• Accurate costing: The Executive team did not have access to daily updated and accurate costs incurred by the distribution teams. Staying in touch with costs and progress critical for them to fulfill projects within estimated budgets.
  
• Project Profitability: The Executive team wanted to be in a position where it was easy to ascertain and accept profitable assignments. The current situation prevented them from gauging between financially viable and less profitable engineering projects
• Team Efficiency: Determining a healthy team mix to boost profitability and team effectiveness was a challenge in itself.

The Solution

The engineering company subscribed to Xellent solution's ASP model of deployment. Xellent Solutions hosted the application, database, backups and technical support, at a low monthly license fee per user. The web application was accessible to all employees and consultants for their respective clients from any location. The Customer was not subject to any overheads in order to maintain and implement the ASP model.

The deployment of the ASP model resulted in the following process improvements:

• The corporate office creates a financial budget for every project, which was sub-allocated by program managers to branch office. The Executive team would then be able to view the dashboard of dials and gauges every day to track the budget spent and forecast of each project on a daily basis. In addition, a project's details could be analyzed by viewing the project tree to detect problem areas in terms of cost over-runs.
  
• Program managers allocated resources by creating cross functional teams from multiple locations on each project with budgeted hours for the respective engineering services projects.
  
• Every engineering team member logged time-sheet hours on each of projects over the web. Prior to applying ASP, the 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. Logging in hours resulted in realistic numbers and hence the spend and forecast dashboard indicated a high degree of accuracy.
  
• The electronic timesheet and approval workflow enabled 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 project, people, department and vendor based calculations in excel format were used by the finance and accounting and greatly aided them to accurately post accounts entries and expenses to project accounting and eliminated multiple-man months of labor every quarter.
  
  

The Benefits/ Outcome

• The Executive team can now ascertain the profitability of projects in the pipeline and devise effective methods of cost reduction by determining the teams or departments by location and product who contribute to higher costs for project implementation and fulfillment.