Last Modified1/5/2004 Edison Welding Institute enjoyed the benefits of Microsoft® Business Solutions–Solomon and the project management capabilities of Microsoft Project for many years. Now, the organization will see tighter project control with the combined Microsoft Business Solutions Professional Services Automation solution.
Edison Welding Institute (EWI) is the largest nonprofit, industrially driven engineering organization in North America dedicated to advancing and applying materials joining technology to benefit the manufacturing industry. EWI's 160 staff members provide materials joining assistance, contract research, consulting services and training to member companies representing more than 3,300 plant locations nationwide. The organization has engineers in all disciplines of materials joining technology who assist manufacturers with welding and joining challenges. Help can range from a simple answer over the phone to a three-year research and development project to develop a more involved solution. EWI is dedicated to providing quality service to ensure quality results and meet or exceed a company’s expectations. A Decade of Benefits For more than a decade, EWI benefited from their Microsoft Business Solutions–Solomon financial solution. Flexibility and easy customization allowed the organization to retrieve the business information necessary for critical decisions. The Project Accounting series provided easy expense and time tracking along with real-time budget data for project analysis, and EWI engineers had used Microsoft Project for managing project schedules and resources. Each product served EWI well, and now, by exploiting the integrated power of Professional Services Automation, the organization is able to have true control over the lifecycle of a project.True Project Control "We’ve had the situation where we’ve had a good year but we’ve also had high cost overruns," says EWI IT manager Ron Citterberg. Because Professional Services Automation stores all of a project’s data in one central location while sharing it between Project Accounting and Microsoft Project, decision makers have access to the vital information they need to intervene at an earlier stage in a project and take appropriate action. Citterberg says that while Project Accounting provides real-time budget data, the manual entry process delayed data reporting of resource management "at least a week." With Professional Services Automation, budget and resource data are both immediate and up to date. He says, "Right now we enter project data by hand into Project Workbench at the end of week, so by using Professional Services Automation instead, we’re going to eliminate data-entry errors—we’re going to eliminate data entry altogether." Effective Resource Management Improved resource management gives EWI a more realistic view of project timetables. "Since we draw from just one resource pool, we can be more realistic about when we get jobs done," says Ron Fowler, database and applications developer. "We’ll be able to see that if someone is working on two other projects, then we may need to push the deadline out on a third." This benefits EWI engineers by setting more appropriate expectations for each project. According to Fowler, Professional Services Automation also takes advantage of the task-level management within Microsoft Project to extend the budgeting capabilities of Project Accounting. Benefits Continue After a Project Ends Professional Services Automation also provides the necessary information needed to analyze projects upon completion. "We’ll see what went right and what didn’t go right so we can eventually improve our process here," says Citterberg. By adding efficiencies to the project management process, EWI will complete projects more quickly while saving money at the same time. Return on Investment Microsoft Business Solutions Professional Services Automation leverages the features of both Project Accounting and Microsoft Project to allow EWI more cost and resource control than ever before. Benefits include:
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