Search Results

"You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at." - W. H. Auden We are excited to welcome our newest Resource Manager, Cherish Joostberns. Cherish has 20 years of leadership experience in the Marine Corps, with demonstrated proficiencies in logistics, personnel recruitment, and operational planning. She has spent several years in civilian leadership roles, taking a special interest in human resources administration and team building. Cherish possesses a bachelor's degree in Russian studies from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in community and economic development from Pennsylvania State University. You can contact Cherish at cjoostberns@canallc.com Welcome Aboard! #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

"If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you". We are excited to bring aboard our newest Senior Logistics Analyst, Kolleen Young. Kolleen is a highly regarded military leader with more than 23 years of proven success in logistics management, global transportation, strategic deployment, and distributed sustainment support. Kolleen has experience and expertise spanning all facets of logistics, to include exercise planning, MPF operations, and the deployment and employment of ground combat, aviation, supporting arms, and combat service support units. Kolleen holds a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership from Chapman University and an MBA from Brandman University. You can contact Kolleen at kyoung@canallc.com Welcome Aboard! #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

It is our pleasure to announce the promotion of Connie McKissack to Director of Programs & Project Management and Joe Moreno to Director of Development. These are new leadership positions at CANA, which report to the SVP Analytics Operations within our Analytics Operations Group and complement our current Director of Analytics Capabilities. Since coming aboard CANA, Connie and Joe have demonstrated their outstanding abilities, commitment and leadership to CANA's team, culture, capabilities, and clients, and they are the right fit for these new roles! The development of these two new Director positions has been a careful, thorough process. As key leadership roles within CANA’s Analytics Operations Group, these two new Director-level roles will ensure that we consistently deliver high-value, technically sound, quality solutions to our clients across all of our analytics- and operations-focused projects. In her new role, as Director of Programs & Project Management, Connie will lead CANA’s program and project management practice focusing on client relationships and our delivery of quality products and services. Joe’s role as Director of Development allows CANA to leverage his experience in using different types of development approaches and working with a variety of development teams to use technologies and methods to deliver quality, solution-based products to our clients. Please join us in congratulating Connie and Joe on their promotions! #CANAAdvisors #TeamCANA #Analytics #Logistics CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

The CANA Team continues to expand as we proudly welcome our new Senior Contracts Manager, Kristin Fairman! Kristin is a diversified Contracts Administrator with 17 years of success in U.S. Government and Commercial contracting. Kristin possesses highly coveted skills by the contracting Community, Government, and Industry and provides cradle to grave contract administration including solicitation evaluation, bid & proposal preparation, contract negotiations, modifications, and closeout. Kristin is a graduate of The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration/Marketing. You can contact Kristin at kfairman@canallc.com. Welcome Aboard! #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

The Colorado Mountain Club (CMC) recently received the 2020 Public Lands Alliance (PLA) Innovative Product Award for the CMC Recreation Impact Monitoring System (CMC RIMS). CANA is a proud technology partner of CMC and helped develop and currently maintains the CMC RIMS. PLA’s Innovative Product Award recognizes an interpretive product of any medium created in partnership by a nonprofit organization and land management agency that embodies a path-breaking approach to achieve a public lands mission. The CMC RIMS includes a mobile app, data environment, and dashboards. The CMC RIMS Mobile App is free to all users and allows crowd sourcing of outdoor recreation use and assessment data to capture impacts on outdoor recreation natural resources. The data environment provides a collection point for multiple data sources - including the mobile app data - that is then delivered to Natural Resource Land Managers, counties and municipalities for use in making resource allocation decisions. The CANA Foundation provided the initial version of the RIMS Mobile App. Since then, CANA has been partnering with CMC to maintain the app and develop the data environment and dashboards. The CANA team including, Dan Sterrett (Principal Software Developer) and Norm Reitter (Chief Analytics Officer), and CANA’s partners at ReconInsight have been working with CMC’s Conservation Director, Julie Mach, to develop the CMC RIMS and provide resources for stakeholders including, public land managers, counties, local municipalities, and conservation-minded volunteer groups. CMC RIMS has proven to be a key technology enabler to help CMC build their tools, networks, and capacities supporting their Strategic Plan 2025 Conservation & Stewardship goals. Find out more about the CMC's Strategic Plan 2025 Conservation & Stewardship goals on page 16, here. We encourage anyone interested to download the free CMC RIMS app onto your Android or Apple Device from the Google Play or Apple Store! From there, you can either complete the app’s Online Training - just 20 minutes - to get access to the full assessment monitoring capabilities in the app or track your activities or enter basic impact data wherever you recreate! Check out our CMC RIMS brochure for a more detailed explanation of how CMC RIMS works. Thank you, CMC, for allowing us to be a part of this innovative project and congratulations! Please watch their acceptance video below. #TeamCANA #CANAAdvisors #ColoradoMountainClub #CMC #RIMS #PublicLandAlliance #CMCRIMS #MNTDATA CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

CANA is pleased to announce that it has been awarded the Headquarters Marine Corps Installations & Logistics (I&L), Logistics Plans, Policies, and Strategic Mobility (LP) Professional Services IDIQ-MAC. The IDIQ-MAC will provide professional support services over a five-year ordering period with a shared maximum value of over $94 million. As one of five prime awardees, CANA will compete for individual task orders over the course of the five-year period of performance, with work expected to be completed in March of 2025. CANA looks forward to tackling the toughest logistics, maintenance, distribution, and supply challenges facing the Marine Corps and to delivering its best-value approach supporting the U.S. Marine Corps logistics enterprise into the coming decade and beyond. CANA is proud to partner with industry experts, and as stated best by Rob Cranston, CANA’s Founder and President, "The CANA Team that includes CGI, Alion, UNCOMN and Deloitte, is honored to have been selected for LP’s small business IDIQ. Our Team is ready to support I&L’s objectives in logistics plans, policies, and concepts. Our Team of USMC SME’s, technology, innovation, and analytics experts brings extensive experience delivering the latest ‘open and smart solutions’ to overcome the increasingly complex challenges facing the U.S. Marine Corps.” For more information on this contract, please visit: https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/2103659/ For more information on the CANA Team, please contact Mr. Rob Cranston, CANA’s President at rcranston@canallc.com or Ms. Connie McKissack, CANA’s LP IDIQ PM at cmckissack@canallcom.com. #TeamCANA #CANAAdvisors #Analytics #Logistics #Innovation #Distribution #Maintenance

What is CANA up to? Last Thursday our CANA Team Members, Jason Fincher and Tom Fields, attended the Hiring Our Heroes event in Washington, D.C. CANA supports the Hiring our Heroes Corporate Fellowship, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, by incorporating transitioning military veterans into the CANA team for a 12 week structured program. The HoH Networking Night is an opportunity for prospective fellows to meet participating companies and the current cohort. Tom Fields and Jason Fincher represented CANA and talked with dozens of candidates. The pool of talent, concentrated at this single event, is truly impressive. Jason Fincher (left) and Tom Fields (right) CANA has continued to support Hiring Our Heroes since September of 2019 and we are looking forward to the future of #TeamCANA and #HoH! #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

This January, several team members from CANA Advisors attended the RStudio Conference, both in person in San Francisco and remotely! At CANA, the R language is a part of our daily analytics practice, from quick turn analyses to high impact applications build in R Shiny. The RStudio Conference provides a great opportunity to learn about the latest trends in the language and connect with others in the community. Here are a few takeaways from CANA Senior Operations Research Analyst, Lucia Darrow, who attended the conference in San Francisco: Virtual Attendance As a fully remote team, CANA Advisors is accustomed to making the most of virtual meetings and seminars to share knowledge and build community. This conference was the first time several teammates attended talks online simultaneously, coordinating to make sure we covered all the topic areas of interest. The conference organizers allowed virtual attendees to ask questions in the main queue and participate with talks as if they were in the room. It was awesome to feel as if the other R users on our team were attending the conference with me, catching the talks I wasn’t able to attend! With more and more conferences offering virtual attendance as an option, this mode of concurrent virtual attendance is definitely something to consider. Trends and Best Practices Two trends that seemed to be of growing interest among intermediate and advanced users are custom R packages and taking R into production. With a slew of new tools and packages to make package creation easier, the use of internal or project specific packages has increased drastically. Formalization of shiny applications into production grade apps was a continuing theme this year. New packages like golem show promise in making this process more attainable for R programmers lacking traditional web experience. At CANA, we are always looking for best practices to improve our R products and streamline the connection to other tools. I enjoyed several talks in the Programming track which elucidated topics like parallel computing and asynchronous processing with R. As R is a single-threaded language, these methods become increasingly important for processes with longer run time. R Community and RLadies In keeping with their commitment to the open source community, RStudio announced their new status as a Public Benefit Corporation. Diversity and inclusivity were promoted throughout the conference, including a RLadies meetup event hosted by RLadies SF! This was a great opportunity to connect with other chapters and share tips and tricks for building local programming communities. Interested in learning more? Many of these talks are available online. Check out https://resources.rstudio.com/rstudio-conf-2020 to experience the conference. To view CANA’s take on the 2019 RStudio Conference, check out Lucia’s blog post from last year's event. Lucia is a Senior Operations Research Analyst at CANA Advisors. To find more content on our favorite professional events, continue to visit our CANA Connection. #TeamCANA #CANAAdvisors #Logistics #Analytics #RStudio #Conference #SanFrancisco #OperationsResearch #Analyst

*Event Photography proved by Walter Golf Photography Today, on September 10th, 2024, World Suicide Prevention Day, we are reminded of the critical importance of supporting those affected by mental health struggles, especially among our veterans. This year marks the seventh year of our dedicated efforts in raising awareness and support for veteran suicide prevention, a cause that remains deeply meaningful to us at CANA Foundation. Our commitment to giving back to the community is reflected in our ongoing partnership with CANA's Principal Information Systems Security Manager, Kurt Eades and Jon’s Mission for 22. In the blog post below, Kurt shares his personal experience at the annual Jon’s Mission for 22 event back in 2019, highlighting how community support plays a vital role in this fight. From honoring veterans who have lost their battle with PTSD to raising funds for impactful organizations like Mission 22, Project Zero, and the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), each effort at this event underscores our collective responsibility to support those who have served our country. On this World Suicide Prevention Day, let us come together to honor those who have served and continue to fight their own battles, and remember that by standing united, we can make a meaningful difference. In observance of this Veterans Day and founded on the principle of “ Giving Back ” to our communities, the CANA Foundation recently had the privilege to support our very own Kurt Eades and Jon’s Mission for 22 in a fundraising event to raise awareness and support for veteran suicide. As a company with many veterans in its ranks, the issue of veteran suicide is “near and dear to CANA’s heart” and supporting Kurt and Jon’s Mission for 22 was a wonderful way to give back and to raise awareness for this epidemic affecting so many veterans and their families. Kurt shares his personal account of the event below – I have been a friend of the Busbin Family for nearly 5 years, and I have been a sounding board and dedicated supporter of the Veteran Suicide Awareness battle alongside Fred and Laura Busbin since their son, Jon, lost his battle on Oct 14, 2017. This is the 2nd Annual Jon's Mission for 22 event. The event brings people, fighting a common illness, together to support those who need the support. In doing this, Fred and Laura Busbin and their family continue to celebrate the life of their son who lost his battle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Mission 22 ( www.mission22.com ) and Project Zero ( www.facebook.com/projectzerovets ) are organizations that are working tirelessly to stop this epidemic, and they are like no other organizations we have found. They truly put the donated money where it is needed - to the military service members! Tragedy Assistance Program For Survivors ( TAPS ) ( www.taps.org ) is an organization that supports the families left behind after any veteran death, and they provide much needed support to families in their most difficult times. ALL the money raised during this event will be divided between these three organizations. On Friday, October 11th, 2019, I was part of a group who set up a small trail for the event, Trail for 22 . This trail honored 50 veterans who lost their battle with PTSD, and the thousands who are currently suffering. Included in the named ribbons on each tree was one soldier from Canada, exemplifying the fact this is not just a U.S. illness - this is a worldwide illness. Each ribbon was adorned with an American Flag and Canadian Flags for the one Canadian Soldier. Flags we also placed in the ground in front of each tree. On Saturday, October 12th, during the actual 2nd Annual Jon's Mission for 22 event, my role was trail guide, videographer using CANA CDS01 Drone and my personal Jeep with a GoPro, safety, and generally anything that was asked of me. The hours I spent with the event-goers, volunteers and Jeepers, talking as we setup the event or while we were tearing down after the event - was priceless. We shared stories about friends, family and brothers and sisters in arms who are or were fighting this battle. Two veterans participating in the event were chosen to receive a set of special "22" Hoodskulls for their Jeeps. These skulls are 3D-printed, and the skull wears a helmet with 22 on the front and a "B" for Busbin on the back. The event drew in approximately 250 Jeepers, 4-wheelers, SidebySides and motorcycles to the Possum Creek Offroad Park in Ray City, Georgia. We also had 70 items that were raffled off to raise additional donations. The Opening Ceremony was performed by The Honor and Rifle Guards of the American Legions in Valdosta, Sylvester and Albany, GA. The Color Guard was from the Worth County, Georgia High School JROTC. The event raised $4,355 on Saturday from entry fees, and another $5,718 from raffle tickets - bringing the total amount raised to $10,073! People came in for the event from as far away as Frederick, Maryland and the Florida Keys. To learn more, visit Jon's Mission for 22, Inc. at jonsmissionfor22.com . CANA Advisors sends a heartfelt “thank you” to all our veterans as well as those men and women serving in uniform today. Wishing all a safe, reflective, and happy Veterans Day! #PTSD #suicideawareness #veterans #CANAFoundation #KurtEades #JonsMission #Mission22

CANA’s Terry Hagen recently provided leadership and facilitation of a group discussion on data analytics at the Randolph-Macon Academy in Front Royal, Virginia. Randolph-Macon Academy students, along with students from five additional Northern Virginia schools, interacted and exchanged ideas in a day long Leadership Symposium. A variety of industry experts provided overviews and case studies in the areas of: Health Sciences, Military, Cyber/Computer Science, Aviation/(Drones), Data Analytics, Engineering, and Non-Profit. The themes of corporate challenges and ethics, organizational corporate culture, and effective leadership were highlighted and culminated in break-out group presentations. The following blog post provides more details on the event: https://www.rma.edu/blog/leadership-symposium-r-ma-hailed-success CANA Foundation looks forward to continuing supporting Randolph-Macon Academy in their emerging innovations lab and providing expertise in analytics and unmanned aerial systems curriculum development. Terry Hagen is a Principal Logistics Analyst at CANA Advisors. Contact him at thagen@canallc.com #CANAFoundation #outreach #leadership #RandolphMaconAcademy

If you want to learn more about sports analytics use your favorite podcast listening app to download the March INFORMS Resoundingly Human. CANA Advisor's very own Director of Analytics Capabilities, Walt DeGrange, is one of the featured guests. He highlights both surprising examples of analytics in sports and how CANA has helped professional teams use analytics to succeed. The episode also has tips on winning your NCAA Tournament pool with analytics and creating the Major League Baseball schedule with optimization. https://informs.libsyn.com/resoundingly-human-march-2019 Walt DeGrange is the Director of Analytics Capabilities at CANA Advisors wdegrange@canallc.com #podcast #INFORMSSpORts #sportsanalytics #informs #WaltDeGrange

At CANA Advisors, we use R daily, for everything from exploratory analysis, to generating publication-quality documents with R Markdown and interactive web apps with Shiny. In January, I made the trek down to Austin, TX to attend the RStudio conference. This was the largest RStudio conference to date, buzzing with nearly 2,000 attendees. Here a few reflections from those two enlightening days. R in Production: Not only possible, but easy! The first keynote speaker, Joe Cheng, broke down how the RStudio team is working to make R in production effortless for R programmers with little to no experience in web development. New tools like Shiny load test, plot caching, and async are now available to supplement old standbys RStudio Connect and Profvis. Throughout his presentation, Cheng stressed the importance of addressing the cultural and organizational barriers to scaling R. The ability to swiftly take analysis from an exploration in R to production presents a new role for data scientists, one that must be taken mindfully, respecting and relying on the expertise of IT and engineering teammates. The theme of production carried throughout the conference, with several presentations on the topic. Of note was a presentation from a team at T-Mobile, who shared a familiar story with the audience: presenting a Shiny application to high-level leadership gave credibility to their project, sparked interest, and eventually earned them additional resources to continue their work. From there, their engineering and data science teams worked together to put a Keras model into production, which is now responding to customer requests in real time. This is one of the most robust R models I’ve seen in terms of scale— seeing how they overcame technical and cultural barriers to create a fast, compact app was incredibly valuable. Defining Data Science In the second keynote talk of the conference, Felienne Herman, shared her joys and challenges in studying how people learn programming languages. Although this may be changing for the next generation, the majority of practicing data scientists do not have a shared memory of what it looks like to learn the tools of our trade. In part, this may be because data science programs didn’t exist until a few years ago, but the issue is even more fundamental. The view that learning how to code is exploratory, done individually with great struggle, is very common, because that is how so many of us learned how to code. What if, as with math or reading, there is worth in structured education for this line of work? Data science is supposedly the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” Despite all of the hype surrounding this career, amongst the analytics community, there is little consensus on what actually defines a data scientist, apart from a high salary. As operations research (OR) analysts, we see great overlap between our two disciplines. OR can certainly be considered a necessary predecessor of data science. While at the RStudio conference, I was surprised to see how many presenters and conference attendees, from a variety of disciplines, identified as data scientists. To an extent, it feels as if “data scientist” is an attribute that we can append to those that have mastered modern analytics techniques, whether they be biologists, geographers, or operations research analysts. Angela Bassa gave an inspiring talk about growing data science teams and taking advantage of the unique strengths individuals may bring to an organization. A panel discussion with industry leaders also addressed this topic with a conversation about how to manage a diverse set of team members. Strength in Community As with most R events, Hadley Wickham opened the conference with a Code of Conduct, reinforcing the importance of inclusivity and diversity. The “Pacman Rule” of always leaving space for a new face to join a conversation was honored throughout the conference. On the final evening, I connected with other RLadies at a social event. I picked up great tips on successful events from folks at different chapters from around the globe to take back to my own chapter. This event continued a theme of openness and inclusivity felt throughout the conference. PC: JD Long Interested in learning more? Many of these talks are available online. Check out https://resources.rstudio.com/rstudio-conf-2019 to experience the conference. Lucia Darrow is an Operations Research Analyst at CANA Advisors. To find more content on our favorite professional events, continue to visit our CANA Connection. #RStudio #shiny #RLadies #LuciaDarrow