Automotive giant Scania boosts European project management efficiency

Project leaders across automotive giant Scania's European businesses have been empowered with a special new Project and Portfolio Management solution since moving to Microsoft Project Online - a move that has resulted in three times more successfully completed projects.

Ready for the information age

Automotive giant Scania had a problem. Core business processes were overly reliant on paper and whiteboards, and managers lacked an easy, central way to coordinate activities. Then, the company embarked on a three-year mission to explore Microsoft Project Online as the basis for a more functional internal project management portal.

Scania has almost 500 project managers in Europe, leading 72 projects to completion in 2015 alone. By working with trusted local Microsoft technical partner inzagi, Scania has a new internal project planning solution: Project Online, complemented by Microsoft SharePoint Online and Microsoft Power BI. According to Vit Lobpreis, the organization's Czech Republic-based

Regional Project Manager, the number of projects successfully completed has not only tripled, but projects more directly contribute to business success.

The trend is clear, confirms Lobpreis. Projects are being completed on time and on budget, which helps Scania's business.

Corporate planning tool

The system is proving highly useful for gaining real-time insights into overall Scania progress, now that Scania leadership has increased visibility for faster, more data-driven decision making. "Management in our main Swedish HQ are also able to track the status of projects in every business unit now," says Lobpreis. "They can start discussions and follow-up action as needed, streamlining all our project management processes."

Project Online was also key in helping Scania meet its internal General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) targets business units were better able to organize their responses to the new data rules. "Overall, Project Online has become a strategic corporate planning tool for us," adds Lobpreis.

Next steps

Scania plans to make project management a much easier task, and a resource available to an ever-increasing number of users by rolling out Project Online to other Scania units. Finally, a new Power BI-based dashboard that provides a complete task overview will even further facilitate work prioritization for business users.

Lobpreis concludes, "We have a vision of implementing project and portfolio management to other support functions in Scania HQ?and over the longer-term vision, there is a possibility to extend use of Project Online to other geographies we operate in, such as Asia."

Source: https://cdn.featuredcustomers.com/CustomerCaseStudy.document/microsoft-project_scania_422879.pdf

Question 1 (40 Marks)

With reference to the case study, critically discuss the challenges that Scania was subjected to regarding project management and what were the resolutions they effected to resolve these.

Question 2 (30 Marks)

"Project leaders across automotive giant Scania's European businesses have been empowered with a special new Project and Portfolio Management solution since moving to Microsoft Project Online - a move that has resulted in three times more successfully completed projects".

Assuming that the goal of a project management tool is to help those involved in managing projects to achieve their objectives, discuss the general benefits of using a project management tool such as Project Online or MS Project and relate it to the case study.

Question 3 (30 Marks)

Scania has adopted Project Online as their project management and strategic corporate planning tool. Being an ardent user of MS Project, how would you convince Scania that MS Project is the better tool as it deals with complexity in a very simple manner on top of having a remarkable range of capabilities for which it is extremely user friendly.