Northrop Grumman

About Them:
Northrop Grumman is an American-owned aerospace and defence technology company that provides innovative systems and solutions to government and privately owned entities. The company is the fifth largest security contractor in the world and employs over 68,000 people globally.

Project Overview:
Northrop Grumman was paying over 30,000 hourly employees using an outdated time-and-attendance system. As a result, there were many inefficiencies and error-prone integration points within this system that were creating payment issues for its users. Because payment is one of the most sensitive areas in companies both large and small, they needed help modernizing their existing payroll system.

The first challenge of this project was working out how this outdated and complex system functioned without any existing documentation or personnel that understood its internal technological structure. After completing this stage we were then able to create a business flow diagram that showed the data, how it flowed through various components of the internal system and third-party systems like payroll and accounting. The last stage of the project involved creating a roadmap on how to replace the various components, one by one, without disrupting any of the software and business processes.

Project Tasks:

Create all data mapping documentation for various system interfaces, software processes and database-stored procedures
Hold information gathering meetings with various departments (manufacturing plants) to document their current business practices and develop solutions going forward
Analyze various ways to streamline their processes and reduce points of failure
Modify their applications ( written in C, SQL, TCL, UNIX shell scripts, JAVA and Oracle), stored procedures and triggers and heavily modified their SQL code
Recommend and develop extensive specialized testing tools in Visual Basic to assist with unit and regression testing, define test cases, initialize and re-run test cases and create and compare baselines
Conduct User Acceptance Testing (UAT), created test plans, test scripts and gap analysis for software application development and installations, as well as Web based applications and system redesign, including acceptance and sign off
Manage projects through all phases: requirements, design, development, testing and deployment using tools such as Visio for Process Flows, MS Project for Project plans and TestDirector for defect logging
Design and create an administrator application, VB.NET for the users to inquire about the status of scheduled jobs and the transactions received. As a result the employees were able to check the status of their jobs the morning after the jobs were complete as opposed to waiting several days
Recommend and design interfaces flowing from PeopleSoft, SAP and IBM Mainframe
Streamline procedures by transforming several processes into transaction-based instead of file-based, again decreasing wait time from days to minutes or even seconds
Normalize several tables to create more integrity and efficiency
Create user guides for new software and web applications

Technologies: C, Unix Shell Scripts, SQL, Oracle, IVR, Web front-end interface, Epic (Epicdata) Time Collection software, stored procedures, triggers, HP, Visual Basic, VB.NET, TCL, JAVA