Secure Management of Competing Vendors

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Overview

Plimco Limited, a consultancy company based in Ireland, was responsible for capital project management for a multinational client based in India. The scope of the project included management of the equipment lifecycle from the requirements (URS) phase until the completion of the FAT/Commissioning phase. The vendors for the high-speed filling line equipment were based in 5 different geographical locations.

Plimco Limited was assigned to oversee and provide effective project lifecycle management based on the client’s aggressive timelines, to effectively manage the different lifecycle phases, and to propose lean validation strategies.

The client faced significant project management and coordination challenges, especially in regards to the management of proprietary information between the competing vendors.

A system was required that would allow the client and Plimco teams to have flexible access to all of the relevant information while ensuring that no proprietary information was shared between competing vendors.

In order to help complete this goal, the ActionR software suite was selected to manage the action registers due to its powerful access management features.

 

Project

Capital Project Management For High Speed Injectible Filling Line

Client

Confidential Multinational Client, India

What We Did

Management of the Equipment Vendors, Management of the Action Register

The Challenge: Secure Global Management of Competing Vendors

The client required an action management solution with a number of features in order to efficiently manage the complex needs of their various stakeholders:

  • The project manager required a single task management system to capture all the tasks/actions for the project, allowing them to assign and delegate tasks centrally
  • The client team required complete visibility to all the tasks/actions on the action register
  • Vendors 1,2 & 3 could only have visibility of their own team tasks/actions or to tasks that were common to all the related teams
  • Any attachment of documents, drawings, or pictures to support the action could only be visible to the client team members or the relevant interface vendor team members in order to maintain confidentiality of proprietary information
  • Due to the wide geographic spread of the team members, the action register solution needed to be available from any device and at any hour

The client’s normal action register solution, an Excel sheet stored on a shared location, was not suitable to the task at hand. Of primary concern was that a shared spreadsheet solution would allow full read/write access to all members of the project.

Without central control, the job of the project manager would prove much more difficult as edits to the action register could happen anonymously and by any team member with access. Additionally, the security concerns of the various vendors around their confidential information would prohibit the attachment of many documents containing critical information to the shared spreadsheet.

Additionally, a shared spreadsheet would only be accessible from desktops, a significant drawback for teams spending much of their time travelling to and from the geographically diverse sites involved in the project.

The Solution: ActionR

Replacing the shared spreadsheet solution with the ActionR package from Plimso Software solved the issues faced by the client, the project manager, and the equipment vendors.

The access control features of ActionR allowed the project manager to be secure in the knowledge that the action register was being maintained in a consistent fashion. By assigning the different vendors involved to different teams, the vendors could be kept separate as required while still keeping a common point of access for the entire project team. This also allowed documents with confidential information to be easily stored and shared from a single repository without any information being shared with a competing firm.

The ability of all stakeholders to access the database on either a desktop or mobile device from anywhere in the world reduced lag times between the geographically diverse teams. In particular, the ability for on-site engineers to reference critical documents sent from overseas on their mobile phones saved time and reduced uncertainty.

Overall, these features allowed the project manager and the execution team to plan and track actions in real time. This kept project execution efficient and on budget, leading to positive outcomes for both the client team and the consultancy managing the project.

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