Increasing Productivity and Profitability

Continued

Business Information Management Drives Need for PSA

“Unisys has made a transition from a hardware-centered company to one focused on services and solutions,” says Kevin Sheetz, vice president and managing partner at Unisys. “As part of that transformation, our P&L leaders and our project leaders in the field need different types of information than they did before. That’s really what drove the need for our PSA project.”

As executives looked at the business transformation Unisys had gone through, they could see the company was getting the right skill sets, processes, and methodologies in place—but it still didn’t have the right support infrastructure to make the transformation as efficient as possible.

“We wanted to increase the level of transparency of all our resources around the world, so that we could make sure we were leveraging them as effectively as possible,” says Sheetz. “We also had a lot of disparate systems that didn’t talk to each other. As a result, people in the field were inputting similar information into multiple applications, which obviously isn’t good for efficiency or effectiveness.”

Of course, it didn’t help that the scope of the Unisys PSA solution is immense—with 25,000 resources, 3,000 project managers, 8,000 project team members, and 19,000 active projects. To get a handle on its challenging project management environment, Unisys started by evaluating PSA systems, looking to external research organizations for recommendations and feedback, and matching that with its existing infrastructure components, including Oracle E-Business Suite enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise human capital management system. It also looked closely at the specific functionality that Oracle Project Resource Management provided.

“The external validation we did and the ability to leverage our existing systems would really be meaningless if we didn’t have a good match in the functionality that Oracle delivered,” says Sheetz. “When we compared the functionality that the Oracle solution offered versus the functionality that we required in our business cases, we found a good match, especially in our high-priority areas. One of the things that we didn’t want to do was take on a solution where we had to do a lot of customization, and so it was important that out of the box we had a solution that hit more of our critical points.”

After evaluating a range of PSA options—from portfolio management through resource management—and looking closely at their business requirements and infrastructure, it was apparent that Oracle could deliver an enterprise-class PSA solution that could help Unisys maximize its investment in Oracle ERP while simplifying its IT architecture and delivering a better total cost of ownership.

Adapting Skill Sets and Best Practices

Of course, to make the most of Oracle’s integrated best practices, Unisys had to make some changes to its business processes. For example, Unisys consolidated its job codes from 4,300 down to 700 to take better advantage of Oracle’s built-in best practices—a step that Kern sees as critical in aligning business and IT goals and supporting Unisys’ transformation.

“Adapting our skill sets was key because we wanted to fit inside the Oracle best practice in this space and adapt so that we can leverage the integration. It’s just part of our continuing drive toward standardization and best practices,” says Kern. “But to make that adaptation, Unisys IT and business teams needed to be in sync. We teamed up with Kevin Sheetz because we wanted to make sure we had a strong business-partner pull,” adds Kern.