A lot of business comes down to making decisions. A company’s senior management team are paid to make good decisions. If the right information is in front of them they’ll make those right decisions. If, however, they have a lack of information or wrong information in front of them, they’ll either make lucky decisions or incorrect ones. With our project and portfolio management system, Cora PPM, we eliminate that – that is our focus. We get the right information into the hands of people working on large programmes and projects. It you have a single source of information – instead of having it spread over disparate systems or spreadsheets – that means there isn’t any discrepancy amongst the project team as to what, say, their actual figure is, or of what the actual delivery date is on a project. The client will know exactly what’s going on. Financial people can make projections around cashflow, around project expenditures because they have this one figure that they can believe in, and that has been consolidated from other systems. That gives you a tremendous the organisation a tremendous shot of confidence. Now it’s easier to make the best business decisions. Cora PPM consolidates a lot of information from all of our clients’ different systems. Take Honeywell Building Solutions, for example. We provide Honeywell with insight into information that is pulled from 22 systems. We integrate to systems like their CRM system, Salesforce. We integrate to their financial system, SAP, and to numerous other systems like Hiet, eCAP, GCAT and so on.

"A single version of the truth"

We integrate to HR systems – to get real-time costs for staff. We can pull that consolidated view of the whole world together for a management team. If they don’t have that, it’s a huge amount of work for them to go and get that information. What Cora PPM does is it pulls together “a single version of the truth” – to allow them to make those right decisions. What a client like Honeywell was doing previous to having Cora PPM was in a lot of instances project staff had to act on intuition. A lot of good managers will have a good feel for what’s going on, but there are always things that they won’t know, especially as an organization grows and gets larger. A system like Cora PPM becomes invaluable to them. Now they can get this dashboard view of what’s going on. They can drill down and find out key project data in an instant. One example of a decision senior management might have to make: will they continue with a project? In Cora PPM, there are a number of terms that are given to types of projects – ones that are going really bad, ones that you have invested, say, a couple of million euros already, and you’re wondering can we do this one or not. You’ve to put a lot of effort in those ones. We call those “dogs”. The flip side of that are the “stars” – ones that would give you a fantastic return. These are elite projects, and you’re absolutely right to do them. Quite often management teams need to make a decision on which projects to run with. What they want to do is minimize the “dogs” and maximize the “stars”. If you choose too many “dogs”, you can’t take on the “stars” as well. You’re incurring all this cost for these “dogs”, but you’re not getting the benefit of the “stars” you could have taken on. It’s a double whammy. Why take the risk. Use a system like Cora PPM to help you make better decisions. Philip Martin is CEO of Cora Systems. For a look at how Cora PPM is powering a wide range of WSP’s “Future Ready” projects throughout the UK – their programme to see the future more clearly and to prepare for future realities like self-drive cars, dealing with more severe weather events and increasing loneliness, see webinar details (12pm, April 2): http://bit.ly/CoraWSP.