Multinational Corporation Solution

Project Landscape:

Xellent Solutions engaged with a client known as a global leader in pharmaceuticals. Though a forerunner in their industry, the worldwide technology leader had a complex and urgent problem that required immediate attention.

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

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

The Challenge

• The process of compiling sub-project costs, and integrating them to project and finally program costs was an arduous task based on ad-hoc assumptions from individual managers and director's in-charge.
  
• The Enterprise Project Management Suite that existed did not integrate with disparate Accounts, HR and Vendor systems. Hence, even though all the data existed in their systems, the client could not correlate the data to narrate a meaningful summary to the executives.
  
• Management was reactive to problem areas at the end of the quarter. The Executive team was routinely surprised at end-of-quarter project costs, escalation estimates and as it was the end of the quarter or year, there was insufficient time available to gain an insight into problems.
  
• When "estimated" project costs were presented to the executives, they lacked verifiable and traceable sources for the executives to validate them for corporate financial reporting as per compliance guidelines.
  
• The Accounts department had a penny by penny account of what money was paid to who but they spent countless number of days on excel spread-sheets in determining the exact amount of money funneled from the respective project's budgets for every payment.
  

The Solution

Xellent Solutions identified the above challenges as a recurring business case pattern and diligently suggested the following strategy to combat the situation at hand:

• The managers, directors, VPs and executives needed to have access to an at-a-glance dashboard that would provide a near-real time spend as-on-date, expenditure 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 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 the compliance of rules through software at the lowest level to 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.

The Benefits:

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

• A Drilled down dashboard for an at-a-glance view of project amount spent, 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 exported to Finance and Accounting ensured a single source of data for the PMO and Accounts.
  
• Xellent 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 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.