Portfolio and Program Management Keeps Your Best Practices Up and Running

As a manufacturer, you need to juggle numerous projects to get the right product to market fast. That’s a lot of pressure.

If you don’t have control and awareness of your project portfolio, you can lose track of valuable resources—not to mention increasing your time to market. An integrated management process system is key to your success when you are managing a large portfolio of projects across internal and external global teams and suppliers. Decisions must be made quickly. And when project team leaders do not follow a standard protocol for sharing information between people or information systems, organizations end up reinventing the wheel from project to project or from division to division.

With a Microsoft-based portfolio and program management (PPM) software solution, you can use your resources more effectively, balance the risks and paybacks of each project in your portfolio, and align your project’s outcome with your corporate objectives.

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	REI Addresses Product Lifecycle Goals With a Microsoft-Based Solution
	Aligning Your Business Projects with Your Business Goals
	Microsoft Maximizes Your Success

REI Addresses Product Lifecycle Goals With a Microsoft-Based Solution

To achieve its product lifecycle goals, REI turned to a Microsoft-Based PPM solution. The solution helps REI model processes, optimizes them, and generates project plans from them for use in the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) 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.

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 lifecycles and then duplicating them for other divisions. Equally important, the solution helped the division improve their research and development process.

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Aligning Your Business Projects with Your Business Goals

Here’s what a portfolio and program management tool can do for your business:

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Microsoft Maximizes Your Success

Microsoft maximizes the success of your portfolio and program management software solution in two ways.

First, Microsoft offers intuitive software solutions. Your software solution will plug in to your existing Microsoft products like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. There’s no need to buy add-ins. Industry leading solutions like Enterprise Project Management (EPM) easily integrate into Microsoft SharePoint Services, helping users to better organize and collaborate through fast access to information. EPM operates in the familiar browser-based Microsoft Office-integrated environment.

Because Microsoft software is widely used in business, your employees will be able to learn and use Microsoft tools fast. You can expect lower training costs, less resistance to new technology, and look forward to greater usage.

Second, Microsoft has the largest partner ecosystem of any technology company. Together with our partners, our collective body of knowledge spans every type of manufacturing. We can provide solutions for companies that produce everything from semiconductors to flower pots. You can be assured that Microsoft will match you up with an industry partner who can develop a software solution that supports your bottom line.

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