Customer Success Story
Magneti Marelli
Project portal drives success at Italian Automotive Supplier
The Challenge
Cofap Automotive Suspension (C.A.S.) R&D division lacked a central project management system and found it a challenge to capture accurate actual costs for its many projects. With a typical time-tomarket schedule of just 24 months, the division needed to optimize its project management activities and gain visibility into its complex project costs. C.A.S. decided to create just one system and data repository for the whole department that integrated all project and cost information.
C.A.S.’s R&D division in Italy has approximately 50 projects ongoing at any given time. Each project represents a particular car model and requires a combination of internal and external labor resources. With increasing pressure on C.A.S. from the carmakers to meet aggressive delivery schedules, keeping track of project status and costs is a must. “We typically plan our R&D projects starting from the end date and work backwards,” explains Maurizio Catena, Information Technology Solution Consultant at Magneti Marelli. “The carmaker gives us the delivery date and we have to be sure that we meet that date.”
When Catena and his team were brought in four years ago to improve project management in the R&D Division, they faced numerous challenges. First, there was no central project management office. “Project managers are heavily involved in the technical side of the projects and do not have a lot of time to spend on project management,” states Catena. “But we needed to find a better solution because data was scattered in copies of Microsoft Project® and Excel®, which meant that the finance department did not have the same numbers as the project managers!”
Consistent status reporting was also a problem due to a lack of standardization. “To get a departmental-level view of status, the R&D manager had to call each project manager for an update. He would receive lots of documents, each in a different format with different colors, graphs, and scales,” remembers Catena. There was a lot of guesswork involved in creating an overall, cross-project picture.
The same was true for capturing actual costs. “We have different types of projects, each with different classifications of work packages. About 50% of our resources are external making it more difficult to manage. Plus, we have different types of billing for different projects. So project organization is complex and capturing accurate actual costs was a challenge,” says Catena.
Catena and his team were given the goal of finding a solution that could be used to manage all projects, without exception. They set out to design and implement an integrated system that would deliver the data and reports needed by the R&D manager and financial controller, but would be as simple and time-efficient as possible for the busy project managers. Key objectives included the ability to control development costs, scheduling, and resource allocation and to manage budgets, actual costs, and forecasts.
They started by defining user requirements and mapping C.A.S.’s unique project organizational structures. “To get the right data, you must have an accurate model of the project organization,” explains Catena. “We wanted to create just one system, one data repository, and a standardized approach to project organization. We decided on a portal approach.”
With this vision in mind, it became a question of finding the right tools. The project managers were already using Microsoft Project and this component had to stay. “We were asked not to change the scheduling system because everyone knew it. And so we needed to find tools that could integrate with Microsoft Project, help us solve our costing and timesheet problems, and bring it all together in a common point of access.”
The Solution
WelcomHome, Cobra, and TimeControl® were chosen as the other three components of the solution named the Multi-Project Management (MPM) system.
“We chose Cobra as the engine to give us a consistent cost model of projects, cost accounts, cost classes, and resource breakdown structures,” says Catena. Cobra allows C.A.S. to load non-labor costs from its ERP system at a summary level, bring in actual hours from the MPM system at a detailed level, and then perform target costing and forecasting for all projects.
A portal approach was important to keep the system as simple as possible and to avoid users having to learn multiple tools. “We chose WelcomHome as the project management portal because it could provide a single point of access for all the people that work on R&D projects. We particularly appreciated the high level of customization that it allowed and the general architecture of the system. It has allowed us to integrate different databases and create the reports that we need,” says Catena.
The Benefits
WelcomHome has become the core of the MPM system and is now used by the R&D manager, project managers, and financial controller. It also acts as the front-end to the other three systems: using WelcomHome, project managers can set up the necessary charge accounts in Cobra, view project schedules from Microsoft Project, and authorize actual hours logged in TimeControl. This single interface greatly simplified the system and improved user acceptance.
| The Challenge | The Solution | The Deltek Advantage |
| Magneti Marelli’s Cofap Automotive Suspension (C.A.S.) R&D division lacked a central project management system and found it a challenge to capture accurate actual costs for its many projects. | Deltek WelcomHome and Deltek Cobra were two of the three components of the solution named the Multi-Project Management (MPM) system Magneti Marelli chose. |
|
At the outset of the project, Catena and his team had worked with the R&D manager and financial controller to define a common methodology and standards for reporting. Now that the system is live, it is paying dividends.
“All our reports are in WelcomHome and have been customized to reflect the C.A.S. methodology,” says Catena. “The important reports are the Actual Hours Report, Chart Reports - which monitor by work package - and Summary Reports by Project Type and Invoicing Type. This data comes from a combination of Microsoft Project, Cobra, and TimeControl.”
“We are seeing the biggest results in the monitoring and control of actual hours,” he continues. “The key for us is standardization. Project managers can check the hours billed against their projects and approve them. Now, 99% of the hours are billed correctly.”
A particularly powerful report is the Chart Report, which graphs target budget against actual hours. This report makes it very easy for the project managers to see how they are performing and for the financial controller to monitor costs. Another report compares the commercial budget with the actual hours budget, allowing the R&D manager to track profit margins.
There is no longer guesswork when it comes to departmentallevel status reporting. “We now have a good situation where the project managers each present the same type of report every month and the direction of their individual project is clear,” says Catena. “Before we had this system, when the project people and the R&D controller spoke to each other, one would say ‘budget’ and the other would understand it as something else.” Now everyone is talking the same language.