QEI Exec Project Management Software
Case Study: Rolls-Royce Marine Power
Part of the internationally respected Rolls-Royce group, the Derby based Marine Power Business specialises in the design and supply of nuclear propulsion systems for the Royal Navy’s submarine fleet. One of PCF’s oldest customers, the Derby site have long valued QEI and QEI Exec for their ability to present project information in a wide variety of graphical formats and for their capacity to work with large volumes of data.
At any one time the company’s cost collection and progress tracking system holds data on over 35,000 tasks, spread over about 600 projects and 200 departments. In order to maintain tight control on schedules and budgets, Marine Power produces a comprehensive set of management reports every accounting period which breaks down all ongoing work by both department and project, including detailed earned value analysis on about 25 key projects.
Up to now, the production of these reports has formed a significant part of the Planning Department’s monthly workload, taking over 24 hours to prepare, duplicate and distribute the 250 page document.
In order to increase the efficiency of this process, PCF is has worked closely with Marine Power to develop an automated reporting system based on QEI Exec. Stage 1 was designed to completely automate the production of the report by combining last month’s progress and cost data with a database holding a complete history of all the company’s project activities. This allows the system to generate a document which not only reproduces the old tabular report format in about 20% of the time it used to take, but also includes graphics with detailed earned value analysis information for the specified key projects.
The document itself is prepared in Microsoft Word, using the DDE functions of QEI Exec to control the contents and formatting. Stage 2 will make use of Word’s mail merge facilities to directly distribute the relevant portions of the document by email to its intended recipients, further streamlining the process.
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