Case Study Summary: SENTRY – Automating Military Trainee Identification at Scale

As both product manager and technical architect, I designed and developed SENTRY, a high-speed name matching and case triage platform that identifies military trainees across millions of records daily. Built on a custom database platform with DAO and SQL, SENTRY combines fuzzy logic, mainframe data integration, and real-time analytics to empower investigative leads nationwide. The system automates what was previously a 2–4 hour manual task into a 10-minute process, supporting oversight, improving case accuracy, and enabling daily processing at scale.

Highlights

  • Automated record matching across trainee lists and federal workload systems using custom Levenshtein-based fuzzy logic

  • Integrated with legacy IBM mainframe through VBA + EHLLAPI automation for real-time subject data retrieval

  • Matched over 1.5 million records during each run, identifying high-probability matches with customizable filters

  • Linked graduation and holdover data to contextualize trainee timelines and enable follow-up

  • Designed with modular data pipelines to support rapid import, cleansing, transformation, and export to Excel with pre-formatted tables

Technology and Skills

Lightweight database architecture, VBA, DAO, SQL, EHLLAPI (IBM mainframe automation), Data Cleaning & Normalization, Record Linkage Algorithms, Dashboard Reporting, Workflow Optimization, Government Compliance, Solo Full-Stack Development.

Impact

  • Reduced processing time from 2–4 hours per run (weekly) to under 10 minutes (daily)

  • Automated over 1 million comparisons per run, with confidence scoring and unit-level filters

  • Enabled real-time oversight of U.S. Army trainees and AIT students for national security investigation follow-up

  • Revealed missed subjects and case gaps by linking multiple intake sources and applying rigorous high-probability logic

  • Saved hundreds of hours per week across regional field offices, allowing agents to refocus on investigations

  • Enabled matching against the full federal case inventory—a task previously infeasible for a single person without months of manual effort

Why It Matters

SENTRY showcases how lean, data-driven product leadership can deliver enterprise-grade impact without enterprise overhead. Designed for investigators and deployed as a self-updating service, it bridges legacy systems with modern logic to surface insights in minutes—not hours. The result: faster decisions, smarter oversight, and a scalable platform delivering SaaS-like benefits in a secure, distributed environment.