"It's bigger than I expected," said Maun while other students climbed into and onto the LAV, known officially as Light Armored Vehicle-25. "There's a lot of stuff inside."

Some of that "stuff" included the tank's central computer, onboard databases and monitoring sensors that Maun and his classmates in IST 421 spent spring semester studying. The project for the School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) majors was to figure out how to integrate onboard vehicle health monitoring systems with the Marines' supply chain systems.

This was no textbook exercise: With that information, the Marine Corps can better plan for the vehicles' needed maintenance as well as predict a part or even a vehicle's life, key in military and peacetime operations.

"If the systems are integrated, then the Marine Corps can respond proactively and stay ahead of maintenance needs," said Bob Walter, head of the Applied Enterprise Systems Department with the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory. "The LAVs could operate with greater efficiency, have greater availability and possible even greater longevity."

The students, all enrolled in IST 421: Systems Integration, were divided into four teams, with each team exploring a different integration option for managing the data exchange. Their projects ranged from investigating emerging technologies, such as Web Services, to more mainstream integrations using SAP, a widely used enterprise resource planning system.

By semester's end, the students had articulated the complex problems of systems integration, mapped out processes and workflows to understand their teams' problems and found workable technical solutions. Students also had to develop prototypes of their recommendations, said Brian Cameron, course instructor.

"We learned that systems integration involves much more - such as working with people and research - than the obvious technical aspects," said Michael Thomas, an IST major. "We also learned how to balance the needs of the customer with the resources available to us. Our budget was very limited, and we had to derive a solution based on that."

Meetings with the client - namely, ARL - occurred at least biweekly to help students determine their project scope and refine their technical approaches.

Besides tapping Walter's knowledge, the students also had the benefit of industry expertise. As part of a pilot mentoring program, Accenture Consulting consultants worked with two of the four groups.

The students developing an interface from the Marines' parts maintenance system to SAP initially teleconferenced with their two Accenture contacts weekly, said Jessica Kimble, team leader, who credited the consultants with helping direct the team's focus.

The other two teams connected with industry contacts with ARL links.

"There are tremendous pluses and almost no minuses from the point of view of a private company," said Brooke Hutt, president of N2 Decisions, a software development and system engineers group whose specialty is near real-time data warehousing in Chantilly, Va.

"From our side, students have a project that you've not done, so you get feedback from their results and how well it worked. For the students, we provide experience so that they can overcome initial roadblocks and hurdles," Hutt said.

Some of the student teams pioneered new territory, namely using Web Services as an integration option. That team introduced ARL engineers to the potential and current shortcomings of Web services, Cameron said.

ARL engineers also got a crash course in integration options with SAP from Kimble's team whose research included interviewing the developer of a Java tool kit used for SAP systems integration.

Learning to leverage different resources was key for the student projects and for students' careers as these are the skills employers look for, Cameron said.

ARL certainly did: Two of the IST 421 students have paid internships this summer to continue the work they started as part of the course.

"We threw some big challenges at the students, and they handled them well," Walter said. "We all benefited from the class: Our engineers are going to continue to develop all four of their projects and ultimately integrate them to create a new capability to assess vehicle health."