AUCHAN LLC Supports Steady Expansion in Russia with Optimized Project Management and Resource Allocation
 
 

AUCHAN LLC Supports Steady Expansion in Russia with Optimized Project Management and Resource Allocation

  • Oracle Customer:  AUCHAN LLC
    Location:  Moscow, Russia
    Industry:  Retail
    Employees:  25,000

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AUCHAN LLC is one of the world's largest distributors of consumer goods, with more than 1,300 megastores and supermarkets in 12 countries. In Russia, the group operates megastores under the AUCHAN, AUCHAN City megastores, Atac supermarkets, and Raduga discount store brands.

AUCHAN Russia, which owns 50 hypermarkets and supermarkets across the country, plans to expand its Russian operations by opening stores in cities with more than 500,000 residents. Together with France and China, Russia serves as one of Auchan’s most profitable countries for its megastores.

To effectively manage numerous projects associated with market expansion, AUCHAN Russia recognized that it required a powerful project management system to accurately manage budgets, costs, time schedules, contracts, and accounts payable on a daily basis. With this in mind, the company worked with Oracle partner PMSOFT CJSC to implement Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management and integrate it with two customized modules developed to meet the company’s requirements for customized reports.

With the implementation, AUCHAN Russia eliminated its dependency on labor-intensive, error-prone, and spreadsheet-driven processes. It also enabled the company to better allocate employee resources. In addition, AUCHAN Russia acquired an expanded view of project performance variances, such as actual versus budgeted work schedules, to help it decrease project overspends from 20% of initial project cost, down to a maximum of 5%.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from AUCHAN LLC

  • “Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is the perfect project management tool, as it enables you to see the company’s project roadmap as a whole. Specifically, it has enabled us to mitigate project budget overruns and plan and allocate our resources better, which helps in managing projects more efficiently.” – Tatyana Kovaleva, Financial Controller, AUCHAN LLC

  • Establish a comprehensive project management system for more precise management of project costs, schedules, contracts, and payments for the construction and maintenance of hypermarkets
  • Eliminate manual spreadsheets for project management, which limited availability of timely and complete information, consumed significant human resources, and hampered project scheduling and progress
  • Enable the head office to collect all information relevant to the maintenance of 50 hypermarkets throughout Russia—from small repairs to new store fixtures—using a standardized and automated process
  • Introduce an analytical view of actual work schedules and project overspends to more efficiently manage hypermarket construction projects
  • Provide management with a complete picture of completed and ongoing projects

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed a customized project management tool, based upon Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management for access to all information relevant to construction and maintenance projects in a single platform, including project tasks, milestones, suppliers, communications, and payments
  • Acquired a comprehensive view of project cost variances, decreasing overspends from up to 20% of the initial project cost, down to a maximum 5%
  • Boosted performance of 18 dedicated project managers, who oversee a growing number of projects, including 20 store construction projects and 35 projects involving repair, expansion, and modification of existing stores
  • Used Oracle partner PMSOFT’s Primavera expertise to add customized reports with PM.Report, providing AUCHAN with the ability to report its results according to Russian and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)
  • Increased financial visibility and control substantially, while minimizing risk of financial conversion errors
  • Enabled managers to monitor all project information in one place—as opposed to manually collecting data from numerous sources—to enable instant and comprehensive post-project analysis and provide best practices for future projects
  • Facilitated instant monitoring of critical information—such as actual versus budgeted work schedules—for completed and ongoing projects, enabling managers to perform detailed project analyses and make better informed decisions in less time
  • Enabled suppliers to integrate data, such as designs and construction supply inventories, directly into Primavera, eliminating the need to enter data manually and saving valuable time for planning and analysis
  • Created a flexible reporting format to accommodate more accurate and timely reporting from suppliers, with the goal of enabling suppliers to provide their data in a format that AUCHAN can automatically import into Primavera, without needing help from AUCHAN’s personnel
  • Optimized store maintenance by enabling AUCHAN to manage and track global contracts within Primavera
  • Facilitated detailed analyses of past, current, and future projects, as well as defined benchmarks, improving adherence to project budgets

Partner

Oracle Partner PMSOFT CJSC led the implementation and developed the customized modules PM.Contract and PM.Reports to meet AUCHAN’s requirements for supplier management and financial reporting.

“The customized modules developed by PMSOFT have converted Primavera into the perfect project management tool for us. For example, we have the opportunity to transfer financial information directly to our headquarter in France without having to adapt manually to IFRS accounting standards, as the software provides this feature automatically,” said Tatyana Kovaleva, financial controller, AUCHAN LLC.
 

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