Defense Sector Resolves Resource Management Issues

Case Study on use of eResource Scheduler

Company Background

• A multinational defense, security and aerospace company.
• One of the world’s prominent defense contractors.
• Develops, produces and supplies huge range of defense products.
• More than 25,000 employees and other resources, involved in research & development, production and quality control of defense products.
• Resources spread across the globe but have to collaborate together with different teams for different projects.

Challenge

Client organization simultaneously undertakes multiple production, testing, research & development projects in defense sector.

Every project requires a team of qualified resources such as scientist, engineers, technicians, IT personnel and assets such as servers, equipment etc. Project teams vary from few employees / contractors to several hundred resources based on the requirement, complexity and budget of the project.

In this organization, Resources are dedicated to a particular project or shared between different projects depending on their availability and project requirements. These resources, generally spread across the globe, come together only during certain phases of a project.

With these dynamic and complex requirements and pool of several thousand resources, client organization was facing major scheduling & planning issues.

The major challenge faced by this organization was lack of resource visibility. There was no central database maintaining updated resource profiles and their existing commitments. There was no way of locating and identifying the right resource even though they were very much there. Project managers had to dig deep into documents to search the right resource only to find that the particular resource was not available at the required time.

All this confusion and futile exercises ultimately led to project delays, cost overruns that impacted organization’s competitiveness and bottom line.

Solution: New Resource Scheduling Process

Client organization came across our resource scheduling software - eResource Scheduler during their Google search and undertook free trial of our tool. After evaluation and web demo, client organization decided to buy permanent licenses of eResource Scheduler.

Since implementation of our scheduling software, resource coordinators are able to maintain comprehensive profiles of resources along with their skills, preference, qualification and other custom attributes. Now eResource scheduler identifies the right resources for different projects. Gantt chart view on booking chart provides clear visual information about existing commitments of resources and their available time. Right resources can now be easily identified along with their availability for particular projects or can be shared between two or more projects for different % of their capacity.

Confidentiality is important in defense industry, so access control feature in eResource Scheduler helps maintains confidentiality. It allows resource managers to see allocation of their own resources and individual resources to see their individual allocations.

eResource Scheduler also assists to achieve better employee satisfaction as resource preference can be considered while making allocations.

Benefits

• Accurate and updated resource profiling.
• Identifying resource on the basis of their skill sets and other attributes.
• Comprehensive visibility of existing resources their commitments and availability.
• Projects are adequately resourced with correct resources.
• Optimum utilization of resources across teams, departments etc.
• Provides forecasting data that helps in accurate manpower planning.
• Efficient project delivery and positive impact on organization’s bottom line.