Acelity is a durable medical equipment company specializing in wound care. Based in San Antonio, Texas, they have provided solutions designed to address Advanced Wound Therapy needs for the last 25 years. Consisting of a staff of around 5,000 people around the world, they serve 90 countries and their solutions have a hand in over 800,000 clinical procedures globally each year.
Acelity chose Tempus Resource to:
As product technology and innovation is a central aspect of Acelity’s business, their Research and Development department is a vital component of the entire business. Acelity’s efforts are grounded in scientific advancement across a wide variety of disciplines from immunology to biomechanics. Successful organization of their resources in the Research and Development department has enabled Acelity to make significant breakthroughs in advanced wound care. And success in this area relies on innovation project management.
Research and Development staff carry out projects in the areas of:
Acelity’s existing method for project management created information silos. Projects were agreed upon, funded and categorized by type and were being managed by different business entities all with their own inputs and timelines. Acelity realized they required a way of dismantling project silos to create better visibility across all their projects. Soila Alejandro, Sr. Project Manager, Innovation Project Management Office, explains:
“We had manufacturing that was planning COGS initiatives with a dollar amount of savings that equaled twenty different projects that were going to impact the bottom line, but they were working on these individually. While at the same time you had the innovation teams kicking off new products and they needed the manufacturing line to support when they’re ready to go to market. But the manufacturing line was busy on a COGS project so they couldn’t support the innovation, and we didn’t have the visibility or understanding of those timelines.”
This lack of visibility across projects and departments was creating information silos, resulting in an inefficient use of resources. As Ms. Alejandro says:
“The visibility of project details and data was being held on an Excel file on someone’s desktop and reviewed and agreed upon within that particular business unit. Individual departments were making decisions to kill or give the green light to projects without being able to see how such decisions would impact other teams across the business, such as the innovation team trying to bring new products to market.”
Acelity chose to implement a project management office (PMO), in part to help solve this lack of visibility. The Innovation PMO is still in its infancy but has quickly become an important part to the development of standardizing project processes across the organization. Primarily, they support how projects are brought through from planning to funding to fruition, establishing processes to help with the uniformity of how projects are tracked and reported on from a cross-functional standpoint. And central to all of this is Tempus Resource, the resource management tool of choice.
Ms. Alejandro explains the role of the team:
“Our team does not manage the individual projects—there are project managers within each of the departments that do that—instead we capture data and concentrate on resource allocation and providing visibility across the organization for all of the projects that are being run. An aspect of governance, if you will.”
Ms. Alejandro’s team had previously tried using different tools to produce the views and visibility they needed to see their resources. However, she explains that none of these tools offered the power she needed:
“The problem was these tools never really ‘talked’ to one another or aligned in a uniformed way. This indirectly caused hold-ups in innovation projects because resources were not available as they were busy on other projects.”
Acelity trialed a number of resource management tools, to see if the PMO could produce a view that would help organize resources more effectively. After an initial pilot, they opted for Tempus Resource’s superior flexibility:
“Back in May of this year, we used Tempus Resource to partner with all the various teams and groups across the organization to produce a view that the company had never seen before. That was revolutionary. We chose the solution because it produces these ideal views. They are unique and allow us to integrate all the different departments; we can look at the whole organization and we can drill down to a unique function.”
Up until Tempus Resource was deployed, these various departments and teams had never been able to produce a view that gave them a raw count of how many projects they had within the organization, or a view of how resources could be spread out between them.
“Because we had that view, we could see where we were understaffed. Our assumption was that knowing this we could decide on which projects were less of a priority and perhaps postpone them. But when we came back with our view we were told to go and hire more staff to get the work done—which was a huge development.”
Thanks to Tempus Resource, Acelity can see the allocation of a specific job function across the organization if they want to begin a project that requires that job function. For example, if Ms. Alejandro is kicking off a project that requires technical writers she can run a report in Tempus Resource that tells her what the allocation is for technical writers across the organization.
The benefits of this include:
Acelity recently extended their contract with Tempus Resource for another year. As Ms. Alejandro explains:
“The solution continues to add value within our organization and if we continue to produce this value that we have in the last few months I can see the tool continuing to be leveraged.”
Named Gartner Cool Vendor 2016, Tempus Resource is a real-time resource management software that uses powerful ‘What-if’ simulations to model project data. It helps organizations of any size, of any level of project management maturity, to make risk-free, data-driven resource decisions.
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