SAIC － Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD

• Contracts for Joint Personal Effects Depot (JPED), Mortuary Affairs (CMAC) Aberdeen MD, Alexandra VA, Fort Knox KY.
• Hired as technical lead to get a three month behind schedule up to date by analyzing problems and developing a strategy to get on schedule. This was a last effort by SAIC.
• Designed and developed PETS system to workflow and automate Joint Personnel Effects Depot.
• Developed MARTS tracking system.
• Move MARTS and PETS (Personal Effects) systems to new HR facilities at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Technologies: C#, ASP .Net, Oracle PL-SQL, Web Services, IBM WebSphere.

The History

I didn’t know if my contract was going to get renewed at Brandywine Realty Trust. It was a very short-term assignment. I was called for a position with SAIC at an army base. It was not something I ever considered. I interviewed for a project that was three months behind schedule. The development was being done in an old WW2 army barracks with no AC. There were weeds growing through the walls. I was not excited about this position. They said it took a special person who could deal with tragedy though and that not everyone could do it.

At the height of the war SAIC brought me on as a last chance effort to bring a months behind failing project up-to-date as a technical lead. My duties were to design the new system to meet the requirements of the CMAOC to manage all soldiers’ effects coming into the depot, the processes that all effects went through and where they would go. This was a very complex system with a lot of communications with other systems.

I was successful at getting this project back on schedule, designed and developed. To achieve these goals and to meet requirements of over a hundred forms I designed the system into multiple tiers of an Oracle database schema, data tier, services tiers, middle tier and presentation layers. To speed the presentation layer, I designed many reusable user controls and patterns.

This system used many web services, IBM Web Sphere and the enterprise service bus to move images and classified data. To get images I created HTTP image handlers to get images through the ESB.After this system was completed, I took over another failing system MARTS which was another mortuary tracking system. I redesigned much of this system and got it into production. When the Army Human Resources moved to Kentucky I spent more than a year and a half going to Kentucky to help with the move.

Some highlights

A photographer had to take many pictures of every single item that came through. There were thousands of items a day. Even a penny needed to be photographed. The photographer’s camera was connected to our system through a work station. We uploaded the photographs via IBM WebSphere to another location. On other work stations though, the users would need to view these pictures as the items went through the work flow. We could not store all of the images on local servers but could only store a recent cache. I had developed .Net image handlers that would check if the images were still in the cache and if not, to get them via a message queue through WebSphere. This all had to be quick.

This project introduced me to government DoD work. This was very different than corporate. I am still very good friends with Steve, Terry, Phyllis and Win. Steve and I went to other projects in Virginia and Kentucky together. We all still get together occasionally to socialize.

This project made me see the youth coming home after having sacrificed their lives. It was a life changing event for me.

View this link to see what this system was about. I know some of the people in this video. I’m surprised it was made public as no photographs of any kind were allowed.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?195351-1/joint-personal-effects-depot