Cost Savings in Control Board Processing through Business Process

							     Cost Savings in Control Board Processing through Business Process Management –
                                      A Success Story

       When management asks you to do more with less, what do you do? Sometimes the answer is in
Business Process Management. The Space Life Sciences Directorate (SLSD) at NASA’s Johnson Space
Center has been able to reduce costs in infrastructure support in order to apply those cost savings towards
increased support of NASA’s vision. SLSD has a series of control boards to provide configuration
management over its elements. Previously these control boards were done utilizing a labor intensive process.
SLSD chose to study the process and came up with a common human-centric process for CCB processing.
This process was automated using a next generation workflow engine and rolled out to a small number of
boards whose feedback was used to improve the process and the tool. As more people used the tool, more
boards were added. Because the tool implemented the SLSD defined work instructions, a natural by-product
was standardization amongst the boards within SLSD. No longer were the boards being managed differently
based on who was the administrator of the board. Now all boards were being managed in a common way and
the process of administering a board was simplified. The manpower requirements for board support were
reduced while providing increased communications.


                                         Richard Laws, PMP
                                   Program Manager, PPMI Contract
                                       Tietronix Software, Inc.

         Mr. Laws is the Program Manager for the Program/Project Management Integration (PPMI) contract at
NASA’s Johnson Space Center serving the Space Life Sciences Directorate. In this capacity, he is responsible
for infrastructure support, IT management, and educational efforts. Prior to this position, Mr. Laws served
numerous capacities including: Project Manager, Lead Software Architect, and Lead Software developer.

       Mr. Laws is a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP ®)