Suggestion earns award for employee, cost savings for AEDC

  • Published
  • By Shawn Jacobs
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, TENN. --  A suggestion that will save Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) $23,548 annually and earned an employee cash award through the Aerospace Testing Alliance (ATA) Ideas in Action Suggestion Program required innovative thinking by Marty Gordon.

Gordon, a software engineer for ATA, was recognized in December 2011 for work that he actually began in May.

A Bedford County resident who has worked at AEDC for almost 28 years, Gordon was involved in transitioning the Oracle Work Asset Management (WAM) application from physical to virtualized servers.

WAM is the software system that stores and configures all of AEDC's assets. It is used to generate work orders, charge for labor and services and provide for the management and inventory of facilities, infrastructure and equipment.

Rather than just migrating the existing physical server configuration to a virtual environment, Gordon revalidated the system architecture for potential savings. Research and action occurred in two areas: consolidation of Oracle WAM web/application servers and changing the annual Oracle WAM software maintenance to align with server consolidation.

"First of all, we changed the server configuration," Gordon said. "We went from a two-server configuration to a virtual server. That configuration allowed us to have a different structure in our price at the time."

The success of the web/application server consolidation made possible the option to reduce the annual Oracle WAM software maintenance agreement for fiscal year 2012 and beyond.

Gordon said that means the cost avoidance should be realized throughout the length of the contract.

According to Gordon, this agreement change required a ruling by the software vendor, Oracle. The Oracle research took several months to complete because the original agreement was put in place under the software vendor Synergen, which had since sold the software.

"Allowing us to go to a one-server configuration really tripped it to my question that we had two and now only have one, so it should be half," Gordon said. "And they [Oracle] said it should have been a site license and they reduced it significantly."

Mark Rigney, director of Information Technology and Systems (IT&S) for ATA, complimented Gordon for his innovative work.

"I'm very proud of Marty and the work the he does on a regular basis, not only in his day-to-day productivity but also in his insightfulness and his ability to think outside the box in his efforts for continuous improvement, trying to make things better for AEDC," Rigney said. "[Marty's efforts] will result in significant savings for the government. We continually look for ways to improve and provide effective, efficient IT services."

The Ideas in Action Employee Suggestion Program is designed to encourage employees to exercise initiative within and beyond their basic job requirements to develop suggestions that improve the performance and quality of work while achieving company objectives. It also establishes open communication of ideas and maximizes employee talents.

Suggestions should be submitted through MatrixOne or Ideas in Action form GC-1390 to the department suggestion coordinator. In addition, suggestions that have potential costs savings/avoidances must be submitted on form GC-1570, Cost Analysis Summary. For more information, employees may contact Tina Bonner at 454-6804.