The customer: aerospace innovation and leadership

A leading American multinational, the company designs and manufactures commercial and military aircraft as well as aerospace and defense products and systems. It must continually improve and expand its product line and services to meet changing market conditions and new customer needs.

The challenge: driving greater cost efficiencies

The commercial aircraft and transportation industry is increasingly competitive, while aerospace is continually pushing the boundaries in innovation and exploration. The company’s IT projects play a vital role in supporting the development of new products and services as well as ensuring security, enabling efficiency, and delivering high levels of productivity across the globe.

With a global portfolio of approximately 500 concurrent projects and 1,000 users, the company was keen to identify cost efficiencies and keep a tight rein on budgets and expenditure. To achieve this, it needed to review its approach to project and portfolio management (PPM) and gain greater insight into project resources and activities.

While many companies use project data to shape their portfolio, projects, and budgets going forward, the manufacturer wanted to reverse this approach in favor of top-down management of its portfolio.

The solution: moving to a centralized, top-down approach

Following several successful experiences of working with Rego Consulting, the manufacturer once again turned to the consultancy to help it establish its new approach to PPM. Rego not only helped define the new PPM framework, but also ensured the company’s PPM solution, Clarity, was configured to fully support it.

Rego worked closely with the company to analyze its existing processes and identify the process and system changes necessary to meet its business objectives.

As well as configuring a large number of new reports and developing portlets in Clarity PPM to provide the detailed insights required by the company, Rego also provided web-based training. The training, which was rolled out globally, included the creation of comprehensive documentation to ensure high levels of adoption.

The Rego project team worked with the company’s stringent security policies and processes throughout the engagement, which constrained the amount of information available to its consultants. Through careful yet rigorous questioning and analysis, followed by configuration and testing in the development environment, the consultancy was able to ensure that the solution would deliver the desired results.

The benefits: significant cost savings through deeper insights

With Rego’s assistance, the company has been able to adopt its top-down approach to PPM and achieve greater visibility and stronger control across its portfolio.

As a result, the company has been able to:

Achieve major cost savings: the ability to identify and eliminate duplication of effort has led to cost savings of tens of millions of dollars over 12 months, with further sizeable cost savings anticipated going forward.

Improve resource management: greater insight is enabling the company to better forecast needs, match skills with requirements, and ensure the right focus and priorities across resources.

Increase efficiency: the new automated reports are delivering significant time-savings across the company as well as meeting the strategic and operational needs of project managers and the senior management team.

With greater transparency and governance, the company can continue to drive cost savings while ensuring the timely delivery of business-critical IT projects.