The world has moved on – and quickly - the days of old-fashioned portfolio project management (PPM) are over, writes Philip Martin.

You can no longer manage your portfolio of projects using MS Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint reports and emails and expect your organisation to be a competitive leader.

Powerful integrated enterprise solution

These days, you need a powerful integrated enterprise solution that is configurable, intuitive and easy for the entire team to use. More and more of our clients are coming to this realisation.

One of the most interesting projects we’re working on at the moment is with a US firm, Automated Logic Corporation, or ALC for shorthand.

ALC is a global leader in building automation systems, and is a part of UTC Carrier, a division of United Technologies Corp, which is one of the largest providers to the aerospace and building systems industries worldwide.

ALC choose to work with us because they wanted to install our Cora PPM solution. They needed a system to help them better manage their resourcing, their capacity management and to streamline the workflows they operate with their licensed vendors.

Essentially, they required a digitised and cloud-based collaboration tool to deploy across the organisation. What our Cora PPM solution offered them was a platform that assisted them in standardising work processes across all their business units so they could operate more efficiently and, for example, improve the execution transparency of projects at all tiers of the organisation. This was key.

Create dynamic Gantt-style scheduling chart

Once Cora PPM has been implemented, ALC are now able to import the detailed scope of any awarded project and create a dynamic Gantt-style scheduling chart, which sets all projects across the United States off on a level footing.

It provides a convenient way to access documentation and standard templates for every project. ALC’s business executives are able to delve instantly into the detail of each portfolio of work on major projects, delivering significant time savings and making them more competitive.

Mark Ruettiger, North America operations manager for automated logic, has summed up the benefits of the partnership: “We chose to work with Cora Systems because it’s proven to be one of the more innovative software companies in the industry and it has an extremely customisable PPM solution, which is what we needed – a solution that would fit to the way our business processes operate.

"Everything from being able to do our monthly forecasting to our cost reviews are all very detailed and specific. We’ve had a good, collaborative working relationship to date. It’s been a positive experience.”

It is gratifying for us that we’re already seeing results from the implementation and it has encouraged UTC, which is ALC’s parent company, to roll-out the solution to other divisions of the business.

Author: Philip Martin is CEO of Cora Systems. For an introduction to Cora PPM, including a short overview video, click here: https://corasystems.com/takeatour