Company: The Vaillant Group is an international heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technology concern based in Remscheid, Germany. As one of the world’s market and technology leaders, it develops and produces tailor-made products, systems and services for domestic comfort. The product portfolio ranges from efficient heating appliances based on customary fuels to system solutions for using regenerative energy sources. In the financial year 2011, the company with about 12,000 employees, which has been family-owned since its founding in 1874, achieved sales totaling €2.3 billion.
Challenge: The Vaillant Group is an innovation-driven company and its R&D department forms the core of the business. With R&D facilities in many European countries and in China, the company was using isolated project management systems that were not interconnected. The company initially worked with SAP project management, which proved a challenge for R&D staff. The Vaillant Group required a centralized project management system that would streamline resource planning and management throughout the group and give insight into the project status and the risks at any time.
Solution: The enterprise management solution is based on Microsoft Project Server with the addition of several TPG products to extend the functionality of the system. Notably, the Vaillant Group is using TPG PSLink for integrating SAP with Microsoft Project; TPG ResourceLink to populate the enterprise resource pool with data from any source, including SAP; TPG ProjectLink for sharing information about schedules, across projects; and TPG MTA Server for on-demand milestone trend analysis.
Benefits: Significant increased insight into resource availability and workloads, ensuring that projects are completed on time and on budget. Flexible reporting with different levels of detail depending on the recipient. Increased transparency across multiple projects and R&D locations.
