Equipping Yourself with the Right Project Management Tools in Heavy Manufacturing

Do you manage projects in the manufacturing industry? Innovative-e offers an array of #AmazingPM tools to deliver winning projects, realize better ROI on PM portfolio investments, and empower your teams with decisive insight and control over your projects.  Ranging from mass-produced, OOTB Microsoft products to standardized, yet tailored, Innovative-e services and products, our tools answersthe question, “What should you have in YOUR toolbox?”

Tools in Innovative-e’s Toolbox for the Manufacturing PM

Microsoft PPM

Microsoft PPM provides, on its own, robust project management capabilities to maximize business value. Increase PM performance and project throughput, optimize productivity by increasing resource utilization, and improve enterprise resource management with Microsoft Project with cost-effective features such as:

• Easy time and task management
• Robust issue and risk mitigation
• Intuitive collaboration
• Wide-spread access from virtually anywhere

Check out our fact sheet about the business value of Microsoft PPM here.

OutageHawk™

Built to leverage the power of Microsoft PPM, OutageHawk™ is an outage planning and performance management tool created especially for PMs in heavy industry. OutageHawk™ enables project managers in pulp and paper manufacturing plants, chemical manufacturers, energy companies and other heavy manufacturing industries to manage non-routine, planned maintenance outages, plant upgrades, and critical repair outages smarter and more efficiently to come in on-schedule and under budget safely, sometimes by millions of dollars.

Manufacturing PMs who use OutageHawk™ will be able to:

• Make better informed decisions where to apply resources on critical tasks
• Gain improved visibility on schedule drivers and the lock-out/tag-out status of jobs
• ​Maximize collaboration by adopting a tool designed to work with teams

Want to know more? Download our two-page brochure about OutageHawk™ here or watch our short video about how to use #AmazingPM on your next outage.

Edison365 Projects

Edison365 Projects (previously known as PS+) is an award-winning add-on for Microsoft Project to empower you and your team with even greater insight and control than comes with standard OOTB PPM. Improve collaboration and manage your entire project from start to finish with an intuitive add-on that extends Microsoft Project’s capabilities to give you:

• Easy-to-use OOTB apps and aids to increase system adoption and productivity immediately
• Visibility into portfolio project management performance
• Management reporting
• Finance management

With Edison365, you’ll gain insights into your portfolio project management performance, take control of resources and expenditures, make more informed decisions, have critical near-real-time information at your fingertips, maximize your resources, and enable more productive collaboration. All of this in an easy-to-use, intuitive interface!

Read this comparison to see how Edison365 Projects deepens and enhances Microsoft PPM, or watch our recorded webinar, “Accelerate Your PM with Edison365 Projects.”

Customer Success Management Services (CSMS) Subscription

With these PPM tools at your disposal, you want to protect your investment and make the very most of it. Innovative-e’s Customer Success Management Services (CSMS) subscription and Application Management and Ongoing Adoption (AMOA) service product give a solid foundation for your user community and your PPM toolset. We will train you to effectively use, manage, and maintain these tools to achieve your business goals at your desired level of self-sufficiency.

Innovative-e uses our years of expertise and stable of PPM subject matter experts to address your PM pain points and attain your organization’s project management goals using the people, processes, and technology you already have in place.

Use some or all of these tools to maximize productivity, gain better visibility into your portfolio project management, and access up-to-date project performance information to enable informed business decisions. These tools lead to better control over resource management, project scheduling, and portfolio reporting so projects stay on time, on- or under-budget. Each of these tools is designed to help project managers across a number of industries do what they aim to do with their project portfolios and they are especially helpful for PMs on projects in the manufacturing industry.

If you want better ROI and decisive insight from your manufacturing industry project management tools, drop us a line at info@innovative-e.com today!

Outage Hawk – still on-time, still on-budget, but now even better!

Announcing a new Outage Hawk (TM) release! This release features a major enhancement with changes to the Updater App designed to improve overall performance and user experience.  

These changes to the Updater App include: 

• Faster load times of individual users’ jobs 
• Performance and experience improvements to job update process 
• A queue for jobs to be published has been added to the app to avoid conflicts and issues when another user is publishing at the same time. 
• The user will update a job(s), click submit, and is informed the updates have been queued for publish. When the page refreshes, the user will see the most recent updates to the jobs including the same job that was updated by a different user at the same time! 
• Faster and better publishing operations with provider-hosted Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• The app uses Azure services to perform publishing operations with an Azure Web Job. Azure Web Jobs helps ensure updates in the queue are handled quickly and efficiently without conflict or collision with other users. 

Innovative-e is excited to make these updates available as it extends the functionality and increases user adoption and experience!  We look forward to hearing about and sharing your results using this release! 

Want to know more about Outage Hawk (TM)?

• Check out our website
• Download our two-page brochure about Outage Hawk (TM)
• Watch our brief video with an intro to Outage Hawk (TM)
• Dive deeper with our recorded webinar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On-Time, On-Budget: a Solution for Smoother Sailing with Planned Outages

If you’re a PM in heavy manufacturing and run into problems staying on-budget or on-schedule with planned floor or plant outages, this post is for you.

Do you find that no matter how meticulously planned your outages are, when you shut down the plant, the realities are, in practice, different from your plans? During a planned outage, rapidly progressing work across a large number of interdependent jobs and tasks can easily take over, causing you to lose sight of your plans. If you’re unable to access the time-critical information  that lets you make informed decisions, if you’re using ad hoc and incomplete collaboration processes, and if your data is residing in disconnected toolsets, it can become impossible to get an accurate view of status and areas of concern. This can result in (dun dun DUN) chronic schedule delays and budget overruns.

The solution, of course, is to make better decisions. How? Centralized, actionable, near-real-time info. Featuring proactive problem-solving in executive meetings, rather than playing catch-up and having to dig around for status. Change the conversation from, “Where are we?” to “This is what we do.”

Innovative-e has purpose-built a solution, OutageHawk™, to help project managers take control of planned outages and ensure that the realities of the outage match the plans. OutageHawk™ provides the right tools to the right people.

• Planners and PMs use Microsoft Project to create schedules.
• Executives use a summary dashboard with drill-downs that can be used in regular status meetings at any time, from any device.
• Supervisors use a simple, clear interface to update tasks.

In the next blog post or two, we will detail these tools for the different users of OutageHawk™. For a short overview of what OutageHawk™ is and how it can up your planned outage game, check out this 4-minute video or read more about it on our website. If you’d like to talk to someone about OutageHawk™ or schedule a demo, contact us at info@innovative-e.com.

The night after Christmas

T ’was the night after Christmas and all through Santa’s shop, not a creature was stirring; everything had come to a stop. The gifts had been delivered with great care, in hopes that it would bring joy to children everywhere.

Santa laid awake unable to slumber, thoughts in his head made his mind cluttered. He was truly flustered. The sleigh was a mess; the reindeer needed some rest, these next few days would surely be quite the test.

The North Pole was in need of its yearly outage, it was time to renovate this old cottage. But confused installers lead to the loss of millions of lost dollars.

Spreadsheets and PowerPoints gave him no resolution, he felt as though he would never find a solution. Suddenly a loud screech took the red out of his rosy red cheeks. When to his amazement what did he see, but the Outage Hawk Soaring high and free.

Could this be the end to his troubles? The end to his outage stumbles? Santa spoke to the Hawk with a mumble… “Can you help me with my outage trouble?” “Why of course” answered the Hawk with a chuckle.

            My workshop is in need of a new table, all of the stockings are in need of fresh labels, and the sleigh is in need of shiny new handle.

My dear Santa we can help you with your outage, and when it is finished you will be quite astounded.