Primavera
Primavera Systems, Inc. is the world’s leading provider of project, program and portfolio management software solutions.  Companies turn to Primavera to help them make better portfolio investment decisions, improve governance, prioritize their project investments and resources, and deliver tangible results back to the business.

Primavera wanted to expand their reporting capabilities to the entire organization by creating a more robust reporting environment and make it easier and more efficient to create and maintain standard and Ad-hoc reports. Primavera requested BusinessObjects reports because Onyx, their reporting system, was difficult for end-users to develop reports.

The Challenge:
Primavera owned the BusinessObjects software before Chateaux’s arrival but had little success with user acceptance in the beginning so the IT department wanted to change this perception.

One of the main objectives in developing BO reports was to eliminate the time-consuming manual updating and adjusting of pipeline information from which Sales Management reports were created and distributed for Senior Management on a weekly basis.

Another challenge was the combining and simplifying of Maintenance Quote report that required quite a bit of processing by gathering information from numerous sources.
By better measuring company performance and better estimate business potentials as well as pinpoint weaknesses and strengths, Primavera wished to formulate a strategy in which they could improve their sales by at least $1MM per year.

The Approach:
After extensive hands-on interviews with departmental team leaders and end users, Chateaux gathered requirements which included aggregate and roll-up across regions (Domestic vs. International), departments, directors, and across industries. Users wanted to generate reports with little or no manual intervention, and with ease of access and distribution. Chateaux’s design approach was to provide the ability to pinpoint opportunities and areas of attention, and to offer information to other departments such as Marketing, Sales, and Maintenance.  During development, Chateaux had constant communication with end users to make sure that they are confident in the accuracy and are satisfied with the availability and performance of the reports.

The Result:
Before BusinessObjects, Pipeline reports took a person one week to aggregate in Excel and present them weekly on the Upper Management’s meetings which are now instantly available reports. Other reports didn’t even exist before such as the “Win/Loss report” which indicates why opportunities had been lost/won and it now provides better insight on sales. In addition, stack ranking reports are published frequently that indicate sales people’s performance for their industry groups and overall ranking reports which encourage overall better sales performance within the organization. Maintenance Sales people are now able to generate Maintenance Quotes on-the-fly whereas before it took them 30-45 minutes to assemble one in Excel.

Reports are also now used by operational workers to provide information on their daily work: they can create reports to send out to their customers or they can provide more details for their bosses and other managers.

Sales and Management Dashboards illuminate areas of weakness and strength as well as point to areas requiring further analysis. These dashboards now enable users to get a snapshot of functional areas, and with the addition of several detailed reports, they are also able to drill down to the details.

By setting up users with Webi access, Chateaux provided a single access point to reports and information, flexibility to respond to emergent issues and get a company overview within minutes.

As Chateaux began providing reports to managers at first, we gained their support which then translated into support of the Sales People once they had their own reports as well. Once the Maintenance Sales department solely depended on BO reports to do their daily jobs, they were very excited to request more and more new reports to make their work more efficient. Any minor update or enhancement has been receiving great excitement from the Sales persons. Also, Upper Management now greatly depends on Business Objects to measure the entire organization’s performance.

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