In today's changing business environment, responsiveness to customer needs, the emphasis on innovation and effective cost management decide the success or failure in the fight for market position. This forces the change upon modern organizations. For a growing group of enterprises and organizations the response strategy to these new challenges is to use the principles of project management.
Our Project Management solution, apart from storing basic information about the project, offers additional advantages:
- provides an effective means for change management and monitoring of the project progress (both technical and financial control);
- takes into account the specificity and diversity of project execution, accounting and reporting;
- allows archiving of all documents produced during project execution.
Project Management module keeps following project data:
- project title,
- cost group (dictionary field, determines project accounting),
- organisation unit running the project
- project manager,
- project number (internal, external),
- related offer (integrated with offer registry),
- related agreement (integrated with agreement registry),
- project sponsor,
- planned dates (calculated automatically from project stages),
- real end date,
- project status (new, submitted for review, rejected, accepted, ongoing, submitted for re-verification, submitted for settlement, settled),
- financial calculation (planning the project budget based on the automatic calculation using user-defined algorithms, allows to plan budget by entering costs in several categories, like salaries, civil-law contracts, business trips, materials, equipment, outsourcing, promotion and patents),
- project members (the list of employees with the assigned function in the project, access rights to the project, the planned amount of manhours and flags whether a person performs copyrighted work),
- stages of the project (the stage name / description, date of start and end, planned costs for salaries, civil-law contracts, business trips, materials, equipment, outsourcing, promotion and patents),
- project documents (all documents related to the project, divided into categories, such as inquiries, offers, requests/purchases, applications/methodologies, contracts/orders, system documentation, invoices, receiving records, reports, notes, etc.),
- financial data (taken from the financial and accounting software for all expenses billed to the project account, such as invoices, salary, business trips, etc., there is also presented the current status of the project, taking into account the reserved amount, which is the amount resulting from e.g. the purchase orders that have not yet been billed and accounted for),
- project forms (list of all electronic documents associated with the project),
- comments (the system provides a way to add comments/messages related to the project, additionaly system may force commenting some actions like e.g. rejecting the purchase order),
- project log (a list of all the activities related to the project and indicating the time of the event, event description and the person that triggered the action, information in log are automatically saved during the data modification).
Additionaly the Project Management Module automatically validates the accuracy and consistency of all project data, in particular, compliance between project budget and actual expenses..
This module is an essential element of quality ERP system. It has been implemented in the Foundry Research Institute as a part of the ERP class Integrated Management System.
