INDUSTRY

TPG The Project Group GmbH, a leading Microsoft Premier Project and Gold Certified Partner, announced today that it has successfully completed an extensive international implementation of Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) at the Mobility Solutions business unit of Agere Systems, a leading manufacturer of semiconductor components for mobile telecommunications. The solution’s special features include high performance and availability. In addition, the capabilities of the Microsoft Project solution have been comprehensively extended with multiple add-in products from TPG. “This project’s particular challenge was to reconcile the various different system requirements,” said Dr. Thomas Henkelmann, Director Consulting Services at TPG. “The project planning philosophies in the countries involved – the USA, Britain, and Germany – are sometimes very different, even if we’re talking about one and the same company with operations distributed internationally. We resolved this question by involving Agere’s management from the outset, enabling us to keep up the momentum throughout the project. As a result, we were able to complete a rapid implementation in only three months, from the first requirements workshop through to the production system going live,” Henkelmann added. Currently approximately 100 project managers and 500 staff at different locations worldwide are working with the TPG solution, which includes load balancing features to ensure high performance and availability. Following an international request for proposals, to which multiple Microsoft partners responded, it was Munich, Germany-based TPG’s bid that was accepted. “The complexity of our project, program and portfolio structure, along with the formal definition of project workflow, time, and resource management processes within the division, revealed the need for integration of project management information into an enterprise project management (EPM) system. The concept that TPG showed us was really convincing,” said Chris Gehman, the project manager in charge of this initiative at Agere Systems. “The fact that we had made the right decision was further confirmed during the requirements workshops. During these workshops it emerged that we needed certain extensions to the EPM solution and TPG made these available very quickly,” added Gehman. Comprehensive expansion of Microsoft EPM Functionality The enterprise-wide project management solution based on Microsoft Office Project 2003 has been extended with several TPG products. - One of TPG ResourceLink’s capabilities is the flexible import of resource data from an external personnel database into the Enterprise Resource Pool. - The distinctive multi-project structure, including multiple main and sub-projects, required the deployment of TPG MilestoneLink, a product that transparently communicates milestone dependencies across projects. - The Milestone Trend Analysis (TPG MTA Client) enables the visualization of how important milestones are progressing over time for meaningful reporting. - TPG MilestoneRollup shows an at-a-glance overview of all marked milestones in the whole project portfolio and - TPG AssignmentRollup accomplishes the same function for all the tasks of a given staff member.