Challenge

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.

Solution

Tempus Resource by ProSymmetry is a purpose-built, resource portfolio management solution providing many Fortune 500 companies with resource forecasting and capacity planning solutions to help make strategic decisions for their businesses. Tempus gives PMO leadership actionable intelligence, cutting-edge analytics, and real-time scenario analysis.

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. Valérie Chalhoub, Domtar’s Manager of IT Planning & Process Governance, explains, “Tempus enables us to predict resource capacity risks before they happen so that we can address them right away, thus preventing negative impacts to projects.”

“Tempus aims to solve resource management challenges that slow down, damage, and overwhelm organizations,” says ProSymmetry Founder Sean Pales. “It’s clear that traditional and especially agile project management software cannot cope with the demands of resource management. Tempus is a purposebuilt resource management solution providing unparalleled solutions for resource forecasting and capacity planning, as well as what-if analysis to ensure an organization always has the right people in the right place at the right time.”

Benefits

Domtar’s IT PMO now uses Tempus for resource management and capacity planning, including Tempus Timesheets for tracking actuals and trend analyses for forecasting, reporting for various stakeholders, and helping them enable other departments to work more efficiently.

Chalhoub describes how Domtar leadership is looking to empower people to make decisions based on data. “Tempus can be a self-serve resource for our team. If I’m in Finance and I want to see what my resources are doing, what different priorities are and who they are assigned to, with Tempus I can get the information that I need to decide about allocation, needing more resources, and timelines.”

Mimi Raza, Domtar’s IT Capacity Manager, adds, “Tempus has become part of our DNA. When we’re thinking of process improvement or new processes, we think now of what Tempus can do. As we’re prioritizing, we think about how to leverage Tempus to either facilitate or expedite our process improvement. If we identify a process where we would require something that Tempus cannot do, we know we can request it and ask ProSymmetry, ‘How can you help us here?’ so we don’t worry knowing we’d have to spend too much time in spreadsheets. We are confident that if something is the best for the process, we can take it to the Tempus team.”

Timesheets help Domtar’s IT PMO ensure their people are working effectively. Raza elaborates that “Tempus gives our people the ability to manage their own time effectively because it gives them line of sight on what’s coming, allows them to prioritize their work and collaborate and get feedback. That allows our PMO to focus on and better oversee workload management.” For Domtar’s IT PMO, Tempus Timesheets are one part of a bigger picture; other Tempus modules provide the other parts to make the whole. “We use Timesheets not just for forecasting workload, but we’re also doing trend analyses; what types of work are done by what types of people, what’s coming down the pipeline, making sure projects are going to be on time,” continues Raza. Timesheets also enable the team to do forecast accuracy analyses, comparing planned figures to actuals.

Tempus enables Domtar resource managers to see what employees are working on, allowing them simple and instant visibility. The resource management platform can help justify staff improvements by analyzing the data of what proportion of time employees are spending on administrative and operations work versus actual projects. “Tempus helps us examine, ‘Are we working on the right things?’,” says Chalhoub. The IT department enters all non-project work, PTO, and administrative time into Tempus for further analysis. “If you see that a resource is supposed to be 100% dedicated to operations yet they are stuck 150% on a project, then you can go to a manager and say, ‘Operations are at risk because an operational resource is doing too much project work.’ That allows them to make decisions on next steps.”

Reporting tools in Tempus also help Domtar’s IT PMO provide stakeholders with data that is customized to their needs and is actionable, helping them to adjust their work planning as needed. Raza explains, “We use Tempus reports to quickly bring focus to areas that require attention – here is a risk, here is an issue. We can give the tools to the manager and leadership to see those issues and help other departments do their work more efficiently.”

Domtar’s entry into the packaging business by converting a paper mill is a significant focus and undertaking involving business areas across the company, including IT. Tempus helps the IT PMO absorb this additional workload. “Since the project has a lot of moving parts, dependencies, and is a high priority project, we rely on Tempus to make sure we have the right resources working and focused on the project,” describes Chalhoub.

Tempus Roadmaps help the IT PMO focus its capacity planning efforts. Raza comments, “Roadmap is not just a view, it’s what it combines and the dimensions that are added to it. It’s not just a timeline view of our projects. The layer on top of that is, in the time increments, an overlay of your capacity issues. At a very high level, it allows you to pinpoint and focus a project portfolio, and then you can have conversations just about that period and that project instead of opening a giant capacity report and asking, ‘What do you want to see?’ It allows us to uncover where to focus.”

Tempus’s ability for customization has benefited Domtar’s IT PMO significantly in their capacity planning efforts. Chalhoub elaborates, “What we love about Tempus is that if a field doesn’t exist, we can create it. It’s just a few clicks. Tempus is customizable without it being messy.”

Results

While already having established processes in place when they implemented Tempus, Domtar’s IT PMO has seen positive changes to their output and workflow. Raza recounts, “We knew Tempus outputs wouldn’t surprise us; they would just be quicker and easier to generate. The efficiency and ease with which we can now share data did bring revelations to other departments.” Tempus has helped other departments within Domtar’s organization to improve as well. “When other teams saw our data being presented and where we could include their data, they saw the potential for Tempus to help them with their resource management. They didn’t know what they didn’t know, and now know to ask.” Domtar departments that had limited capacity planning expertise and visibility are now exposed to the possibilities and insights they can realize with Tempus that they didn’t have before. Chalhoub elaborates how Tempus has helped give their IT PMO more value within their organization: “Getting buy-in has become easier because people trust the data in the way it’s presented and visualized. Having Tempus as a solution has smoothed a lot of road bumps for us. There is less questioning of data and much quicker turnaround to correct or provide new data.”

As the PMO enables more and more managers to utilize Tempus reporting and analytics, Chalhoub says, “Managers say Tempus is so easy to use; they love the interface, and they love that they can go get their information. Tempus’s reporting is amazing compared to previous software we’d use without reporting, where we had to export all our data to spreadsheets. For the user, it’s a huge improvement, night and day.” Raza continues, “Tempus excels with visibility and ease of use for the end user. Before Tempus, in order for us to provide visibility, we needed to take extra steps and email people data. Now they have direct visibility to the data, and can go click and check whatever they want. The visibility for the timesheet user themselves is also beneficial, as they can toggle on and off the view for planned hours so they can see what’s planned for them coming up.”

The IT PMO’s success with Tempus has helped other departments within Domtar to realize the opportunities to access insightful data about their own employees and projects. Raza says, “Because of how well Tempus allows us to provide visibility and information, now we’re getting other departments and other teams realizing the value of capacity management. It’s also facilitating business improvements for us.”

Ease of use was one of the features that drove Domtar’s IT PMO to choose Tempus over other platforms. Raza explains, “We were looking at other platforms, but it was so easy to use and adjust in Tempus. The modules are set up in a way to guide the user.”

Tempus has also freed Chalhoub and Raza’s IT PMO team from cumbersome report sharing, as the platform is designed to be self-serve for users and let others share the data results. Chalhoub explains, “We are now making results in Tempus more self-serve, which makes us more efficient. We are able to make decisions faster and identify and address resource-related risk in an organized and informed fashion.” The ability for Tempus administrators to share reports and specific data helps make reporting and analysis more accessible within Domtar. Chalhoub continues, “Self-serve will not only remove work from our group, it’s going to make things easier and more efficient, and it’s helping us flip that accountability and responsibility for capacity planning back to the project and resource managers. It’s enabling and empowering our stakeholders.”

ProSymmetry’s Customer Success Team has been a valuable partner for Domtar’s IT PMO throughout the platform implementation and beyond. Raza describes the ProSymmetry team as “the absolute model of customer-focused partners. When they say they are ‘Customer Success’ Managers, we know they mean it because of how seriously they take Domtar’s success. We know we are not just another client for them; there is a real partnership between us. The ProSymmetry team honestly feel like they are an extension of our own team.”

Nationwide employment and hiring issues due to the pandemic and the “Great Resignation” were managed more proactively by Domtar having implemented Tempus. Says Chalhoub, “Tempus helps us be more employee focused. Being able to see the workload imbalances that could occur down the line and potentially increase the burden on our people means we can proactively put mitigation measures in place.” Raza elaborates, “Having Tempus aids us in establishing trust with our employees and to have fair workload distribution.”

As Domtar’s IT PMO becomes more sophisticated with its resource management for capacity planning with Tempus, the ProSymmetry team continues to help their client grow and provides updates to the platform as needed. “The Tempus product and the ProSymmetry team have created a partnership scenario with us where they are growing and improving in lock-step with our own process improvements,” says Raza. “There is something in our partnership with ProSymmetry that is not just keeping up with us and our process improvements, but being on the same page helps with our process improvement. We know Tempus can keep up with us whether we’re scaling, moving, or changing.”

What is Tempus Resource?

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.

Contact ProSymmetry for a free Tempus Resource trial or demo.