TPG will deliver EPM 2010 with integration to the Project Systems (PS) module of SAP, improving NATS capability to schedule, resource and execute their entire project portfolio. The solution will meet NATS specific requirements including:

By-directional SAP Integration using TPG PSLink:
- EPM resource pool data from SAP including RBS and time dependant data such as planned working time and planned leave and labour rates
- Work Breakdown Structure and status to be managed in EPM and interfaced to SAP
- Time-phased forecast work and costs  transferred from EPM to SAP
- Time-phased actuals costs and work transferred from SAP FI/CO and CATS to EPM
- SharePoint Collaboration
- Extensive Business Intelligence solution covering NATS Program and Project reporting requirements

NATS selected TPG as their solution supports NATS planning and project management processes and provides an industry standard planning and reporting tool to meet the  schedule and resourcing requirements.

About NATS
NATS En Route is the sole provider of en route services in the UK. It is economically regulated and operates under licence from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). It operates from two air traffic control centres, at Swanwick in Hampshire and Prestwick in Ayrshire. NATS Services provides air traffic services at most of the UK’s major airports, including all six owned by BAA Airports Limited. This range from the world’s busiest for international flights, Heathrow, and Gatwick, the world’s busiest single-runway airport, to the city airports of Glasgow and Edinburgh. NATS also manages air traffic at airports in Manchester, Birmingham, London City, Luton and Farnborough. NATS Services also provides engineering, consultancy, training and aviation information management services to customers in the UK and overseas.

Lonza now has an enterprise-wide multi-project management system based on Microsoft technologies. Using a consistent SharePoint interface, it is now significantly easier for staff in the company’s research and development departments around the world to file their reports and provide notification of costs incurred. In addition, all the necessary information about available resources and services can be made available to customers at the touch of a button. 

TPG The Project Group’s own products contribute to the success of this solution. TPG PSLink runs in the background to ensure financial data are kept synchronized between the project management system and the SAP environment, while TPG ProjectLink creates transparency in multi-project management processes. It links tasks from different project plans and displays them as a graphical chart. 

The new solution is currently based on Microsoft Project Server 2007. Working with TPG The Project Group, Lonza AG is now engaged in migrating it to Microsoft Project Server 2010, the latest version. The company expects up to 800 employees to be working with the system by the end of 2012. 

About Lonza
Lonza is one of the world's leading suppliers to the pharmaceutical, healthcare and life science industries. Products and services span its customers’ needs from research to final product manufacture. It is the global leader in the production and support of active pharmaceutical ingredients both chemically as well as biotechnologically. Biopharmaceuticals are one of the key growth drivers of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Lonza has strong capabilities in large and small molecules, peptides, amino acids and niche bioproducts which play an important role in the development of novel medicines and healthcare products. Lonza is also the world leader in microbial control providing innovative, chemistry-based and related solutions to destroy or to selectively inhibit the growth of harmful microorganisms. Its activities encompass the areas of water treatment, personal care, health and hygiene, industrial preservation, materials protection, and wood treatment. In addition, Lonza is a leader in cell-based research, endotoxin detection and cell therapy manufacturing. Furthermore, the company is a leading provider of value chemical and biotech ingredients to the nutrition and agro markets.

Lonza is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland and is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange and secondary listed on the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited (“SGX-ST”). Lonza is not subject to the SGX-ST’s continuing listing requirements. Lonza is subject to the listing rulesof the SIX Swiss Exchange, which do not have specific requirements equivalent to the listing rules of the SGX-ST in respect of interested person transactions, acquisition and realizations, and delisting. In 2011, the company had sales of CHF 2.69 billion. Further information can be found at www.lonza.com.

TPG and two of its customers are making four presentations that give interesting insight into their work with the Microsoft project management system along with the TPG solutions. Exxaro, a South African mining company, will explain to conference attendees how it has standardized project management for its various types of mining projects using Project Server, SharePoint and TPG PSLink. Kemira, a Finland-based chemicals group, will report on its goal of a fast implementation of the project management system, including SAP integration, at all of its R&D facilities around the world. This system now enables the firm to control project costs much more effectively. TPG will be presenting TPG PMCS, a solution based on Microsoft Project and SharePoint for managing large projects in the construction and energy industries that is already being used successfully in these sectors. In TPG’s fourth presentation, the company will provide ten top tips on how best to implement multi-project management with Microsoft Project Professional. 

“The Microsoft Project Conference is the largest and most important event of its kind and TPG was also a premium sponsor at the last conference in 2007,” says Stavros Georgantzis, Managing Director and founder of TPG The Project Group. “At that event, the opportunity to interact with a top-flight audience and the valuable contacts we were able to make on an international level left no doubt in our minds that we would be a premium sponsor at the next conference. With our four presentations, we’re putting the focus on the customer perspective and showing how our customers use Microsoft EPM, SharePoint and our own products and how they have integrated their EPM solution into their SAP or Primavera environment. We’ll also be giving our recommendations on the best ways to introduce and use EPM and SharePoint in practice.”  

More information about the conference is available at: http://www.msprojectconference.com/pages/default.aspx
Further details of the TPG PSLink interface to integrate EPM with SAP are available at: http://www.theprojectgroup.com/pslink

With the ISV/Software competency, Microsoft recognizes selected partners that develop and sell standardized software products based on Microsoft technologies. The Gold status is the highest level in this competency. TPG PSLink achieved it by passing demanding tests that evaluated the interface between Microsoft Project Server and SAP to ensure it works with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The Gold status also required TPG The Project Group to provide additional information, including a larger number of customer references using TPG PSLink.

TPG PSLink, which is certified by SAP, is the world’s leading product for integrating Microsoft Project and SharePoint with SAP. The product is backed by over twelve years’ intensive development work. TPG PSLink enables bidirectional data sharing between the two market-leading systems Microsoft Project and SAP. It ensures that all the data exchanged between the two environments are kept completely synchronized at all times, using extensive verification mechanisms to check the information. Before synchronizing the data, a difference analysis shows the changes to be made and only these changes are transferred to the other system.

Until 31 December 2011, TPG The Project Group is offering a proof-of-concept of TPG PSLink at an attractive fixed price. It enables companies to validate for themselves that the integration works in their own specific SAP environment. Further information is available at www.theprojectgroup.com/aktion 

“We have been providing our products and services for Microsoft-based project management internationally for 13 years now,” says Stavros Georgantzis, founder and managing partner of TPG The Project Group. “Due to this commitment, the TPG brand has an increasingly high level of recognition among our target audience. This is why the protection of our brand is an important initiative to safeguard the value of our company.”

The proposed Proof of Concept will cover:

• A workshop to identify the core integration requirements to facilitate decision-making
• Specification and documentation of these requirements
• Installation and configuration of TPG PSLink on the customer’s premises by TPG staff
• Delivery of a working prototype within an agreed timeframe (typically less than a week)

This offer applies to companies in Europe and the US and has a fixed price of 7000 USD (or 5000 GBP or 5000 EUR or 7000 CHF). Customers outside these regions can get in touch with TPG or one of its partners for a separate quote.

In the unlikely event that TPG PSLink cannot meet the agreed requirements, the customer pays nothing!

The fixed-price offer assumes that Microsoft Project Server and the relevant SAP modules are in place and configured properly. The offer can be extended to cover a broader functional scope, such as the implementation of Microsoft Project Server. TPG can quote for such scope extensions separately.

For more information and registration see http://www.theprojectgroup.com/aktion

“We are proud to recognize this outstanding group from our highly valued worldwide partner network as our 2011 Partner Award finalists,” said Jon Roskill, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft Corp. “We applaud the unique perspective and creativity each of these companies brings to solving customer business and technology challenges. Our strong partnership along with their commitment to customers plays an essential role in our mutual, long-term success.”

TPG is currently operating under an NDA. Shortly however the American TPG customer will publish an official press release regarding this winning project. Following that, TPG will release more details about this exceptional project solution.

The Microsoft Partner Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions over the past year.

In March 2010 Kemira announced its new corporate mission: the Finland-based chemicals group was aiming to become the world’s largest water chemistry firm. With a view to achieving this goal, the company is working on hundreds of research and development projects at 100 locations in 40 countries. It decided that it needed to install an enterprise-wide, standardized project management system to manage all these projects more efficiently.

“Each project manager had his or her own way of managing projects,” says Jani Saarinen, Senior Manager and Head of Processes and external Relations in R&D at Kemira. “And the reporting was horrible!” When working on quarterly reports, it often took Saarinen himself several days to find and collate countless pieces of information from multiple departments.

For Jani Saarinen there were two main criteria for the choice of the enterprise-wide project management system. First, it had to help staff save time in their everyday project work; and second, the entire system had to be easy to use.

The solution put in place by TPG The Project Group and its partner Tietotalo, based in Helsinki, Finland, meets both of these criteria. Project managers and staff now work with Microsoft Project Professional and the Microsoft WebApp in a system based on Microsoft SharePoint and Project Server 2010. “I’m able to use Project Server 2010, even though my background is in economic history, not IT,” says Jani Saarinen, clearly pleased with the user-friendly Microsoft solution.

The new solution saves Kemira’s R&D project managers a lot of time, especially in the creation of reports. With the TPG PSLink interface running in the background, project-related data are constantly synchronized between SAP and Microsoft Project Server 2010 and kept up to date. Adds Saarinen: “The system saves our project managers up to one day a month, because they now have cost control data at their fingertips via TPG PSLink.”

In addition, all staff worldwide can now use Microsoft WebApp to enter their actual hours and retrieve relevant project data. “That alone saves them about two hours per month,” comments Jani Saarinen. “Previously, they had to enter the data twice – once in an Excel spreadsheet, then again for control purposes in SAP.”

The implementation began in June 2010, managed by TPG and Tietotalo, both Microsoft Gold Certified Partners. Kemira had reviewed solution providers by having them respond to a set of scenarios and selected Tietotalo based on its execution during the review. Kemira was also impressed of the solution and references provided by TPG of integrating Microsoft Project Server to SAP.

“The co-operation with our parner TPG was seamless and working with TPG’s knowledgeable staff was a real pleasure. Together we were able to meet all the deadlines defined in the original project plan” says Ville Vakkilainen, Director of the Business Unit at Tietotalo.

A detailed case study about the implementation at Kemira is available on TPG’s website at: http://www.theprojectgroup.com/en/references/customer-case-studies/kemira.html  


About Kemira
Kemira, based in Finland, is a global two billion euro chemicals company that is focused on serving customers in water-intensive industries. The company offers water quality and quantity management that improves customers’ energy, water, and raw material efficiency. Kemira’s goal is to be a leading water chemistry company. More information: www.kemira.com 

About Tietotalo
Based in Espoo outside Helsinki in Finland, Tietotalo Infocenter Oy is a leading IT services company specializing in project and portfolio management, e-business and digital communication solutions based on Microsoft EPM and SharePoint technologies, InfoWeb (CMS), EPiServer (CMS), InfoGate (reservations system) and InfoMessenger (a tool for email marketing). The company has customers in multiple sectors, including financial services, manufacturing, R&D, retail and government. www.tietotalo.fi

Demand and portfolio management have been an integral part of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) system since the 2010 version. These new functions help users collect project ideas and create project portfolios. They also provide access to the EPM system for users who have not previously had any dealings with project management or the software used for it. “It’s exactly this type of user we’re thinking of – those who are newly involved in a part of the project work – and we can now support them with the Nintex products,” says Dr. Thomas Henkelmann, Director Consulting Services at TPG, describing why TPG is extending its range of services. 

About Nintex
Nintex is a leading global innovator of software that extends Microsoft SharePoint, bridging the gap between existing SharePoint features and customer needs. All Nintex products are designed with a passionate commitment to innovation and user experience. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Nintex aligns with Microsoft’s strategic and architectural direction to ensure that Nintex and Microsoft products work in harmony, both today and into the future. More information: www.nintex.com 

The Montreal office is the 3rd TPG America office joining Bellevue, Washington and their headquarters location in Jamison Pa. CEO Paul Szyarto states that, “even in today’s virtual world TPG America understands the importance of on-site client relations. Our continued expansion will bring us closer to clients on a regional basis. We look forward to continued expansion and the opportunity to interact with clients on a more personal basis.”

TPG's new Montreal/Canada office is located at 1200 McGill College Ave. Suite 1100 Montreal, QB H3B 4G7.