Best Solution Showcase

Submissions

Annese & Associates, Inc.
Booth 134
Customer: White Plains City School District
Solution: Unified Communications

Value, Functionality, and Business Success with Unified Communications

White Plains City School District began to reevaluate its traditional, private branch exchange phone system as new technology surfaced in the market. The District determined their current phone system, which serviced 11 buildings, was expensive, limited in functionality, and unreliable- with daily problems and user complaints.

White Plains retained Annese for extensive research, thorough assessment, and pre-project planning to prepare for a district-wide upgrade of their current phone system to a Cisco Unified Communications solution: Voice Over Internet Protocol.

At implementation, the unique challenge was installing the new system during regular school hours per request, without disruption to students or administration. The Ethernet switching backbone also had to be upgraded to support intelligent packet transport and prioritization of voice, video, and standard traffic groups, and to provide Power over Ethernet, where needed, to run the new IP phones over the data cable and avoid needing AC power with each phone.

The project, with its complex installations, was a huge success; completed on time, on budget, and seamless to the end user. "We used to field about 10 to 15 phone complaints a day," explained Mike Lynch, Director of Facilities at White Plains. "Now we only get about 4 to 5 calls per month... The change has been phenomenal."

With the addition of Unified Communications, the District's entire communication system now operates as a single entity across each building, and with an annual savings of 55% on telecom bills, White Plains is positioned to meet all business, student, and administrative needs.

GCOM Software
Booth 114
Customer: New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR)
Solution: Community Development Online Application

Product Description:
The New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) provides state and federal grants and loans to public and private sector developers to partially finance construction or renovation of affordable housing. The Community Development On-Line (CDOL) system was designed to allow developers to submit applications for both DHCR and selected HFA/AHC housing development funds securely over the Internet. The system currently provides the ability to submit 5 different funding applications - HOME/AHC, RESTORE, Access to HOME, New York Main Street and the Capital Application which includes the Housing Trust Fund, NYS HOME, Homes for Working Families, State Low-Income Tax Credit, Federal Low-Income Tax Credit, Urban Initiatives, Rural Area Revitalization Program and the Housing Development Fund, as well as HFA 4% Low-Income Tax Credit, Low-Interest Second Mortgage and Bond Financing. The CDOL provides housing developers an intuitive user-friendly interface to submit funding applications and upload supporting documentation.

Problem:
Organizations applying for DHCR funding for any of the above-mentioned programs had to complete applications made up of both Excel and Word documents, either by hand or on their computers, and submit five hard copies to DHCR. A typical size of a printed application depending of the specific programs would be between 200-300 printed pages. The data in these submitted paper applications had to be manually input into the mainframe by dedicated DHCR staff. These paper applications were error prone and the process to validate and correct the applications was very cumbersome. In addition, paper applications and the supporting documents that are required as part of the application had to be manually scanned and stored in DHCR's document management system.

Solution:
DHCR IT staff along with supplemental staff provided by GCOM consulting service architected and designed a 3-tier web application as per OFT guidelines with all the necessary security in place. The application was built using Microsoft .Net technology with an Oracle database. The application provides a web interface for organizations to input and submit various funding applications online. The middle application tier and the data tier have intelligence built in the form of programmed business logic, edits and validation. The applicants have the ability to add additional documents (attachments) as part of the online application. The application has to be digitally signed by the authorized person in the organization before submitting to DHCR. Data collected in the web application is exported to the mainframe and an automated function transfers the completed applications and attached documents into DHCR's document management system.

Resulting Benefits:
Community Development applicants can apply and submit their application directly to DHCR through the website. This new feature has virtually eliminated mistakes that have bogged down the process in the past, and has significantly cut paper waste. This has resulted in DHCR completing its most successful funding round to date. DHCR has approved awards six weeks ahead of last year's schedule. The online application has helped DHCR to be even more efficient and effective at providing New Yorkers with safe and affordable housing. According to developers who responded to a post-application submission survey, over 90 percent achieved efficiencies in the amount of time and money spent by using the CDOL application.

TRUARCHS/online, llc
Booth 18
Customer: New York State Office of Mental Health
Solution: Capital Asset Management System Project Planning module

The software solution is an integrated web application used to request and track planned capital projects. Requests are reviewed and processed by the agency's project managers, and then directly exported to the agency's existing project management system in order to track the potential projects throughout their respective lifespan. This enables the 30 campuses across the state to submit their capital project requests on time and in a uniform format that allows the project managers to review and comment throughout the budget request process.

In addition, the agency is permitting this application to be accessed over the internet to allow consultants to maintain pertinent data shared by all groups.

Problem:
The New York State Office of Mental Health realized that over the last 15 years its informational needs have changed due to the evolution of its facility management focus. During the 1990s OMH strove to downsize the facilities and consolidate programs into refurbished, space-conditioned buildings. Massive amounts of master planning and building assessment-centric data was captured to assist in this process. This worked well for the next several years. However, with shifting populations and the major consolidation completed, OMH was looking to focus on daily operations and facility management leading to greater success of the capital budget requests within an ever decreasing state budget.

OMH asked TRUARCHS/online, llc to review and evaluate current and future data requirements, along with the existing enterprise architecture of their Capital Asset Management System. TRUARCHS met with the 20 primary stakeholders, reviewed systems and needs, and composed a recommended master plan to accomplish OMH's goals. The primary focus for the majority of the stakeholders was the Capital Budget request process.

The former Capital Budget request process began with a call letter sent out to the facilities instructing the facility administration and work control staff to begin preparing the requests. The facilities would then produce their requests in a file-based template and send to the respective Central Office project manager. Once received by the project manager, the clerical staff would copy and paste or transpose into the desktop-based Project Management System (not available to the facilities) for review and processing. This was all very time consuming, labor intensive and provided very little time for the project manager to discuss and improve these requests with the facility prior to the budget deadline.

It was determined that the older Capital Asset Management System needed to be upgraded with newer technology that conformed to the latest OFT and accessibility standards as well as the latest OMH Web Application design standards (in some senses this was the prototype implementation of those standards). The work was to be done in phases with upgrades consisting of revising the data structure to conform to the new reporting requirements, and archiving information no longer used or deemed unrealistically supportable. The development was fast-tracked in order to achieve the April 1, 2008 deadline for this cycle's request process initiation.

Solution:
TRUARCHS/online, llc implemented an upgraded Capital Asset Management System (CAMS08) using the .Net platform and a three-tier architecture model that now allows OMH to permit internet access by consultants to keep the pertinent data current.
The system now focuses more on integrating the data for the Capital and Project Request processes. The improved site navigation allows the user to view multiple items in different tabs without having to reload pages, and the users can ‘save' or e-mail links of the data for quick navigation or sharing of information. But the most important features that were developed are the actual Budget Request forms and tracking functions. The facilities compose and save their requests online. The project managers can review and comment prior to the facility actually finalizing and submitting the requests. In addition, all users can see the status of their requests during the process. Once the budget coordinator reviews and adds the required funding information, the data is migrated directly into the Project Management System to be managed by the project management staff. The data is shared between the two systems and is viewable by both the facility and central office staff.

Resulting Benefits:
The system achieves the agency's goal of improving the capital budget request process and providing pertinent data that was not available to all the concerned parties prior to the upgrade. The information is also reusable in that the requests not approved for the current year will be available the following year as a potential new request rather than the facility having to recreate all of these requests from scratch as in previous years. This not only saves time for the facility, but the project managers can see the potential requests ahead of time and assist with the forecasting of need.

As our client stated at a recent meeting, "...I like that I can see the information composed before it is submitted - to understand what the facility is thinking; and then contact the facility and discuss changes, or tell them how to improve the request's justification..." in order to increase the request's success rate.