ENSURING SUCCESS THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Optimation Technology—a 60 person engineering, automation and information systems firm established in 1985 and with an impressive roster of clients including 3M, International Paper, Kraft Foods, General Mills, Lockheed Martin, Nabisco and Westinghouse—has first hand knowledge of the importance of project accountability and tracking in their organisation’s ability to manage projects and client relationships. After years of facing the challenges described above, Optimation realised that having real-time access to information and being able to view the entire lifecycle of projects within the organisation from multiple angles had become a key requirement for ongoing success.

By early 1998, Optimation had come face-to-face with the limitations of commercially available software products. Limitations such as inflexible architectures, lack of functionality, disparate systems and data, and less than perfect user experiences threatened the company’s ability to pursue an aggressive growth strategy, and necessitated the introduction of a new enterprise-wide technology solution. Therefore, while developing in-house applications to meet some of its immediate needs, Optimation developed a wish list of capabilities and functionalities.  By 1999, the company was using three separate external databases to keep track of its people, projects and clients. These included Goldmine., Deltek Advantage. and Allegro., as well as a homegrown application developed to track project status and client satisfaction post delivery. The company was expending more and more resources on database management and upkeep, yet still achieved only a partial view of the organisation. In an effort to manage the flow of up-to-date information, Optimation updated the four databases every day at 2:00 am.  However, even on the occasions when the update routines did not fail, the latest information was always a few hours old. “There were a number of times that we had to cancel our resource planning meetings. There was no point without up-to-date information,” says Burns.

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