To support your business, it's important for us to understand how your industry at an operational level. Our team has experience or careers in a variety of professions. We've been "in the trenches", and know the ins and outs of what needs to be done at the tactical and strategic levels. This allows us to provide expertise in a multiple skill areas. Our broad experience allows us to see trends and patterns that might be missed by those focused on a single skill area or with less experience.
Experience
With their breadth and depth of experience, our team members can assist your business in improving, optimizing, or implementing:
Strategic planning and Forecasting
Management and Organization
Productivity Improvement (including process automation and information systems)
Human resources
Cooperative relationships and teamwork
Crisis management and problem solving (including mediation)
Career development
Teaching and Training
Fund-raising
Our Customers
Our team members have assisted:
Small, medium, and large companies (publicly and privately held).
Professional practices and associations (legal, medical, dental, engineering, and scientific).
Health care facilities.
Human services, not-for-profit, and religious organizations.
Public and private schools and colleges.
Government agencies.
Towns, villages, cities, communities, and co-operatives.
The military.
Utilities.
Determining how to improve a business is a process, involving input from managers, employees, competitors, and business leaders, as well as reviewing the status and trends of the business and its industry. Cougar Solutions uses a 5-step process to make this determination: Inspect. The first step in improvement is to assess the current situation:
Where are we
What is working for us
What is not working for us
This puts all the information on a list, and gives the stakeholders an opportunity to make sure that they are all in agreement before moving on to the next step. Improve. Now that we know where we are, we need to decide how to improve the situation, where we want to go. This involves creating a description of the target we are aiming for. This might be a small description if only an incremental improvement is sought, or might be large if the business is looking for an overhaul. Investigate. Now that we know where we are and where we need to go, we need to determine how best to get there. This involves investigating the marketplace for existing solutions that will move to the business to its goal, or if there are none, determining the internal resources that are available to achieve the goal. Invent. Now that we know where we are and where we need to go, and what tools are available to get there, we need to make a plan. This involves creating an implementation plan, including tasks and schedules, for reaching the goal. Implement. Now that we have an implementation plan, we need to implement it. This involves orchestrating the people, resources, new systems, new processes, and other business assets to acquire, create, and put the solution in place into the organizational structure. Once put in place, the solution has to be tested, and once tested, rolled out to the personnel. Finally, since no business environment is static, a feedback loop needs to be set up to alert management when the solution is no longer keeping pace with the marketplace. This may involve risk assessment and contingency planning.
Cougar Solutions offers a wide variety of financial services to individuals, companies, and trusts. Since your time is limited, using our financial services can free you for more productive pursuits. Our staff has decades of experience as company treasurers, bookkeepers, trustees, tax preparers, and financial software developers. We offer these services:
Accounts Receivable (invoicing, receiving and depositing funds, tracking missing/late payments)
Accounts Payable (paying vendors)
General Ledger (tracking income, expenses, assets, and liabilities)
Payroll (all payroll tax calculations)
Federal, state, and local filings (payroll, unemployment, gross receipts tax, I-9, etc.)
Reporting (balance sheet, profit and loss, employment, etc.)
A/R, A/P, General Ledger, Payroll, Filings, Reports, Tax Preparation
C Corporation
Consulting
A/R, A/P, General Ledger, Payroll, Filings, Reports, Tax Preparation
LLC
Aircraft refurbishing
A/R, A/P, General Ledger, Filings, Reports, Tax Preparation
Trust
Payback Supplemental Needs Trust
A/P, General Ledger, Filings, Reports, Investment Management, Tax Preparation
Sole proprietorship
Residential real estate
A/R, A/P, General Ledger, Filings, Reports, Tax Preparation
Cougar Solutions has extensive experience as Legal Investigators and Insurance Investigators, having performed hundreds of investigations for law firms and for insurance companies. The types of cases that have been investigated include:
Medical cases (including medical malpractice).
Products liability.
Banking and finance.
Horses, dogs, and other animals.
Agricultural.
Toxic / industrial chemicals.
Jones Act / maritime.
Construction and industrial accidents.
Marine insurance cases.
In addition to gathering facts, interviewing witnesses, and preparing for trials, the investigations included research into the state of the art and correct practices that should have been followed in each case, what was actually done, and how that differed from the norm. Experts were found when needed, both to advise on the practice of the particular industry, and to testify in court. Cougar Solutions is especially facile at acting as liaison between the jargon of the court and the jargon of experts, bridging the language so that each side understands the other. Finally, team members has spent hours and days sifting and searching through boxes of records to find information pertinent to a case. Sometimes discovery will result in hundreds of banker boxes of records being delivered, all of which needs to be examined for critical data.
Cougar Solutions has spent decades assisting organizations to improve their policies, procedures, and processes, to allow the organization to provide more services, to improve the bottom line, to improve employee productivity, and in some cases to just remain open for business. We do this by encouraging these precepts: Take Control of Your Organization's Future
Building or rebuilding the organization
Accurately forecasting the future
Developing the right organizational structure
Developing organizational goals
Developing company-wide support for goals
Developing strategic, goal-oriented plans
Crisis management and problem solving
Focusing the organization's energies for maximum benefit
Building cooperative working relationships
Providing interim management
Ensure a Happy, Productive, Workforce
Best practices for effective leadership and efficient management
Building an effective HR Department
Developing/providing training
Planning the right incentives
Linking employee effort to corporate goals
Ensuring personal growth for each employee
Bring New Health to Communities
Identifying a community's strengths and weaknesses
Accurate forecasting of the future
Developing community goals
Building ongoing community-wide support for goals
Planning the community's future
Focusing the community's energies
Ensure the Not-For-Profit's Financial Future
Researching funding sources
Preparing grants
Planning fund-raising efforts
Building ongoing public support
Use the Right Tools for Communications
Facilitate tough discussions
Engage participants
Use innovative tools to help make progress
Energize discussions and decision-making
Provide a "win-win" context for conflict resolution
Be proactive: Equip people with tools to resolve conflict early on
Frame collaborative approaches and coach collaborative teams
Foster open, honest, and constructive communications
Inform and support people in addressing diversity, cultural, and civil rights topics
Areas in which Cougar Solutions can provide software solutions:
Requirements Analaysis and Feasibility studies. [Case Study]
Development of functional specifications, including database specifications, general design, detail design, and test plans.
Custom (bespoke) software development, especially software that needs to manage large sets of complex data.
Performance optimization of existing software and environments. [Case Study]
Conversion of legacy software, legacy DBMS, and legacy user interfaces to modern standards.
Maintenance of legacy software and/or legacy DBMS.
Unit testing, integration testing, and Beta testing of software.
Representative systems include:
Developed a system to manage the credit process at large banks, including components to implement CRM (customer relationship management), workflow, credit application, followup, document preparation and management.
Developed the Transportation Information System (TIS) for the USDA Forest Service, to manage all roads, bridges, and culverts in all National Forests. [Case Study]
Performed cost/benefit analyses of multiple implementation scenarios for office automation systems, for custom-built software projects, and for packaged software, for private companies and government agencies.
Trained users in programming languages, packaged software, APIs, and general computer usage.
Developed dozens of utilities, Personal Information Management systems, data management systems, data inquiry systems
The Situation. U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Surface Mining, needed a systems to manage coal mining data, to replace disparate manual systems then in use. The Solution. We analyzed mission-related objectives and used these to develop a list of requirements. We then developed multiple information management scenarios, and for each developed qualitative and quantitative costs and benefits. The Results. Top management was able to use the analysis to determine an optimal implementation strategy to meet their needs. The Lesson. By tying information management implementation scenarios to mission-related objectives, top management gains an extra level of assurance that the implementation scenarios will meet the needs of the organization.
The Situation. A bank was using software to generate complex loan applications, involving many grouped companies, shared facilities, and shared collateral. It was taking almost a minute to generate the simpler applications, and over 4 minutes to generate the most complex ones. Since loan officers had to generate over a dozen of these per day, over half an hour per loan officer per day was being spent waiting with no productive activity. The bank was considering purchasing expensive new server hardware to try to improve response time and make their staff more productive. The Solution. Using software analysis tools, we identified bottlenecks in the software, then analyzed how to improve their performance. We applied SQL optimization techniques, performed algortithm analysis and improved algorithm performance, and added code to perform local caching in critical areas. In the end, we reduced the amount of time needed to generate the loan applications by 85%. The Results. Loan application generation time was reduced to 10 seconds for the simpler applications, and 30 seconds for the more complex ones. This eliminated the bulk of wasted employee wait time, and eliminated the need for the bank to purchase new hardware. The Lesson. Improving software performance can lead to immediate gains in user productivity, and can avoid capital and operational costs.
The Situation. The USDA Forest Service was using manual methods to track its inventory of roads, bridges, culverts, dams, and other physical property. For each inventory item, tracking information was kept, such as date installed, maintenance performed, future maintenance needed, and future replacement requirements. This information was kept at over 700 individual ranger stations, then sent up to regional offices to be consolidated, and finally up to the national office. This took considerable manpower and was error-prone because data was easily lost or incorrectly copied. The Solution. The specifications for an inventory / budgeting system (Transportation Information System) were developed, then design documents and test plan documents were prepared. The software system was developed, using Forest Service-prescribed software tools and DBMS. Unit testing was performed as development proceeded, then integration testing was completed. Finally, the national office rolled out the software to the ranger stations and regional offices. The Results. Ranger stations entered their data into the new system, and over time built up a computer-based history of activities performed. Consolidation at the regional and national levels became automatic, and additional reporting, analysis, and data mining became feasible because a database since a database in computer-accessible form was now available. The Lesson. Integrated business process management software provides for reduced risk of entry and transcription errors, faster movement of information from remote offices to headquarters, and new opportunities for data mining, analysis, and auditing.
The Situation. NASA Wallops Island was using a significant amount of programming to analyze data collected from weather balloons and other measurement devices. The programming had historically been done in the Fortran programming language. NASA identified a need to have its staff learn the "C" programming language in order to take advantage of new data structures, and also in order to transition to new personnel who were generally not proficient in Fortran. The Solution. We developed a course specifically targeted for teaching Fortran programmers how to use C. This did not teach programming per se, but rather the syntactical and semantic differences between the two languages, as well as typical programming "gotchas" in C, especially those that may trip up a Fortran programmer not used to the C way of doing things. The Results. The course was taught at Wallops Island, and Fortran programmers received a grounding in C programming language structures and techniques. The Lesson. A course that is customized to take advantage of the existing knowledge of the class can reduce teaching and learning time.
The Situation. Troubled children with learning disabilities or behavioral disorders were causing disruptions in the classroom, leading to an inability to teach these students and other students. Finding a way to tap the potential of these students was imperative to their current and future success. The Solution. For learning-disabled students, teachers needed to understand student learning styles. For students with behavioral problems, the students needed to work through their issues. Using art as a springboard for achievement, troubled students were taught drawing, and once they mastered that, the success was used as a platform to develop self-assurance in other areas. The Results. About 15 to 20 students per year were helped to achieve increased potential and to work through behavioral issues. The Lesson. If a student stuck with the program for the first few hours, they were hooked and improved. Almost any student can be helped, if there is a teacher willing to give guidance and a student willing to go in with an open mind.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead "Some men see things as they are and say 'why?' I dream things that never were and say 'why not?'" -- Robert Kennedy "There go my people: I have to go and run and catch up because I am their leader." -- Mohandas K. Gandhi "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity." -- Albert Einstein "If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one! And that's the way to become a computer scientist." -- Richard Feynman "Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines." -- Satchel Paige "Someone doing it often interrupts the person saying it cannot be done." -- Author Unknown
