Forecasting made easier – Wärtsilä’s new app for Cost Planning

Referenssi

The new SAP Fiori tool designed by Cerion enables Wärtsilä to keep better track on actual vs. budget costs. All data lies in the same place for Project Managers and Project Controllers to tap into. Goodbye, personal excels and multiple SAP windows – welcome, fast and easy project management!

For Wärtsilä, a typical project is hard to describe due to the vast scope of products, services, experts and customers involved. Often the Project Manager finds himself/herself in another location than the rest of the team, customers, factories and suppliers. This means that several different Wärtsilä companies, legal entities, currencies, and bookkeeping methods take place in a single project. A true challenge for cost planning and forecasting – something Wärtsilä wanted to tackle with Cerion.

With Cerion’s lead a new Cost Planning tool was designed. The aim was firstly to enable Project Managers to have a better overview over their projects and secondly to analyze, plan, and forecast project costs as easily as possible.

Wärtsilä’s General Manager at Project Control and Reporting Magdalena Söder describes the positive changes the new tool has brought. What was before time consuming and complicated, is now a simple task.

The app is very user friendly: we need to manage only one page to get a good overview of the project and can easily maintain and update the cost budgets. The reason behind the updates and history tracking helps to see how costs has developed, and who has been in charge of what, Söder says.

Another useful feature is related to the POC (percent of completion) projects, which Wärtsilä couldn’t monitor fully with SAP before without using excel. All in all, Project Managers and Project Controllers have now an even greater visibility on their projects. The POC cost planning part is still under development.

The target is to not have any personal excel-calculations anymore. It benefits the whole organization, when information is visible in one place and easier can be utilized and linked to other tools or/and reports, continues Söder.

No SAP skills needed on this SAP Fiori solution

The Cost Planning app is designed on SAP Fiori. A big step towards simplicity from the old SAP course of action has been taken, praises Wärtsilä’s Senior Manager at Project Management Development Jussi Mäkiranta.

A spot-on solution for our needs, since the person working with this tool doesn’t have to be an SAP expert anymore – in fact the app can be used without installing SAP in the first place, Mäkiranta says.

The first phase of the project is now finished, and the app is in use the whole Marine sector comprising almost 300 Project Managers and Controllers. The Energy sector has also showed interest in the tool having noticed the vast benefits for project management.

Cerion was an apparent choice for the partnership, not least due to Cerion’s skills on SAP Fiori. A huge benefit was also Cerion’s prior knowledge of Wärtsilä’s business.
Cerion knows our way of working having been involved in many other projects as well. The app was developed with an agile attitude, and our many requests were met with patience and expertise, says Mäkiranta.

Suosittelija:

Cerion knows our way of working having been involved in many other projects as well. The app was developed with an agile attitude, and our many requests were met with patience and expertise.

Wärtsilä’s Senior Manager at Project Management Development, Jussi Mäkiranta