The customer: enhancing the health of pets, people, and livestock

IDEXX Laboratories was founded in 1983 and has grown to become the global leader in veterinary diagnostic instrument development and manufacture; reference laboratory services; and dairy and water testing. Its products and services keep animals healthy and ensure safe milk and drinking water for humans. Headquartered in Maine, USA, IDEXX offers products to customers in more than 175 countries.

The challenge: ensuring project management rigor and consistency

IDEXX invests tens of millions of dollars each year in research and development (R&D) to bring to market new products and services and ensure continued fast growth. The company’s R&D projects can take several years to come to successful fruition and involve thousands of people around the world, ranging from scientists and engineers to marketing and finance professionals.

When IDEXX joined Standard & Poor’s 500® Index at the start of 2017, it raised its profile as a potential opportunity for investors globally. To strengthen governance and safeguard investments in growing the company and its offerings, IDEXX’s executive team was keen to achieve greater rigor and visibility for its R&D projects, and ensure consistent processes across its global teams.

With spreadsheets and disparate systems being used by different teams, the company recognized that it needed a standard approach and single system to provide the required financial, resource, and other project insights, as well as realistic product roadmaps.

The solution: standardized system and processes globally

Having successfully worked with Rego Consulting to improve its approach to IT projects, IDEXX re-engaged the consultancy to enhance its R&D project and resource management capabilities.

Rego worked alongside IDEXX’s project management office (PMO) and the largely scientific community across the R&D organization to define standard project management processes, deploy Clarity, and incorporate ‘lite’ versions of project management, resource management, and timesheets.

Introducing resource management, project management, and timesheets represented a significant change in culture as well as process for the R&D community. Rego Consulting provided advice on organizational change management, which was driven by the IDEXX PMO.

To support the change and facilitate adoption, Rego produced a training video for IDEXX scientists around the world, as well as providing classroom training for users and managers.

Rego configured Clarity to reflect the newly defined processes and trained IDEXX staff to enable them to configure the system in-house thereafter and reduce support costs.

Reporting and portlets were also developed to meet the specific requirements of IDEXX. The company also found RegoXchange™ invaluable in helping understand and identify portlets used by other organizations that would add value to IDEXX and could be adapted and deployed cost-effectively. RegoXchange™ has hundreds of ready-to-use Clarity PPM solutions including portlets, training material, reports, and more, to help clients increase the value of the tool.

The benefits: Enhanced governance and visibility

IDEXX now has standardized processes and systems that have been adopted by approximately 570 staff around the world, many of them new users that were unaccustomed to timesheets and other project management tools.

As a result, IDEXX has improved:

Project Management: one central source of projects to understand financial, resource, and dependency impacts over time.

Resource management: insight into the type and level of involvement of resources at different project stages is aiding resource and project planning.

Budget management: resource management and timesheets ensure clarity and visibility of labor costs, facilitating budgetary control.

Reporting and insight: reporting is now available at a touch of a button, and in granular detail. This provides IDEXX managers and its executive team with greater insights into multi-year, multi-million R&D projects.

By working with Rego Consulting, IDEXX has been able to strengthen the management, visibility, and governance of its R&D projects, which will enable it to safeguard its investments, support further growth, and maintain its attractiveness to potential investors.