Siemens Optimizes Rail-Traffic Product Development with a Project Management Solution
 
 

Siemens Optimizes Rail-Traffic Product Development with a Project Management Solution

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Siemens AG is a multinational enterprise, headquartered in Munich, Germany. The mission of Siemens’ Rail Systems Division is to move people and goods more efficiently by linking various modes of transportation. With integrated hardware and software technologies and comprehensive industry solutions for production, transportation, lighting, and engineering, Siemens Rail Systems has become an established global leader. The Siemens World Center of Competence in Graz, Austria, develops chassis and bogies (rail components). It is also a worldwide supplier of subcomponents, diagnostic systems, and services for all types of state-of-the-art rail traffic.

With the global market becoming more competitive, the ability to bring products to market faster is crucial. With this goal in mind, Siemens deployed Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management and reduced its product development time from an average of 22 months to 15 months.

During the pilot deployment of the Primavera solution, Siemens Rail Systems established a new product development management process that connected resource allocation information to product development plans and schedules. With complete visibility into managing development goals, schedules, resources, and costs, Siemens Rail Systems can accurately plan the delivery of its products to the marketplace.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Siemens AG

  • “Thanks to Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management, we can meet our goal of reducing the time to market for rail-traffic products by maximizing resources and eliminating delays in our product development processes. Primavera’s enhanced insight into project and resource allocation helps us to make better business decisions and operate more efficiently.” – Helmut Ritter, Head of Engineering Bogies, Siemens AG

  • Establish a transparent platform to improve product and process planning, gain insight into product performance, and facilitate advanced analytics that support research and development and overall business decisions
  • Enable users to make changes to modern rail traffic product development plans by adding or removing activities that are scheduled in the system without impacting the product development process or causing delays
  • Ensure transparency of chassis-development goals, scheduling, and capacity planning, so that project management becomes more precise

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Integrated scheduling and resource planning for the development of chassis, bogies, and other modern rail traffic products with Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management, substantially enhancing team productivity, project planning, control, and delivery
  • Increased resource allocation visibility to identify and correct delays, ensuring that the organization can immediately detect and address inconsistencies between project teams regarding resource utilization
  • Integrated product development plans and objectives in the product requirement system with schedule, resource, and cost information in the project management system, giving Siemens one complete product development management system, and optimizing product development performance

Why Oracle

Siemens evaluated various multiproject management solutions and chose Primavera P6, due to its open and standardized application programming interface that enables the company to integrate with third-party systems. Additionally, Siemens had used Primavera P6 in other divisions for several years, and it had an internal knowledge base in place in Germany to deploy Primavera for a rail-systems pilot program in Austria, quickly and efficiently.

Implementation Process

Siemens Austria completed its pilot Primavera implementation and integration with the requirement management system in just six months, going live in September 2011. Siemens Austria is now transferring the new processes and procedures into production to increase future competitiveness by accelerating the time-to-market for all of its new product developments.

Partner

Oracle partner proadvise GmbH worked with Siemens for more than eight years, helping it to roll out Oracle’s Primavera solutions across various company divisions. The company has substantial knowledge of Siemens’ business requirements, as well as Oracle’s Primavera solutions, which has expedited roll out. During the implementation, proadvise was responsible for system consulting and specified the interfaces between the software for the requirement management system and Primavera, enabling data to be exchanged between both systems, which accelerated the product development process.

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