Worldwide roll-out in planning
USU GmbH user report
We appreciate the comprehensive range of functions in Projektron BCS and the customizing options. After more than five years of productive use, we will now continue the success story internationally and use the strengths of Projektron BCS worldwide.
USU - Digitization of IT and Customer Services
USU offers software and service solutions in the area of IT & Customer Service Management. With our solutions, companies around the world respond to changing customer and employee needs in a digitalized working world. We enable smarter services, simpler workflows, better collaboration - and thus the success of our customers in their increasingly demanding and dynamic markets.
Our products and solutions help companies in all industries to better manage their IT and to fulfill and orchestrate service requests from customers, employees and partners faster, more individually and more efficiently. Founded in 1977, as "Udo Strehl Unternehmensberatung", we have followed a continuous growth path and constantly expanded our business areas. Today, we employ around 800 people at 17 locations worldwide and support more than 1,200 customers. To date, we have completed more than 10,000 software and service projects in over 30 countries.
As an experienced partner, we support our customers from strategic consulting and project design to technical implementation and integration. Our customers benefit from Professional Services and Managed Services through to the provision of entire project teams.
Classic and Agile - Managing Projects in One Software
In addition to its own products in the area of IT & Customer Service Management and the associated implementation projects at customers, USU implements projects in its own business unit in the financial services, public administration and industry sectors. The focus is on the responsible and complete implementation of complex solutions in the form of application integration with service-oriented architectures, the realization of powerful portals and the customer-specific development and maintenance of complex specialist applications. Our customers receive all steps from the functional analysis and conception to the realization, introduction and operation from one responsible source - always when no standard software is desired or available for the tasks to be solved.
In this context, around 250 projects and customer/contractor projects with a volume of up to 2,500 person days are initialized per calendar year. In projects with customers from the public sector, classic project procedure models continue to dominate (e.g., V-Modell XT Bund for federal ministries). Collaboration with customers from the financial sector is currently essentially incremental, whereas some projects with customers from the industrial segment are largely handled in an agile manner (based on Scrum). Depending on the respective project contracts, the three key points of deadlines, costs and scope of services are strongly fixed (e.g. EVB-IT creation at a fixed price with defined delivery dates).
Reasons for Projektron BCS
In 2013, the business unit specializing in custom application development and project execution set out to find a "responsible partner to further optimize and professionalize project execution. The partner's task is to provide a professional, flexible as well as licensable and IT-scalable system to support all facets of project management and project execution. By using the software, a wide range of requirements in the business area [...] are to be implemented.
The goal of this project is to consolidate and optimize the management of data [...] in the management fields: Quotation Management, Requirements Management, Resource Planning, Project Planning, Time Recording, Controlling.
The services put out to tender include the delivery of the software as well as support services for customizing, commissioning and introduction as required" (RfI USU, 2013).
Projektron BCS came out on top in a selection process that included a total of ten providers. Decisive factors in favor of Projektron BCS included the broad range of functions, the low migration costs (including training) due to its "proximity" to USU's core business, and the customizing options available to us. Initially started with around 100 users in Germany, the number of users has now doubled and - almost 10 years after the initial contact - we are preparing for the worldwide roll-out of Projektron BCS.
Use of Projektron BCS
The use of Projektron BCS usually begins with project initialization after an order has been placed by an external customer. The project is created by the project management office and the required basic data (especially order values and fee rates) is entered. The project manager is then responsible for detailed planning, from structural planning and scheduling to team and effort planning. In smaller projects, this is done with the support of assistants and/or appropriate templates; in larger projects (with up to 500 structure plan elements including milestones), this may be done by individual subproject managers.
During project execution, the project team members usually report on expenses on the same day, which is the first step towards effort and project controlling. Here, the time-related view of project costs (including the self-developed indicator for forecasting the project contribution margin "at completion") as well as the trends based on the earned value analysis play a central role.
The bookings, which are released in a three-stage workflow, are automatically transferred to our ERP system on a monthly basis and the corresponding expenses are invoiced to the customer. Proof of performance is generated directly from Projektron BCS, for example, with corresponding BIRT reports according to customer specifications (anonymized if necessary).
Resource planning is a particular focus for both our project managers and personnel managers. On the one hand, it is important for project managers to be able to take into account available capacities in various skill groups for scheduling at an early stage, but also to recognize potential conflicts with other projects. For HR managers on the other hand, workload management of their employees is essential - both to avoid permanent overload and to avoid free employees.
Since both our regular projects and operational and permanent tasks (e.g. application operation) are planned and absences (vacation, illness, etc.) are transferred from our human resources management to Projektron BCS via an interface, the integrated multi-project management tool really comes into its own. In particular, when larger opportunities are initially planned before they are commissioned, we can identify the need for action regarding bottleneck-related planning risks at an early stage - even before the first project milestone is at risk.
Conclusion and plans for the future
USU is undergoing a major transition in 2022/2023. The OneUSU strategy serves to bundle our established solutions into a consistently integrated overall solution, also by bringing the individual business units even closer together.
In the course of this, USU's tool landscape, including project management tools, was also reviewed again in order to set a uniform standard for the Group here as well.
Here, Projektron BCS again came out on top - against four other tools already in use at USU. Here, too, the decisive selection criteria were the broad range of functions, the low migration effort due to the "proximity" to USU's core business, and the customizing options available to us.
