Fulton Bank is a premier community bank in the Mid-Atlantic region. Fulton Bank’s Internal Audit team has been using TeamMate for 25 years, an audit management software widely used and recognized among the audit industry. For many years, the scheduling function within the software met the needs of Fulton Bank’s Internal Audit team. When the prior version of TeamMate was sunset, and Fulton Bank’s team moved to the current version, they found the scheduling function was no longer meeting their needs for capacity planning and resource forecasting. The TeamMate+ team recommended Tempus Resource to Fulton Bank to fulfill their needs for more advanced scheduling and resource utilization needs. Heather Hirschmann, Director of Audit Professional Practices for Fulton Bank, said, “We were pleased with TeamMate+ with the exception of their scheduling function, so we looked at what Tempus Resource offered. The cost was very reasonable to add on to TeamMate+, and the integration with TeamMate+ as well as the capabilities of the platform is what led us to choosing Tempus Resource.”

The Internal Audit team began its implementation of Tempus Resource in January 2024, and now is entering their second year of resource planning with Tempus Resource.

Download your copy of the Fulton Bank Case Study.

The post Fulton Bank Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

BMS is a dynamic, independent, global broker established in 1980, delivering specialist insurance, reinsurance, and capital markets advisory services. They are a global brand with offices located across the US, Canada, Latin America, Australia, Europe and Asia with both a strong local focus and understanding of market needs. As an independent broker, BMS can tailor custom solutions to meet their clients’ needs and provide personal service to all clients.

Within BMS Group’s Catastrophe Analytics team, there are approximately 30 employees spending more than 50,000 hours annually on various client projects and internal tasks. The team needs a solution to ensure that the tasks necessary for their clients, and any internal requirements including trainings, are being accomplished. By being able to track time on both internal and external work, the Catastrophe Analytics team leadership can ensure that resources are being allocated properly, and established workflows are helping them meet their clients’ needs.

Download your copy of the BMS Case Study.

The post BMS Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

Telephone and Data Systems (TDS) is a Fortune® 1,000 company. Before Tempus, TDS’s IT leadership was overseeing its Resource Management through Excel spreadsheets. It was a very manual and time-consuming process that left the door open for errors and inaccuracies. Their team needed to identify a new method to ensure that they were effectively and efficiently tracking resources, allocating their time correctly, and not overwhelming staff with too much work. Most importantly, the team recognized they needed to ensure they were conducting their Resource Management effectively, with on-time project delivery and meeting the needs of the business.

Daniel Neugart, IT Portfolio Resource Analyst with TDS, explained the need to move to a platform that focuses solely on advanced Resource Management. After experiencing the team using Excel for resource planning, “I think using Excel was a critical step for us to take because it gave us a greater appreciation for what a tool like Tempus can offer. We had to go through a learning curve of what we think we need for Resource Management. We initially thought we would use Excel, and that step would help us reaffirm to ourselves that there might be a better way to do resource planning. We went out and did a little bit of shopping around. We landed on Tempus.”

Download your copy of the TDS Case Study.

The post TDS Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

A.P. Moller – Maersk is an integrated logistics company working to connect and simplify its customers’ supply chains. As a global leader in logistics services, the company operates in more than 130 countries and employs around 100,000 people.

Chris Thompson, Head of Implementation for North America, is part of the warehousing and transportation arm of the organization. He oversees a team of project managers who implement all new customers, facilities, and operations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Before implementing Tempus, Thompson was using Microsoft Project. When his original company was acquired by Maersk in 2020, his organization had a portfolio of projects that was quite small, typically conducting between five and eight projects each year. Upon being acquired by a global powerhouse in the logistics industry, Thompson recognized that his need for managing his resources and projects would grow exponentially. “I knew that being acquired by a company of that size meant that we were going to grow very rapidly. My team enables the revenue generation of the logistics operations because they can’t run the operations until my team sets it up.” Thompson described the complexity of their operations and what his team manages. “When you think about it, everything you touch or interact with in your daily life has gone through between 25 and 50 logistics operations. From the glasses on your face to the lip gloss on your lips, everything has gone through so many different supply chains. That’s what we do, we set all of that up. There is an inherent complexity in that process that has to be made manageable. At the time, we had 15 projects, and I knew that it would grow. We have doubled every year since then. On average, we have between two and five facility or operations going live each week.”

Thompson has spent his career in logistics, primarily in the transportation space. As a project manager, he had become an expert with Microsoft Project, but felt the software was limiting as its projects must have start and end dates. Thompson says, “I was using a product and I needed to go perpetually forward managing the portfolio with a product that was based on a start and an end. It didn’t work well. I started researching other platforms. There were very few products whose focus is on the management of the portfolio and the resources within it.”

Download your copy of the Maersk Case Study.

The post Maersk Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

Nick Thomson, Head of Operations for Focusrite, recognized the need for a resource management platform that could better assist the company with planning and forecasting. “We design, market, and sell audio technology, both hardware and software products for people and businesses who want to create, record, and produce music. Since we develop and design our own hardware and software products, at any point we’re trying to develop, maintain, and ultimately deliver a product roadmap. Having a single source of truth for our roadmaps, stretching into the future, is something invaluable to us.”

Before implementing Tempus, Focusrite leaders struggled to put together and maintain in a coherent way a roadmap that they could collaborate on as a team and share with their resource managers, programme management team, and product management team. Properly allocating resources to meet their roadmap was a big struggle for Focusrite as well. Thomson continues, “Being able to say with any credibility that this is what we think we can deliver with our resource pool, this is what we can’t, any number of scenarios and what-ifs – we needed all of those things, but we couldn’t do them. We were mainly utilizing spreadsheets to capture our roadmap projects, and we were trying to do some resource planning, but it wasn’t ideal.”

Download your copy of the Focusrite Case Study.

The post Focusrite Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

A well-respected, publicly traded national insurance provider that offers personal home and auto, business, and life insurance was struggling with its prior resource management platform’s inability to help them conduct proper analysis due to lacking reporting features. Brian, the insurer’s IT (Information Technology) Resource Manager, knew that his team of more than 1,500 employees needed a more robust platform to help facilitate resource capacity management. His team also needed a solution to help plan the hundreds of projects they manage, facilitate career development, and hiring decisions. As a Resource Management Certified Professional© who completed professional certification for resource managers with The Resource Management Institute, Brian recognized the need for a quicker resource management solution that was easier to use and could help them manage a growing department and numerous resource managers.

Download your copy of the IT Resource Management Case Study.

The post IT Resource Management Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is a leader in innovative, advanced technology solutions and open architecture integrations in aerospace and national security. SNC creates customized solutions in aviation, national security space, electronic warfare, command and control, mission systems, and inline cybersecurity. The company, with more than 5,000 employees worldwide, needed a solution to help manage projects and employees across multiple business units including engineering, IT, and program management. SNC also had to ensure employees’ time was being allocated properly to keep pace with various projects, including government contracts (“programs”) with firm deadlines. Most of their analysis was managed with spreadsheets, which proved to be very cumbersome and difficult to maintain. SNC leaders knew this was ineffective and started searching for a solution that could provide them with information needed at an enterprise level.

Because SNC’s work involves sophisticated endeavors with necessary skillsets required from their engineers, it was crucial that SNC’s leadership have a platform to help them plan many months in advance for multiple programs and demands for highly skilled employees, rather than relying on bringing in contractors on short notice to fill gaps.

Download your copy of the Sierra Nevada Corporation Case Study.

The post Sierra Nevada Corporation Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

Domtar is the largest integrated manufacturer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and a leading manufacturer of paper-grade, fluff, specialty pulp, and air-laid nonwoven materials who employs over 7,000 people worldwide. Domtar’s IT PMO (program management organization) team, supporting a host of projects across the enterprise, already had mature processes in place for capacity planning, but was struggling to scale up their manual tools and spreadsheets with growing internal demand for their department. Adding to the PMO’s focus was the company’s recent announcement that it would convert one of its paper mills to enable the company to expand into packaging and continue its legacy of environmental responsibility.

In this case study, you’ll learn how Tempus has transformed how Domtar IT does resource management and capacity planning. Since implementing the platform in early 2021, Domtar’s IT PMO now relies on Tempus to help ensure they have the right resources working and focused on various projects.

The post Domtar Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

Cashmere Agency, the world’s first culture agency who builds authentic campaigns with a mix of marketing and public relations strategies, needed a tool to ensure client projects were being allocated and staffed properly, while also effectively managing employees’ time and workloads across multiple clients, projects, and teams.

When COVID sent all employees home in early 2020, the need to track resources became even more vital. Agency leaders were no longer seeing and engaging in person with employees on a daily basis, which deprived managers of the ability to gauge employee time management and negatively impacted the efficiency with which client projects were being completed.

Throughout the pandemic, Cashmere continued to grow and receive accolades for its work, including being named one of Ad Age’s 2020 “A-List Agencies to Watch” in April of that year. Cashmere leadership saw a need for a resource portfolio management platform to help them estimate new client demands and budgets, properly staff projects, and ensure employees were being sufficiently utilized but not overworked.

Enter your information to download your copy of the Cashmere Case Study.

The post Cashmere Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

Lonza started with the assumption that everyone needed to be working on something at every possible moment. This mindset drove everything — and it was literally creating a traffic jam in their IT department.

One day, there was a shared realization that if Lonza optimized utilization, they would get BUSY people. On the other hand, if they optimized throughput, they would get finished projects. Effectively, more projects (or work in progress) meant “longer waiting time,” which in turn meant “longer project duration.”

Even though the theory of throughput constraints was well known, it wasn’t easy to change people’s mindset without something more visual. They needed a project management solution that focused on resolving and preventing bottlenecks to improve the flow of projects within the company.

The post Lonza Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

Manhattan’s preconstruction department was looking to improve resource utilization related to the estimating workforce. “Operations does projects that last six months to three years or more. But the team in preconstruction may work on a bid pursuit for a week or a couple of days,” explains Justin Bell, Senior Project Controls Manager. “So, the preconstruction workforce schedule and assignments have a much more rapid turnaround.”

As a result, the team was interested in tracking preconstruction team members’ availability, getting a full picture of each team member’s workload, capturing accurate timesheet data.

Prior to moving to Tempus, the operations group used Excel as its portfolio management system, which worked well but siloed the department’s information. To enhance its workload view, Manhattan selected Tempus Resource for a project portfolio management (PPM) solution.

Selecting Tempus Resource

For Manhattan, Tempus Resource stood out as the best PPM alternative.

“Most of the software I’ve worked with in the past has a database type structure,” explains Justin. “Tempus Resource is different. It’s engineered very well. The basic architecture of it is extremely solid. It just makes sense. And it’s easy to customize it and get data and reports out of it very easily.”

-Justin Bell, Manhattan Construction Company

According to Justin, other platforms focus on things like the web interface or some particular piece of functionality. They were built to handle simple matters such as assigning carpenters to a specific project. Tempus Resource, on the other hand, gives users a stronger foundation. It’s flexible enough to handle complex projects.

“Once we took a look at Tempus Resource, we had a high level of confidence that it was an excellent fit for our needs,” says Justin.

Implementing Tempus Resource

Implementation of a new software platform is often a hurdle for organizations. That wasn’t the case at Manhattan.

“Implementation was very easy,” shares Justin. “One of the real advantages of Tempus Resource is you can add it to your enterprise system without creating a massive amount of maintenance and customization. It’s quite easy to stand up.”

After an hour and a half of training, each regional group was up and running. The platform is simple and intuitive to use. Everyone caught on quickly and dove right in.

Gaining National Visibility During a Pandemic

Things happened fast when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020. “Projects popped up faster than normal and needed to be completed faster than normal,” shares Justin. “So, we had an increased need for knowing who was available and what the immediate needs were on an inter-regional level.”

For instance, Manhattan needed to move people who were working in Texas up to Oklahoma to complete a project on schedule. Then there were projects that were about ready to start but were paused.

“This all was sort of a stress test for resource planning that normally wouldn’t have been there,” confesses Justin. When it came to available personnel, Tempus Resource created visibility so Manhattan could see who is available or what is needed.

–Justin Bell, Manhattan Construction Company

With that visibility, managers could have internal discussions about which team member should be assigned to which region. Essentially, Tempus Resource allowed users across all regions to manage resources that were not inherently theirs to manage.

“It all works smoothly within Tempus Resource,” says Justin. “When we run the reports, it’s easy to see issues such as when someone is not assigned to anything or when someone is over-allocated.”

Displaying the Best-Case and Worst-Case Scenarios

Tempus Resource empowers Manhattan to produce a best-case and worst-case report. They assign to each new project a probability of winning it. So, when the data is exported, it is easy to forecast their resource needs. Then, managers can have discussions that validate and balance those needs to come up with the most accurate forecast possible.

One report is company-wide but broken down into eight regions. It shows the maximum and the minimum number of people needed day by day projected out for an entire year. This helps Manhattan determine their staffing needs over time. Then, there is a report that is a list of projects and what the resource needs and timeframes are for those projects.

“These reports make us much more effective at resource planning on a national level,” confirms Justin. “In the past, if you needed somebody, you had to guess whom to call or email. Now, there’s something to prompt you for it. The information is right at your fingertips.”

The Bottom Line

Justin is pleased with the impact that Tempus Resource has had on the organization’s project visibility. “I think it’s great, and I would definitely recommend Tempus Resource,” shares Justin.

“I’ve looked at other options in this market space. And if I had to pick again, I’d come right back to Tempus Resource.”

–Justin Bell, Manhattan Construction Company

About Manhattan Construction Company

Founded in 1896, Manhattan Construction Company is a fifth-generation family-owned company that provides preconstruction, construction management, program management, general building, and design-build services throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Manhattan’s portfolio of work includes sports, mission-critical, healthcare, government, education, laboratory, aviation, transportation, convention, casino, hospitality, warehouse, and distribution facilities. Manhattan is a 15-time Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) Accredited Quality Contractor (AQC), an ABC 2019, 2020, and 2021 Top Performing Contractor, a nine-time STEP Diamond Safety Award Winner, and a 2019 National Safety Excellence Award winner. www.manhattanconstruction.com

The post Manhattan Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.

Helvetia is the leading all-lines insurer in Switzerland. For more than 160 years, Helvetia has also been an established presence in other European countries such as Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Spain. In the Specialty Markets segment, the company offers bespoke insurance solutions and reinsurance in selected niches worldwide.

The company’s insurance solutions cover the full spectrum of products for private individuals and businesses. As well as running its own sales organizations and direct sales, Helvetia cooperates with networks and partners such as brokers and banks, accompanying customers throughout the entire cycle of their lives and needs.

Offering their customers simple solutions to complex and individual insurance needs, Helvetia follows a straight-forward motto, “Simple. Clear. Helvetia.”

When looking for a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution, the company wanted a simple tool that would help with the prioritization process and offer a high level of transparency.

The Challenges of Managing a Large Project Portfolio

Helvetia had a large and diverse collection of 256 projects in their worldwide portfolio. With roughly 120 projects running in parallel in the implementation phase, the company also had 56 projects backlogged in the startup phase and 51 projects in the planning phase.

“With such a large portfolio came a lot of challenges,” shares project portfolio manager Tim Ruprecht.” It’s quite a task keeping up with each project. Resource conflicts within the portfolio are guaranteed because of the number of projects. This was especially a challenge for our IT department because almost all of the projects involved that department in some form”.”

Additionally, resource dependencies within the portfolio were often not clear. This was a problem because those dependencies had a huge impact on project deliverables.

Chosing Tempus Resource

Helvetia selected Tempus Resource as the solution to their project portfolio management problem for two reasons. Tempus Resource gave them the visibility they needed to understand where the resource constraints were occurring (specifically which projects). It also provided them with the ability to track all their projects in one tool and easily produce reports that management found valuable. “Tempus Resource is exactly what we needed,” confesses Tim. “We can identify resource conflicts before they happen, and we can provide the data for prioritization if it’s required. Also, we can view resource dependencies with regard to specific teams or bottlenecked resources”.”

Combatting the Challenges of an unwieldy Portfolio by Creating New Roles to Manage the PPM Process

With Tempus Resource in place, Helvetia set out to combat its portfolio challenges. “First, we implemented roles we knew we’d need to manage the new process,” explains Tim. “Roles were really key because we communicated clear responsibilities for each role, and everybody knew what their task was.“

The first role Helvetia established was the resource manager (RM) role. The RMs are responsible for assigning resources to the “operative tasks” required to complete the work planned in the portfolio. They were also to be responsible for displaying the portfolio capacity of the team, processing the resource requests, and talking with the project managers.

The second role they established with regard to the process were the project managers. The project managers would be responsible for planning their project in terms of human and financial resources. As the project progressed, the project managers were also asked to communicate any changes they made to their resource plan or their financial plan changes to the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) committee because, to quote Tim, “with the size of Helvetia’s portfolio, even small changes often have a great impact on budgets.”

The third role in the Portfolio Management Process was the PPM management function. The original hope was that having an additional level of management as an escalation point would help the PM’s and the RM’s keep everything on track

The hope was that the existence of this governance body would allow Resource Managers to make resource conflicts transparent. When resource managers see conflicts with projects, they first reach out to the project managers to find a solution. This is the first level of escalation. If they do not find a solution, the second level of escalation is the PPM.

The task of PPM management was to provide transparency across the portfolio and resolve resource conflicts with the resource managers and project managers when possible. “If it’s not possible, Helvetia created a third level of escalation, Project Portfolio Board, which we called the conflict committee,” explains Tim. “The Project Portfolio Board is made up of PPM management and top management. Together, they are ultimately responsible for resolving resource, financial, and personnel conflicts.”

Implementing a Process for Planning

Helvetia follows a rolling 3-month planning process for projects. This means that project managers must plan their projects each month for the next three months. This involves project managers updating their project plan and resource managers updating their assignment plans and displaying their change capacity within Tempus Resource.

“That level of planning gives the PPM committee and Project Portfolio Board the capability to analyze, simulate (using What-if functionality), and decide whether another project can be put into the portfolio,” says Tim. “That planning also highlights any resource conflicts on the horizon. This was a big change for our organization because before, when we were using Excel, and only the initial project planning was available.”

Implementing Tempus Resources – an exercise in finding the “WIIFM.”

During the implementation process, the resource managers were asked to provide data to PPM management. The resource managers did this faithfully with the hope of getting back some suggestions about prioritization. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen at the start. They complained about this. So, Tim had to find a way for resource managers to easily plan their resource allocation without being forced to decide which project got resources and which one didn’t. The issue was that with the initial process if the resource managers didn’t make these decisions, their resources would become over-allocated, and this was unacceptable. Again, the Project Portfolio Board was the answer.

“Having resource managers handle prioritization is not always in the best interests of the organization,” says Tim. “So, with the implementation of the Project Portfolio Board, we gave the resource managers a tool to escalate their resource conflicts and protect their people from over-utilization. That was a key part in the acceptance of Tempus Resource.”

But the resource managers were not the only ones with complaints about the process requirement that accompanied the Tempus resource implementation. The project managers weren’t happy because the new process meant that they had to update their project plan every quarter. Before, they only had to plan the project once a year, and the resources were set for that year. “Now it’s different with Tempus Resource,” explains Tim. “That meant we needed to find a benefit for the project managers.”

As with the resource managers, Tim had to find a way to achieve maximum stakeholder buy-in. The first step was to make all the data necessary for project managers (net and change capacities, resources, and project information) available in one tool. That was a big benefit for project managers because, before Tempus Resource, they had to go into SAP to look at project costs and Jira to look at time-tracking data.

The second step was for project managers to have committed resources. If a resource request for personnel goes through the approval process within Tempus Resource, the project manager is guaranteed to have the approved personnel on their project. “It’s not like before when things would shift, and project managers would lose personnel,” says Tim. “Now, project managers have a solid resource commitment so that their projects can flow more consistently.” Once the PPM process was completed, Helvetia could move on to tracking KPIs

Ease of KPI Tracking

Helvetia used Tempus Resources to provide easy-to-read dashboards that track four important KPIs:

• Resource Request Approval for the Line – This KPI gives an indication of how much the resource managers are working on their resource requests.
• Resource Request Approval for Projects – This KPI shows whether project managers are working on their resource requests and are communicating with resource managers.
• Plan Versus Actuals – This KPI tracks whether people are working on the tasks that are planned or tasks that are not planned.
• Unplanned Actual Hours Ratio – This KPI gives an indication of whether the project manager is actualizing their planning for their project.

“All KPI reports are created monthly and distributed to stakeholders,” explains Tim. “One of the ways we use these reports is to get resource managers and project managers to continually improve the data quality.”

The Benefits of Using Tempus Resource

One of the primary benefits of using Tempus Resource is that project managers can track time data and project costs within one tool. Every project manager has a view of their plan and actuals. Their plan can be easily adjusted within Tempus Resource, and they can compare their project budget to the actual data.

Additionally, the project requirements for each team are now transparent for resource managers. “In the past, it was difficult for all the resource managers to have transparency with all the requests that were coming from different projects,” recalls Tim. “Now, it’s easy to see what a project wants from a particular team.”

Workload transparency is another benefit. Tempus Resource empowers resource managers to see whether people are over-utilized. If that is the case, they can easily adjust their planning process for their team. And, they have a tool to escalate resource conflicts directly via PPM management to resolve bottlenecks.

There are benefits for PPM management as well. PPM management achieves better overall project tracking and monitoring. And, PPM management has better financial forecasting and better tracking of strategic budgets.

“Finally, Tempus Resource has helped Helvetia with the prioritization process,” concludes Tim. “Now, it is easier for management to make confident decisions because the data is more reliable.”

The post Helvetia Case Study first appeared on ProSymmetry.