The Senior Project Management Specialist from a North American division of one of the world’s largest steel companies met with us to discuss his experience using OnTrack over the past five years. The following interview represents his perspective as a Project Management Specialist and an owner.

What business are you in?

We are a steel manufacturing company with about 5500 employees today – we have had a capital budget between $200 and $800 M per year for the past eight years. We do our own EPCM (Engineering, Procurement and Construction Management) and act as our own General Contractor. We contract out with OEMs to supply solutions and contract directly with construction contractors.

What problem were you trying to solve that led you to investigate this solution?

Our buyers had their own Purchase Orders – they used Microsoft Word to create them. Our cost control applications included budget control and cost forecasting only – no purchase orders or commitments, no invoicing, and we had to record commitments via a home grown Access database. At the time we were looking for solutions, we had a $700M program coming up involving multiple projects from $50,000 to $300M and had to put together, or purchase, an integrated project management software solution.

What benefit did you see in selecting OnTrack Project Manager?

We wanted to get away from having multiple systems, to reduce the sources of information, increase efficiency and reduce redundant data entry, eliminating errors and additional work.

In addition, our financial department could use this information for the accounting ledger and to provide a complete and documented audit trail from purchase order and contract to invoice approvals.

This is a time saver for us as it’s easier to use OnTrack to manage the work than to use a spreadsheet, and it’s easy to learn. The self updating aspect of this system takes a lot of work off our hands and makes sure we have accurate, timely information from a variety of projects and departments all in one place.

Having a system that integrates budget, procurement, cost forecasting and payments saves from half a per cent to four per cent of a project’s capital cost.

Where does the owner’s perspective come into play?

Providing the audit trail to support SOX compliancy and more – for us, a contract change isn’t necessarily a project scope change. Contractors can go in for a change order to increase their budget, but we have to go back to the Board to justify the business case for increasing the budget – we can’t just go get more money in the budget. We have to figure out how to stay on budget and still achieve the scope. OnTrack allowed us to closely monitor the budget and reduce changes, as we’re all working from the same information.

Being able to export all the cost information from the projects into a financial system is huge. The financial people want to do any number of complex cash flow reports and portfolio management functions, and being able to get all the information out of OnTrack and into your financial or ERP systems can be a major benefit to owners.

We like to compare OnTrack Project Manager to a Swiss army knife – there is a lot of functionality in this integrated solution. Do you use all of it today, or only part of it, and how do you see that changing over time?

We use what we consider the core functionality of the system: budget, purchasing, invoicing and forecasting. We don’t use the planning, expediting or inventory control. Our IT department calls this a purchasing system, but in reality, it’s more. It has budget control, procurement and forecasting with built in checks and balances. Financial issues the check and procurement processes the invoices. That way one hand knows what the other is doing and we have a way to cross check.

On certain projects we will give this to the Project Managers and Engineering Manager to see the status of commitments and POs. Having undergone a number of acquisitions and mergers over the past few years, we also see the multi- project reporting capabilities as being very important to our portfolio management efforts as the report libraries mature to support our business needs.

In many industries today, there is a manpower shortage in engineering. How does OnTrack Project Manager help you deal with the resource crunch?

If you don’t have a PMO (Project Management Office) OnTrack forces you to work together. We used to do a lot of redundant data entry, using cost engineers to repeat work done in purchasing. Now, we pay invoices out of People Soft using information from OnTrack, with very little redundancy. We do far more of the work in OnTrack, because it validates everything - you aren’t just considering an invoice as a liability to the company, but are getting the whole story. And because the functions are integrated, we only pay one person, which saves on labor. We’re using lower cost clerical and administrative skill sets to work in this system, and saving our cost engineers to look over the reports, analyze and give feedback instead of doing data entry. They use OnTrack Project Manager as an information system for decision support.

We also save time in this system due to the flexible and powerful coding structure. OnTrack allows you to set up projects the way you want to. We set up templates and duplicate them – I can create a small project using these best practice templates in about fifteen minutes. After the initial few projects where you need a little help setting it up you can move forward on your own. We can always argue about specific details, but in general, the team at OnTrack understands the concepts quite well and basically, this product gets it right.

What is the support like at OnTrack?

It’s the best I’ve ever seen, as far as their response and coming up with answers and solutions. We have rarely been disappointed with the response content or time – someone almost always has an answer, today. We like that personal attention and knowing we can count on excellent turn around time.

Anything else you find particularly beneficial about using this system for facility construction projects, as an owner?

We’re part of one of the largest companies in our industry, and we belong to CII (Construction Industry Institute), PMI (Project management Institute) and AACE (Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering). We understand best practices for project and cost management, and like to think we know how to manage projects. This system follows those recommended practices, so we don’t have to alter the way we know we should work in order to use the software.

It’s an easy system to use, if you’re in project management, and it’s getting easier.

The reports reflect best practices and look very professional. You can alter the many cost reports included in their library, and save your own version. They upgrade the system yearly with input from the users, and we appreciate having the ability to influence the product direction to ensure it supports our requirements in future.

On Track Project Manager is a step in the right direction.