Increasing Productivity and Profitability

Continued

That joint effort involved an extensive series of events called “A Day in the Life,” where the Unisys and Oracle project teams worked together to go through each different kind of business process that the application was going to touch and review daily activity in a detailed way. This helped determine both how things currently worked and how Unisys wanted to change processes, as well as predicting the impact of future changes. Unisys used its unique 3D Blueprinting approach to help ensure that business strategy and processes were aligned with the underlying IT direction.

To help evaluate potential changes, Unisys set up a core team that included IT and business unit representatives from all over the world. They worked together with the core PSA implementation team to look at functionality and potential customizations. Any customizations that were identified were brought before a steering committee that reviewed and validated the changes.

“We would challenge potential customizations pretty aggressively to make sure they were something we wanted to do, since our goal was to get this rolled out as quickly as possible and any customization slows you down,” says Sheetz. “We wanted to make sure that there was going to be a significant business benefit for any customization we would do.”

“If our current processes didn’t match 100 percent how the Oracle system worked, our goal was to revise those processes as much as possible to limit customization,” says Sheetz. “So we spent a lot of time working together as a team to make sure that our business needs and our business processes in the Oracle application were in lockstep. It was a relatively lengthy process, which I think is bearing fruit now that we’ve rolled out the resource management phase across the world—with project management and financial management of client projects to follow.”

Effective Implementation

Once Unisys had worked through all the required changes, the resource management implementation went quickly. By late summer of 2007, the company had completed an initial pilot in two European locations. Continental Europe and the U.K. were launched officially in fall of 2007. Unisys rolled out the solution to North America in January 2008 and completed the worldwide rollout a month later with deployments to Asia Pacific and Latin America.

“It’s been a very easy project to keep on target, because of our partnership with the Oracle consulting group. They’ve been with us every step of the way,” says Stephanie Soer, vice president of applications for Unisys. “Oracle’s PSA resource management has been a very stable platform, and we don’t see much in the way of performance issues.”

Implementing Oracle’s PSA applications let Unisys eliminate a homegrown resource management application, which simplified its IT infrastructure and maintenance requirements. But the new system still had to tie neatly into the company’s existing infrastructure.

“Another important aspect has been the lack of complexity in the integration and interface phases, when we integrated this on top of our other Oracle ERP modules. It’s been very good,” says Soer. “With Oracle we only had a very small number of new interfaces, whereas with the other vendors we looked at, we would have had to add at least 10 new interfaces.”

Now that the system is deployed, the IT group has signed on to use it internally—an application that wasn’t intended but just seemed obvious. “We’re actually going to take all the resources we have within our IT organization and use the PSA resource management software to track where we have our IT people assigned and who’s available,” says Soer. “We’re really using it internally in our IT department as well as for our business. It’s not something we originally planned on doing, but the more we looked at this application as we rolled it out to the business community, the more we saw how it could really help us internally in our own IT organization to enable more-efficient project staffing and better management.”