Project Description

“MPI has simplified our daily planning process and the assignment of people, to our many projects. MPI is securing optimal utilization and good delivery performance, thanks to the transparency across projects and departments.”

Bo Christoffersen, Head of engineering PS/PA division, ABB Denmark

Quick Overview

Rapid Implementation

Go-live with first version after 4 months including SAP integration. 1300 projects and 144.000 WBS lines imported every day. MPI is the daily tool for 150 ABB Engineers and Project managers on 3 locations in Denmark. Project data includes time estimates, project manager, customer, status, cost center and project types: Make to order, internal projects and quotations. Resource data include people, skills, training and machines.

Operational Excellence

Visual indication of bottlenecks on people, competences & equipment. Bookings can be done either on weekly, daily or hourly levels. Notification to PM on changes made by individuals and forecasted orders. Jobs can be dispatched to Outlook for personal convenience. Ease of HR management with skills and renewal of certificates.

Strategic Supremacy

Important information immediately generated and presented in Dashboards. Project evaluation forms and notifications on finished projects for KPI follow-up. Full transparency in the organization on projects and resource capacity and load. Analysis of trends with 4 and 12 week curves with historic data on utilization.

Project ambition

ABB Denmark works with real time process control systems for offshore and ships, among many other things. ABB has a very professional organization, but needed to upgrade to a new system to dispatch and plan jobs.

Their previous system was composed of several systems and tools. Resource management was based in Excel, in combination with project and portfolio management in several other both external and internally developed tools, which meant that data was fragmented.

This was inefficient to maintain for the line managers and engineers, managing multiple systems as well as HR to manage and update skills and certificates, which are a central requirement work on the different offshore projects. There were also an increased demand for a standard system.

One central planning tool for ABB

PM’s can create new projects in MPI directly for speed and convenience, and subsequently in SAP. This meant allocating jobs to individuals or ‘competence groups’ that internally plans details.

PM’s work with 2 synchronized Gantts – project and resource dimensions. People is allocated by competence and available capacity, making it easier to avoid bottlenecks. Physical machines are included in planning – test machines. Notifications: PM’s are notified of all changes made by individuals. Engineers are notified, when not using MPI frequently enough.

Results

  • Full transparency

  • Reduced administration

  • Lower maintenance costs