Quovadix - Case Studies

SOLUTION FOR A MEDIUM SIZE ENTERPRISE

Problem landscape:

A midsize Engineering services company had multiple locations. Their engineers visited customers across USA and analyzed customer requirements. The analysis was then handed over to an assigned project team at the headquarters, where the lead R&D engineers would create detailed design specifications, and handed-off the development and testing to remote satellite development centers.

Key pain points

The Executive team had no way to stay in touch with accurate costs as of today incurred through distributed teams. Staying in touch with costs and progress was absolutely critical for them to finish projects within budgets.
The Executive team wanted to be smart enough to not accept assignments that would not be profitable. They had no idea which engineering projects were not profitable and why they were not profitable.
The Executive team was not in a position to ascertain how the team mix can be improved so as to reduce costs.

Quovadix Solution and benefits realized

The Engineering company subscribed to Quovadix solution with ASP model of deployment. Quovadix hosted the application, database, backups and technical support, at a low monthly fee per user. The web application was accessible to all employees and consultants of the customer from anywhere. The Customer had no overheads to maintain and implement Quovadix.

The Customer used Quovadix in the following way:

Headquarters budgets money on each project, which was then sub-allocated by program managers to teams of different offices. The Executive team would then be able to view the dashboard of dials and gauges every day to track the spend and forecast of each project as of that day. They could even drill down to each of the project in a project tree to analyze any problem areas in terms of cost over-runs.
Program managers allocated resources from multiple teams and multiple locations on each project with budgeted hours on each of those engineering services projects.
The engineering team across the teams logged time-sheet hours on each of projects over the web. Program managers had no way of allocating people on projects without first allocating budgets for the activity. In case of allocating consultants, a valid PO (and hence a budget allocation for it) was required before allocation of their budgeted hours on the project. This resulted in the rolled up numbers and hence the spend and forecast dashboard with high degree of accuracy.
The electronic timesheet and approval workflow enables consultants and vendors to submit accurate invoices on time. Timesheets could be exported to an excel spreadsheet for vendors to roll up their numbers and reduce billing errors.
The projectwise-peoplewise-departmentwise-vendorwise splits of numbers in excel format were used by the accounts department that immensely helped them to accurately post accounts entries and post expenses to project accounting eliminating multiple-man months of labor every quarter.
The Executive team now knows which projects are not profitable and are working out smart ways to reduce costs by finding out which teams or departments in which locations contribute to higher costs for what types of projects.

SOLUTION FOR A LARGE GLOBAL ENTERPRISE

Problem Landscape:

Xellent Solutions engaged with a client who is a global leader in pharmaceuticals. Their worldwide technology leadership group had a complex and urgent problem to solve.

The client has a multi-billion dollar annual budget for worldwide projects that predominantly involve person-hour (professional services) spend. These projects are organized into programs, sub-programs, projects, and their activities, shared amongst a complex matrix of departments and locations globally. Moreover, most of the projects are resourced through shared pool of resources comprising of employees and consultants across the departments and locations.

Additionally, The classification of costs for various projects reflect in the corporate financial reports which must adhere to regulatory compliance.

Key pain points:

The process of compiling sub-project costs, and rolling them up to project and then up into program costs was painful and based on ad-hoc assumption from individual managers and directors in-charge.
Enterprise Project Management Suite that existed did not integrate with disparate Accounts, HR and Vendor systems. So even though the client had the data in their systems, it did could not tell a story that was meaningful to the executives.
Management was reactive at the end of the quarter in terms of problem areas. The Executive team was routinely surprised on end-of-quarter project costs escalation estimates and no time was available to them to gain insights into problems.
When “estimated” project costs were presented to the executives, they lacked verifiable and traceable means for the executives to certify them for corporate financial reporting under compliance.
The Accounts department had a penny by penny account of what money was paid to whom but they spent countless number of days on excel spread-sheets in figuring out exactly how much money came from each of the project budgets for each of those payments.

Strategy:

Xellent Solutions identified the key pain points above as a recurring business case pattern and quickly suggested the following strategy to kill the pain points:

The managers, directors, VPs and executives should have an access to at-a-glance dashboard that must provide a near-real time spend as-on-date, spend trend and forecasts to eliminate quarter-end surprises.
There should be ONE single source of costs data for PMO and Accounts to eliminate ambiguity between their respective quarterly cost numbers.
The field costs collection data should be so granular to the level of unit amount of work by each of the resources (employees and consultants) and each of the lowest level of tracked project activities.
Enforce compliance of rules through software at the lowest level so ensure best practices of Project budgeting and planned allocation as well as compliance with regulations.
Budget process should involve both top-down and bottom-up iterations. Under/Over allocations should be tracked.
The time tracking system should be consistent with all the strategies above to enforce planned budget utilization and removing any possibilities of untracked ad-hoc expenses.

Quovadix solution and benefits realized:

Quovadix Technology was identified as the best solution consistent with the strategy outlined above. Following are the highlights of the solution provided:

Drill down dashboards for an at-a-glance view of project spend, budgets and forecasts at any hierarchical level of project and program tree, effectively eliminating quarter-end surprises and ad-hoc costs estimations.
A time tracking interface with eSubmission and automated approval workflow ensured the granularity of costs data that the strategy had envisioned. Additionally, rolled up reports and data export to the Accounts ensured a ONE single source of data for the PMO and Accounts.
Quovadix enabled extensive reporting capabilities and integration with Corporate BI/Data warehouse to further integrate the performance measurement initiative within the client organization.
Compliance rules are enforced at the costs data entry level to enforce best accounting, legal and Project management practices.
A portfolio management system that enables budget cycle flow from top-down and bottom-up with tracking of rolled-up numbers at any given node.