Successful project delivery – it’s the engine that fuels profitability and growth for companies in service-driven industries, such as management consulting, software development and system integration. Yet the ability for these firms to complete projects that meet customer expectations is becoming increasingly difficult. Global workforces have grown exponentially. Dynamic market conditions and competitive pressures are calling for innovative service offerings that test a project team’s ability to think fast and adapt rapidly. This is all taking place while new, formidable players fight for the same business, putting more pressure on prices and margins. Delivering successful projects on a consistent basis has never been more challenging, and more important.

In an effort to optimize the entire project lifecycle, companies are turning to ERP systems for their program, resource and financial management capabilities. Many project management teams, however, still rely on best-in-class project scheduling and execution tools, such as Microsoft Project and Primavera, to manage projects on a day-to-day basis. As a result of using two disconnected systems, these companies face inefficiencies throughout the project delivery process that directly impact project performance. Impress for Projects eliminates these issues by enabling project data to flow seamlessly between systems.

With Impress for Projects, the need to enter, approve and reconcile data in multiple systems is eliminated. Instead, all project stakeholders have the information they need when they need it to more efficiently perform activities and make decisions. Finance can accurately track and report project performance with access to up-to-date progress information, and Analysts can perform more accurate and timely earned value analysis, revenue recognition, and forecasting. Project managers always have an accurate picture of resource and material availability to optimize schedules, and access to the current budget and cost picture to keep the project on track financially.

Impress for Projects allows professional service organizations to:

• Align project execution and controlling
• Complete more projects on-time and on-budget
• Improve revenue forecasting and portfolio management
• Optimize resource utilization
• Eliminate duplicate time and expense entry
• Get more timely and accurate project status reports
• Reduce days sales outstanding (DSO) and increase cash flow
• Deploy an integration solution in a fraction of the time and cost of alternatives

When a major maintenance, inspection, or clean up initiative forces a production line or plant to be shut down, you have no time to waste. Every day of lost production can cost hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars. Impress for Projects helps you maintain tight project control by integrating the systems that manage plant shutdown project data (ERP’s work management module and project scheduling tool). It streamlines the plant turnaround planning and scheduling process, delivers key information to planners and schedulers in their preferred working environment, and maintains an accurate and real-time picture of performance in both systems throughout the project.

Impress for Projects helps you complete complex maintenance initiatives on time and on budget by allowing you to:

• Accelerate the planning process by transferring initial project data from ERP
• Optimize the schedule using resource and material constraints defined in ERP
• Eliminate manual data-entry required to keep both systems in synch, which is not only costly and time consuming but also quickly outdated
• Improve business decisions by keeping performance information synchronized during project execution
• Save substantial shutdown time by sending project adjustments, such as incidental work orders, to the project management system for immediate action

Unnecessary plant downtime can be prevented with timely, cost-effective maintenance. Impress for Projects allows you to more efficiently manage and perform routine maintenance by synchronizing work order, material and resource information between your work order system (SAP PM) and your work scheduling system (Primavera or MS Project.) By synchronizing these systems, you can:

• Optimize the schedule using resource and material constraints defined in SAP
• Eliminate idle resources and reduce excess inventory charges
• Improve internal communication by providing all departments with the same view of information from either system
• Eliminate manual data-entry required to keep both systems in synch, which is not only costly and time consuming but also quickly outdated

Successfully managing a large portfolio of IT projects requires you to not only meet the end users requirements, but also to deliver those projects on time and within budget. Your project planners rely on a best-in-class scheduling system to optimally manage these projects and a global resource pool. At the same time, accounting and finance rely on the project accounting system (e.g. SAP PS, PeopleSoft ESA) to gain visibility into project progress and delays, costing information, and resource consumption. Manually maintaining data across these systems is costly, time-consuming, and often mistake-prone.

Impress for Projects addresses this problem by automatically keeping information consistent between systems, ensuring that all stakeholders view the same project information from either system. It provides key ERP information, such as project definitions and R&D capacity details, to the scheduling system allowing planners to more effectively manage projects and assign resources. It also allows project performance information captured in the scheduling system to flow automatically to the ERP system, enabling both IT and business organizations to collaborate on decision-making and the project delivery process. And it eliminates the costly manual data enty to keep systems in synch.

Major capital projects can involve thousands of resources and millions of tasks. To meet critical delivery dates and avoid costly late penalty fees, these projects require exceptionally complex management practices. Such practices rely on an ERP systems (e.g. SAP or PeopleSoft ESA) as the system of record for finance and accounting, and a best-in-class scheduling system to achieve optimal management of all projects. Impress for EPM helps capital project organizations meet critical delivery dates with fast and reliable integration of these systems.

Impress for Projects synchronizes initial and on-going plan data between the ERP system and Primavera or Microsoft Project to save time and reduce data administration costs during the planning and execution of the projects. The solution provides the scheduling system with resource and material information from the ERP system to allow schedulers to plan the optimal use of resources. During the execution of capital projects, status information captured in the project management system can be synchronized with the ERP system to provide management with real-time visibility into project delays and conflicts, and provide the finance organization with the information needed for earned value calculations and project capitalization.

Impress for GIS streamlines Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) processes that span your ERP system and GIS. Many asset-intensive companies rely on their ERP system to automate business processes and to support key business functions such as finance, accounting, and customer service. These companies also leverage GIS to locate and service land-based assets, but much of the asset information resides in the controlling systems. Impress for GIS eliminates this gap by synchronizing SAP assets with GIS features and providing easy access to EAM information and processes directly from the map. With this ability, field service organizations are more responsive to asset repairs and service disruptions, which in turn enables companies to deliver an improved quality of service to customers.

Impress for GIS enables spatial asset management by:

• Putting powerful EAM data and features at the fingertips of GIS users, eliminating the need for field service organizations to learn and use multiple systems
• Allowing organizations to apply the benefits of spatial analysis to asset and work order information that previously was accessible only from SAP
• Automatically keeping information between SAP and GIS up-to-date and accurate, providing a common and accurate view of the operation.