Customer: An international automotive supplier that develops and manufactures electronic components.
Challenge: Project controlling in the automotive supplier’s engineering department was causing a significant number of inaccuracies and a lot of extra work. Project managers had no insight into the time and money already spent on a project or how much they had left. Team members logged their actuals in SAP CATS, so they were only booked to the overarching master project rather than to the detailed tasks of the sub-projects. In addition, the controllers had to manually enter external project workers’ actuals in SAP and company employees from other subsidiaries were not registered in the SAP system at headquarters.
Solution: The company uses Microsoft Project Server for all project management in its engineering department. It underpins schedule, resource, cost and budget planning as well as timesheet and project management tasks. The integration of the SAP system with the project management solution was realized using TPG PSLink. This ensures that organizational data, preparatory work and costings for the budget plan are synchronized automatically with no manual intervention at all.
Benefits: Since the company has implemented the Microsoft project management system and integrated it with SAP, project managers have more visibility and control over time and costs, while the controlling staff receive the business data they need automatically. Manual data transfer has been completely eliminated.
“With the integration of Project Server with SAP, we reduced the time needed to prepare budget planning from 3 man-weeks to one man-day. The manual transfer of data from various sources like Excel to SAP has been completely eliminated. Also the equivalent of several man-years can be saved by eliminating double data entry for actuals in Microsoft Project and SAP.”
Responsible Project Manager of a huge international automotive supplier
