11 August 2008

BAE Systems’ military air solutions group has integrated SAP ERP and Microsoft Project Management to enable its use of earned value management techniques.

In recent years, BAE Systems has been changing from a production-based company to one whose expertise is centred on pulling together all the different strands of people, products, services and processes to deliver complete projects – on time and on budget – to its customers around the world. As part of BAE Systems’ enterprise-wide strategy to adopt earned value management (EVM) techniques, the air support business within the military air solutions (MAS) group needed to find a way to integrate and automate data transfer between its SAP ERP and Microsoft Project Management systems, while ensuring that data integrity and quality were preserved.

The data was being transferred manually and involved specialists checking it for errors, which was a protracted process before it was ready for use in projects. After evaluating a number of solutions, the company selected TPG PSLink from The Project Group. The solution is designed to harmonise the variety of different EVM-based solutions and bring all staff up to speed. The company also turned to The Project Group for training, with both standardised and customised project management courses being tailored around the new project management solution.

TPG PSLink now fully automates data transfer and synchronisation between SAP and Microsoft Project with no loss of integrity. The time and resources previously used for checking and correcting data after manual transfer are now used to advance customer projects. In addition, multiple different EVM tools and processes have been replaced with the Microsoft Project and TPG PSLink solutions. As a result, staff can transfer easily between projects without needing to learn new solutions and procedures before being productive. “BAE Systems chose PSLink because it offers a user-friendly interface, and is easily configurable,” says Bill Courcha, chairman of the MAS planning monitoring and control working group.

“We chose TPG for the excellent quality of their PSLink product, but also due to PSLink’s very good cost-benefit ratio,” explains Peter O’Neill, solution architect for the IPMS programme. “Another thing that clinched it for TPG was that we were convinced their extensive expertise could add a lot of value to what we were trying to do.” Vince Ryan, project management function representative for the IPMS programme notes: “The people at TPG know project management and Microsoft Project Server inside out. And we were also impressed with their reactivity and flexibility in their approach to the work.”

TPG, which is a Microsoft Premier Project Partner, was able to provide extensive training on both Microsoft Project Server and on its own PSLink solution. As Ryan puts it: “The training side of things was crucial – we didn’t know how much we didn’t know! TPG’s expertise has been invaluable here.”

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 edition of Prime.