SSAI accelerates aerospace innovation

Modernization to support mission-critical work

Science Systems and Applications, Inc. (SSAI) sits just down the road from NASA in Lanham, Maryland — a location that’s long served this leading provider of research, engineering, and information technology. After all, NASA is their largest customer. But SSAI’s ability to serve NASA — and other federal agencies — goes far beyond physical proximity. Intelligent Content Management from Box has made SSAI more productive, efficient, and innovative.

Nearly half a century old, this private company, like many pre-internet organizations, initially converted to the cloud by embracing SaaS solutions — one at a time. Fast forward, and President Praveen Baheti says, “We had a cluster of solutions, but nothing was seamless.” Employees would create and store content in their favorite systems, so it was often hard to find data when they needed it, slowing down their mission-critical work on the forefront of aerospace innovation.

Box brought seamlessness to SSAI’s operations — not just a secure, central place to collaborate on content, but much more: ITAR compliance, native e-signatures, workflow automation, intelligent search, and the potential to tap into generative AI. Today, Box has replaced many of SSAI’s legacy SaaS tools and helped the organization consolidate its content functions on one secure, compliant platform. Chris Williamson, Chief Strategy Officer, explains, “In order to have efficient operations, we had to modernize our tool sets. And Box has become an integral part of that. From a documentation standpoint, it allows us to collaborate, document, and go back into the history of a project to better understand how we got where we are today.”

Making workflows 50x faster with Box Relay, Box Sign, and Box AI

Every team within SSAI — from HR to IT, program management to accounting — uses Box Notes to take meeting notes, review action items, and generally stay organized.  As a Box Enterprise Advanced customer, they also take full advantage of Intelligent Content Management, including metadata extraction, workflow automation, and advanced AI. They’ve now replaced several legacy point tools for contracts, including NDAs, using Box Sign to gather signatures and Box Relay to automate the approval process. And with Box AI built in, stakeholders can also analyze documents and extract specific information, making them more efficient and effective.

Reports are also much easier to compile with Box Relay’s workflow automation. In the past, it would take multiple people collaborating for days to compile  large reports, mostly because of the legwork associated with having to manually route particular elements to the right people for approval and follow up to make sure it happened. Now stakeholders are automatically notified when they need to review reports, and can use Box AI to analyze specific components quickly. Report development has sped up so much that in some cases, it’s 50x faster than it was before — down from over 24 hours to just 30 minutes.

CEO Shilpa Baheti, MD says, “Box has made the approval process very streamlined and easy. It notifies me what I need to approve in a very timely manner, and gives me an idea of the priority and the timeframe. I absolutely love Box for the process.”

The accounting team uses Box Relay to track and pay invoices. Baheti describes, “Through Box, we were able to streamline. We know when invoices were submitted, when they were approved and processed, and which vouchers to pay. Our invoice-receiving-to-pay time is dramatically reduced — and it’s also improved team morale.”

Time is not the only metric, though. Cost matters, too. In the past, SSAI spent $25K a year on a point solution to route business development docs for review. With Box Relay, they’ve been able to cut that cost. In addition, Williamson says, “Eliminating that tool and consolidating it into Box has made us more collaborative.”

Less coding, more good work

While Box enables workflow automation and AI querying off the shelf, it also provides SSAI with the means to build their own no-code, AI-powered apps and agents. In fact, the company has deployed metadata-powered contract processes that take advantage of Box DocGen and Box Sign — all without IT support.

Taking advantage of Box capabilities without the need for coding expertise enables SSAI to innovate its workflows in highly customized ways. They’re currently experimenting with using Box to capture metadata from forms in order to automatically generate documents, like NDAs or offer letters. “Since we’ve been using Box, there are so many things we can do without having to code,” CTO Ray Baldon describes. “This has allowed us to trim down and focus on what’s necessary to get the job done.”

Ultimately, building out new applications and workflows with Intelligent Content Management will enable staff to focus on scientific innovation. Baldon emphasizes the practical, fiscal aspect of these efforts: “Utilizing Box AI features allows staff to focus on other tasks. They can now look at multiple files and extract the information they want. They don’t have to read all the files; they can summarize them through AI.”

Sped-up hiring and onboarding with Box Forms and Box AI

With Box, the HR department has been able to achieve its target goal of onboarding new employees in just 20 minutes. During the hiring process, Box AI helps hiring managers compare the resumes of top candidates to hone in on the best prospects. Baldon says, “AI has actually helped our HR staff focus on the things that matter the most — reaching out to people.”

Box Forms is also proving valuable to the onboarding process. Employee equipment requests, for example, are now handled automatically through Box Forms submissions.

The ability to find critical information in minutes with Box Hubs

With Box Hubs, various project and line-of-business teams can curate information, streamline collaboration with partners across departments, and offer targeted content access with appropriate permissioning. Baheti says, “Box Hubs really opens the door for collaboration at SSAI.”

SSAI uses Box Hubs for things like:

• Project management: One place to aggregate large volumes of files related to a particular project or proposal, enabling stakeholders to easily focus and find information when they need it
• Info gathering: A portal for sharing news documents, weekly updates, scientific reporting, and other types of globally important information — then apply Box AI to summarize information and surface highlights from these collections
• Government changes: A way to stay organized around executive orders, offering the ability to quickly search through hundreds of documents in order to find certain keywords or topics and review compliance and regulatory requirements

Applying Box AI to the content in Box Hubs makes a substantial difference — in all of these cases, stakeholders at SSAI can extract specific details or analyze trends in minutes versus weeks. Program Manager Susan Howell confirms, “Box AI has really allowed our team to be much more efficient and effective with customer deliverables, supporting proposals, and summarizing documents so we don't have to go through tons and tons of pages.”

Security and governance in a strict space

The ability to rely on Box for content security and industry-specific compliance has been priceless for SSAI. Baldon says, “The security and compliance aspect is humongous for us. We like that compliance is built in, and we can also tailor compliance with NIST, FedRAMP, CMMS, and more.”

Additionally, by using Box Shield, SSAI can put particular rules and policies in place, classify and label data, set automatic retention parameters, and find bad actors or honest mistakes. In one incident, a new employee copied numerous files down to their laptop so they could work locally. Shield caught this anomaly and flagged it for IT intervention — a great catch that also alerted the IT team to an opportunity to give the new employee additional security training.

Saving time and $500K with Intelligent Content Management

All of the Box capabilities SSAI has taken advantage of with Intelligent Content Management funnel down to one greater purpose: freeing up employee time to do better work faster. Baldon says, “It's important for SSAI to stay on top of modernization, because things are expensive, and you need to keep your costs down — and be able to pivot quickly. Having everything in Box makes things easier.”

“If I were to put a dollar figure on it, we’ve saved at least $35-50 per employee getting rid of other disjointed apps and services — a great value,” reports Rachit Mahajan, CFO. “That includes half a million dollars in direct cost. In addition to that: the intangible, the time saved, the collaboration achieved, the stress relieved.”

Praveen Bahethi adds to this: “With all of this knowledge transfer, and utilizing Box AI and Box AI Studio, we look forward to taking that treasure of data to allow the next generation to show enhanced capabilities, removing obstacles for themselves and our customers.”
 

 

In partnering with Box, SSAI is now leaping forward to modernization, looking at how to streamline and become more efficient. All that, in turn, makes us more cost effective.

— Ray Baldon, CTO, Science Systems and Applications, Inc.