Thales Communications, Inc.

Thales Communications, Inc. is a global leader in the development of battle-proven, software-defined, tactical radio equipment and solutions. They provide critical communication capabilities for size-, weight- and power-constrained environments in the Tactical, Naval/Maritime, and Homeland Security/Public Safety domains throughout the globe. Thales Communications is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Thales Group of companies, an international electronics and systems group serving defense, aerospace, services, and security markets. The Group employs 68,000 people throughout the world and generated revenues of $18 billion in 2007. Thales Communications has multiple locations including Clarksburg, Maryland (Headquarters); Germantown, Maryland; and in theater depot facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan.

The Challenge

Over the past several years, Thales has experienced rapid growth and has developed many new business processes that were not incorporated in its instance of PeopleSoft Financials Release 8.4. Users found it difficult to use the system and established many manual workarounds which lessened the value of the powerful ERP system they had installed. Much of their technical expertise fell into the hands and minds of a few resources with little documentation and there was very little system testing discipline. At the same time, Thales was still using manual, labor-intensive time and expense system and process.

The Solution

Collaborative Solutions partnered with Thales to address each of these issues through our Implementation and Upgrade Service Offerings. Rather than attempting to ‘take over’ the project, a collaborative approach was utilized. With just a couple of months prior to go-live of their PeopleSoft Release 8.9 upgrade which Thales was tackling internally, Collaborative Solutions identified the need for a strong system test manager to ensure that the system was truly ready for its users, and also fully documented. Collaborative Solutions also provided functional and technical leadership for the new implementation of PeopleSoft Expenses 8.9 (along with ImageNow for receipts imaging) and ensured that knowledge transfer was delivered. When organizational changes reduced the PeopleSoft support team resources, Thales turned to Collaborative Solutions for our Support Services to provide just-in-time technical expertise from systems administration, to application integration, to applying patch updates and tools upgrades, to providing DBA support.

The Results

Through a truly collaborative effort, Thales has realized successful upgrades and dramatic increases in user acceptance and performance of its PeopleSoft Financials and HCM 8.9 systems. Thorough documentation and knowledge transfer has enabled Thales to support its current PeopleSoft initiatives internally.