Solve Pressing Business Challenges with Built-In EPM Experience

The project management expertise built into Confero EPM allows enterprises to solve a comprehensive set of pressing business challenges quickly and cost-effectively, without sacrificing flexibility. Examples include:

Plant Maintenance

Challenge — Critical data required to plan, schedule, and execute capital projects, shutdowns, and daily maintenance activities reside in siloed applications (e.g., EAM, CMMS, MRO, and EPM). As a result, planners, schedulers, and maintenance workers rely on manually re-keyed data or inflexible, legacy data exchange solutions. Plant maintenance projects become a labor-intensive and inaccurate process, reducing "wrench time" and potentially costing millions of dollars per day in unplanned downtime.

Solution — Confero EPM delivers the accurate and timely data needed to plan, schedule, and execute plant maintenance projects effectively. Confero EPM integrates EAM, CMMS, MRO, and EPM applications to bridge the gap among plant maintenance planning, scheduling, and execution activities. More than just data exchange, Confero EPM includes pre-built, automated and interactive workflows and business rules to ensure your business processes are followed. Plant personnel spend more time on value-add tasks such as planning and scheduling and less time preparing, moving, and reconciling information among different applications, minimizing unplanned downtime and avoiding millions of dollars in costs.

Benefits

• Increase "wrench time" and minimize costly unscheduled downtime through improved coordination between planners and schedulers.
  • Automate manual, labor-intensive processes such as work order, material management, and project planning synchronization.
  • Eliminate duplicate data entry and erroneous data moving among applications.
• Improve planner and scheduler productivity by delivering reliable, complete data and enforceable business processes.
• Meet changing business requirements with flexible, cost-effective integration appliance.
  • Replace legacy integration projects.

Project Scheduling

Challenge — Critical data required to schedule and manage projects effectively reside in disparate systems throughout the enterprise. As a result, schedulers manually re-enter approved project plans and budgets into external project management tools so that cross-project relationships, detail planning, and what-if scenarios can be generated and maintained by the project managers. This error-prone, labor-intensive approach leads to:

• Increased costs due to the inability to identify and proactively manage cost overruns
• Difficulties reconciling estimated costs and actuals
• Inefficient and inaccurate reporting and analysis due to manual processes, unnecessary overhead, and errors updating information
• Inefficient and costly operations due to disconnects in resource planning and utilization across the enterprise

Solution — Confero EPM integrates project scheduling and project management applications and automates and synchronizes project planning, execution, resource, and actual cost information across systems. Confero EPM ensures that timely, accurate data and key metrics required to plan, schedule, and manage projects effectively are available on-demand. More than just data exchange, Confero EPM includes pre-built, automated, and interactive workflows and business processes to ensure your project scheduling and utilization processes are being followed.

Benefits

• Manage your budget, costs, and schedule variances more precisely via real-time project synchronization.
• Improve utilization and reporting accuracy and avoid unnecessary costs by eliminating errors and erroneous data entry. Seamlessly synchronize data and integrate work processes and information flows among Project Management systems.
• Improve project manager, planner, and scheduler productivity by eliminating manual tasks and overhead activities.
• Improve regulatory compliance documentation and change management reporting via data modification audit trails reports.

Project Budgeting and Financials

Challenge — Project budgeting, cost and labor actuals, and approved project scope changes are managed separately from essential financial data. Information held in siloed applications causes a dramatic breakdown in an organization’s ability to accurately calculate Earned Value analysis across projects and determine project financial health. Current methods of manually re-entering detailed project data into financial systems and financial data into project management systems is labor-intensive and error-prone. Previous attempts at automated integration were inflexible and only provided data exchange, ignoring vital business process flows and enforcement. To ensure accurate project budgeting and costs, data must be synchronized between the separate systems, and business processes must be enforced, or project—and ultimately enterprise success—is at risk.

Solution — Confero EPM synchronizes project, budget, financial, and schedule information among Enterprise Project Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, and Budgeting systems. With Confero EPM, fiscal period data and project metrics are accurate and available for historical trending, forecasting, and analysis. Project managers benefit from on-demand Earned Value snapshots for their respective projects, process-specific workflows to create project schedules, and timely and accurate budget and projection information. Confero EPM delivers:

• Integrated time and labor management information
• On-demand Earned Value graphs for individual projects
• Historical trends for project financial information and metrics
• Automatically maintained, up-to-date financial system information, including actual status from project updates
• Best practices for budget change and cost management

Benefits

• More effectively determine project health via on-demand, accurate Earned Value graphs, historical trending, forecasting, and other analyses.
• Improve project financial reporting and accuracy by eliminating duplicate data entry and synchronizing project, budget, cost, and schedule information.
• Improve regulatory compliance documentation and change management reporting via data modification audit trails reports.
• Improve productivity by eliminating duplicate data entry and bridging the systems gap to create seamless workflows, ensuring business processes are followed and enforced.

Contact SOALogix today to learn more about how Confero EPM can deliver Dynamic Enterprise Project Management and solve your integration challenges.

Confero EPM supports a broad range of enterprise systems, including SAP PM, SAP PS, SAP MM, Deltek Costpoint, Deltek Vision, Deltek Openplan, Primavera, Microsoft Project, Oracle Financials, SQL systems, and more. Contact SOALogix today to learn more.