The use of the Case Method Cycle has been shown to result in significant reduction in system development workload and costs (Kitano and Shimazu 1996). For example, use of the Case method during the development of SQUAD resulted in a savings of six person-months from the expected development time for the entire system. Furthermore, the workload required for the system maintenance was reduced to less than 10 percent of the initial workload. Knowledge application systems not only apply a solution to a similar problem but can also serve as a framework for creative reasoning (Leake 1996). For example analogy-based reasoning could provide the initial ideas in solving new problems. Case memories can provide humans with the experience base they may lack. Faced with a problem, experts may recall experiences from the case library, and perform the adaptation and evaluation of the solutions that is sometimes relegated to the knowledge application systems. This is the emphasis of the SQUAD system presented in Box 6.1. Knowledge application systems have enabled the implementation of decision support systems to support design tasks in diverse domains such as architecture, engineering, and lesson planning (Domeshek and Kolodner 1991, 1992, 1993; Grif- fith and Domeshek 1996). These decision-support systems, also called case-based design aids or CBDAs, help human designers by making available a broad range of commentated designs. CBDAs can serve to illustrate critical design issues, explain design guidelines, and provide suggestions or warnings regarding specific design solutions. One of the critical components in the development of such systems is the supporting indexing system used to perform the relevant case search. Finally, case libraries can serve to accumulate organizational experiences and can often be viewed as a corporate memory. For example, the case library for a help desk system could be considered a corporate memory of organizational experiences related to customer support. The same thing can be said of a rule-base supporting an expert system. For more details on a case-based reasoning systems, refer to Chapter 9 of the book Knowledge Management: Challenges, Solutions, and Technologies (Becerra-Fernandez et al. 2004).