Key Benefits

  • This company now manages its multi-year clinical studies and trials with better forecasting ability that is slated to save millions over the next few years alone.
  • Five global business units were able to consolidate their project management processes under a single, end-to-end solution with efficiency gains expected to be in the thousands of labor hours.
  • Product development time frames are cut drastically based on new visibility and data that empowers enterprise-wide go/no-go decisions.
  • Secure access and the flexibility to convert multiple languages and currencies in real-time enables strategy-led resource alignment of all R&D activities worldwide.
Background

A global agricultural company specializing in the marketing and distribution of innovative crop protection and life science brands required help with project portfolio management. More than three-quarters of the 3,000 employees in the organization are involved in bringing new products to market in more than 60 countries worldwide; and the company’s R&D function manages as many as 600 active projects.

Business Challenge

With many different, siloed disciplines for R&D project management running across the company, the PMO leaders at this multinational corporation knew they faced an uphill climb instituting a new system amongst all its users. The current approach, while viewed as quite successful by some, lacked topdown visibility into several parallel lines of business, each of which had their own project management processes and systems. With so many day-to-day processes across so many geographies, the team needed a single-process approach for visibility and control, but knew it could be difficult to attain given the ingrained methodologies. For example, the company’s mature PMO in Brazil was concerned that they could lose their system’s valuable history in SharePoint and strongly voiced their opposition to change.“We recognized the challenge: The scientists, botanists, and engineers were invested in preserving the best of what was going on in the field, while not adding another layer to their reporting efforts. And the PMO leaders needed to gain visibility, real-time updates, and better resource management in a centralized solution that seamlessly integrated best practices,” said Liane Christopher, Director of Implementations at KeyedIn.

This global company hoped their new solution could both improve the bottom line and business processes worldwide. The enterprise aspired to scale their PPM solution to eventually become the backbone of all of its global project teams. Retooling a project governance framework that would integrate with multiple existing solutions, with each language and currency, and for teams with varying degrees of PMO maturity, appeared to be an unattainable goal.  

Global Vendor Search Yields Success

During vendor selection, both the prospective client teams and KeyedIn Projects (KIP) teams convened overseas and in the U.S. Christopher reports that the client finally chose KeyedIn partly based on its cloud functionality, which keeps costs and implementation time in check; allows greater levels of collaboration and flexibility; provides mobile access and instant updates; and can be easily scaled as business needs require. The knowledgeable KeyedIn team guided the client through the proof of concept and then the deployment, providing insight on PM best practices and ensuring the solution was tailored to meet all of their unique business needs and practices. “After our initial meetings, we changed the Board’s perspective on how much value we could bring. We are perceived as a potential growth driver for their business, not just a software vendor,” Christopher adds.


Global R&D Company Grows with KeyedIn Projects

“We can see that KeyedIn will grow with us,” adds the company’s acting PMO head. “With KIP’s multi-currency and multi-usage templates and it’s command of governance, product life cycles, and resource time management, we think of KeyedIn as a key business partner for our organization’s continued ability to innovate for our customers. ”Today, streamlined integrations and the end-to-end control available through the KIP cloud-based PPM solution is the order of the day. The top-down flexibility of KIP will pull all R&D functions under one solution, saving many labor hours that were formerly spent using spreadsheets and other paper-based processes. “We are getting glowing reviews from country managers, because we didn’t walk in wanting to rip apart what was working. We really listened and showed them how KIP software works as the PM hub to the spokes of their wheels. They gained visibility and control without giving up decades of valuable data,” Christopher concludes. Going forward, the PMO (based out of Finance) will also use KeyedIn for supply chain management and accounting, among other functions.

"We can see that KeyedIn will grow with us. With KIPs multi-currency and multi-usage templates and it's command of governance, product life cycles, and resource time management, we think of KeyedIn as a key business partner for our organization's continued ability to innovate for our customers." 
-  PMO Head, Life Sciences R&D Group


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