Executive Summary Project management can be woefully inefficient. Team members don’t always collaborate and manage projects from the same central source. People work on overlapping tasks or don’t always use best practices. Precious time is being wasted. Sound familiar? Despite its successful output, the gear and apparel division of Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) was facing these types of challenges. But even more important, the division of the Kent, Washington retailer wanted to grow. It wanted to improve process and project efficiency, consistency, and scalability to both take on more projects and to more effectively manage existing ones. Process improvements alone could not achieve those goals. On This PageREI Adopts a Microsoft-Based Solution
 | Improving employee productivity allocates more time for dedicated research, which is critical to remaining innovative and forward-thinking. Better time and resource management will allow this to become a reality. |  | | Kevin Myette
Director of Business Operations
REI | |
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To achieve its goals, REI turned to the Apprentice Process Modeler solution, developed and implemented by Apprentice Systems Inc., a Microsoft Office Visio solution provider, and PM Solutions, a Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Partner. The solution helps REI model processes, optimizes them, and generates project plans from them for use in the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management Solution. This system can be used to create a snapshot of as-is business processes, experiment with what-if scenarios, and then convert the optimized processes into detailed project plans. Using this robust software package, a project manager can further develop these plans, assign resources division-wide, manage projects online, and collaborate globally. Overall, the Microsoft-based solution gave this REI division a new and better way to plan, envision, and produce its portfolio of projects. "The best way for an organization to fully leverage a solution like this is to design it to meet specific business requirements." said Kristin Ippensen, alliance manager for PM Solutions. "By maximizing the solution’s portfolio management, resource allocation, and cross-division collaboration features, REI improves project management efficiency and the consistency of product delivery." Solution Helps REI Understand the Product LifecycleUsing this single business solution, REI was able to: 1. | Visualize, diagram, and optimize product development processes. | 2. | Generate project plans from process diagrams that could be used to manage and execute projects. | 3. | Analyze the plans and measure how effective they were. | 4. | Integrate and align all process and project management tools, tasks, documents, and data so projects can be managed efficiently across the division. |
In the end, the Microsoft-based PPM software solution supported the gear and apparel division's ultimate goal of better understanding the most successful product life cycles and then duplicating them for other divisions. Equally important, the solution helped the division improve their research and development process. "Improving employee productivity allocates more time for dedicated research which is critical to remaining innovative and forward-thinking," explained Kevin Myette, REI director of business operations. "Better time and resource management will allow this to become a reality." Read the Complete Case Study
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