Initial situation
A diversified industrial company had a high demand for project management information. In order to achieve traceability in the development of the reporting process, status reports had to be collected in a standardised way. The process had to be supported through an automated and centralised Provision of all status reports and an automated creation of PowerPoint slides based on the reports.
Objectives
The goal of this process optimisation and automation was to enable project managers to create status reports in less time. Management was supposed to be able to capture and compare information more quickly. Furthermore, report data of the particular status reports had to be consolidated on the project portfolio level and management overviews had to be provisioned.
Our Approach
- Requirements analysis, process definition and setting up of a prototype
- Implementation of an integrated and automated status reporting based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office InfoPath and Microsoft Office PowerPoint
- Deployment to the existing IT infrastructure and handover to the internal administrator
Benefits and results
The system’s implementation resulted in significant time savings: Standardised processes and process automation helped project managers and management to focus on the essential. In addition the standardisation let to an improvement in data quality: The automated collection of all reports ensures their actuality and reliability.
Another benefit appears in an improved decision support of the reporting system: Comparability of report data increases the quality of decisions, e.g. regarding competing resource requests or requests for raise of budgets.