Arlington County is located across the Potomac river from Washington, D.C. Arlington Public Schools (APS) is the thirteenth-largest of Virginia’s 132 school divisions and has a total FY19 budget of more than $637M. APS includes 33 schools covering a population of 26 square miles and 225,200 people. Projected pre-K-12 enrollment for 2019 is 28,020.

The Challenge

The APS design and construction department wanted to replace their legacy project management information system (PMIS), Primavera Contract Management (PCM), with Primavera Unifier. Oracle officially ended support for PCM in October 2016. APS wanted the new system to serve as a unified, single-source-of-truth project management information system with a single-point-of-entry data repository. The new PMIS needed to handle project management activities related to project controls (including submittals, RFIs, meeting minutes, action items), project financials (budgets, commitments, payments), and document management.

PCM lacked the ability to host large project files, forcing APS to use additional software to manage most project documentation. Skysite, for example, was used to manage submittals, and caused effort duplication because the submittal workflow was managed in PCM while the actual submittal file was in Skysite.

The Solution

APS hired Gaea for the end-to-end Primavera Unifier implementation, including Unifier Project Controls and Cost Controls, and migration of PCM data and reports into Unifier. Gaea led the project, including discovery, definition of 36 business processes, configuration, and numerous out-of-the-box (OOTB) reports. The entire project spanned eight months from start to finish, including three months of data migration.

Gaea and APS staff managed the project. Gaea developed scripts to extract more than 87 gigabytes of data from PCM and Skysite and migrated the data. 71,000 records from 20 projects (10 active, 10 completed) were migrated from PCM to Unifier. Most of the legacy system financial information was imported into Unifier through .csv templates Gaea provided to APS.

The APS core team and project managers did extensive validation and back checks on the migrated data. Once data validation was completed, APS gave Gaea the go-ahead to migrate to the newly implemented system. Gaea trained APS staff with role-based training for CMAs, AEs, CMRs, and GCs along with a train-the-trainer approach for the APS core team.

The new APS project information management system is used to manage more than $200M in development, renovation, and expansion projects for its schools and technology centers. Ten projects are currently active. Congratulations to everyone at APS and Gaea whose hard work and dedication was instrumental in the making the Arlington Public Schools Unifier implementation project a huge success!

The post Arlington Public Schools Project Management Information System is Live! appeared first on Gaea.

Established in 1834, Milwaukee County is the most populous county in Wisconsin and the 45th most populous in the United States, with approximately 951,000 residents as of 2016.

The Milwaukee County Architecture Engineering and Environmental Services section (AE&ES) manages an average of 250 to 300 capital projects and launches 50 to 80 new projects each year, a total fiscal responsibility of $300M to $400M for the entire portfolio. Major project categories include highways, mass transit, airports, and environmental.

The Challenge

Since 1996, AE&ES used Oracle Primavera Contract Management (PCM) on-premise to manage its capital projects. PCM reached its official end of life in October 2016. County wanted to replace the existing PCM solution with Oracle Primavera Unifier to improve the AE&ES capital project management process, to centralize and standardize management of capital portfolio projects, and to provide improved reporting capabilities on a cloud-based, supported, stable platform.

The Solution

Milwaukee County hired Gaea for the end-to-end Primavera Unifier implementation, including requirements definition, design, configuration, testing, installation, and training. Gaea led the project, including discovery work, definition of 45 business processes, and configuration work, and County provided project management and subject-matter expertise to support the process.

Gaea and County staff collaboratively managed the project. Gaea led the business requirements analysis and documentation process with County in a supporting role. Gaea trained County staff with a train-the-trainer approach.

“Milwaukee County greatly appreciated Gaea’s expertise and confidence implementing Primavera Unifier and migrating County from PCM to Unifier. Gaea’s methodology assessed County business processes and used a multi-stage, iterative approach that leveraged their knowledge and understanding of how businesses operate, what was working, and what needed improvement.”

“Gaea worked collaboratively with County to ensure that the Unifier solution is holistic, adoptable, scalable, and sustainable. County immediately realized value from Gaea’s experience around best practices, functional and technical knowledge of Primavera Unifier, and gained further business value by using Gaea as the sole implementation consulting firm.” – Greg High, Milwaukee County, Director AE&ES

Congratulations to everyone at County and Gaea whose hard work and dedication was instrumental in making the Milwaukee County project a huge success!

The post Milwaukee County Project Management Information System Goes Live! appeared first on Gaea.

About LBCC

LBCC is a community college founded in 1927, with two campuses in Long Beach, California. LBCC currently has almost 25,000 students enrolled across 820 courses and 3,148 class sections. The two campuses cover 142.1 acres and employ more than 1,600 full-time and part-time staff and faculty.

The Challenge

During our assessment, we reviewed LBCC’s existing project management information system (PMIS), and met with the LBCC construction and program management team of approximately 20 people. LBCC’S PMIS was made up of several disconnected systems, including Oracle Primavera Contract Management (PCM) for project controls, PeopleSoft (ERP), Primavera P6 for scheduling. Other peripheral systems included email, Word, Excel, and hard copies of documents.

Our analysis revealed the lack of an integrated, end-to-end solution. The results? Low visibility, data-entry errors, data silos, redundant information, inconsistent coding, inconsistent storage, and duplication of work. In addition, a serious bottleneck was created by multiple users submitting data to a single system administrator for entry.

During discovery, the construction management (CM) team stated that the current system is operating at approximately 20% efficiency when compared to a fully-integrated, coded, and connected system with effective data entry and workflow processes. If a perfect system score is 100%, the goal of the LBCC CM team was to improve their PMIS to at least 65% through available means. The general consensus of comments related to challenge areas was the need to improve standardization of business processes (BPs) and system access. Improvement of these key fundamentals was required for timely data gathering, to support key performance indicators (KPIs) across management levels, and to increase and add business efficiency.

The Solution

Our recommendations covered several areas. One, a revision of current LBCC systems and processes in order to maximize productivity and reduce errors. Two, a potential new project management system and related processes that would enhance the ability of LBCC to manage projects and overcome current system limitations. And three, integrations and processes designed to provide end-to-end system support for program and project management.

LBCC could upgrade from PCM 13.0 to 14.xx under their Oracle maintenance plan, or to select another system. Our post-assessment report included additional recommendations for LBCC. By migrating from PCM to Unifier, LBCC would have a future-proof project management solution (PCM support ended in April 2016). LBCC would also have additional functionality that would prove to be very valuable in many areas as they moved forward.

Further performance increases were also recommended, including several integrations:

• integration with PeopleSoft (cost control)
• integration between PeopleSoft and the cost management system (document control), and
• integrating contract and financial management (cost control).

The fully-integrated system recommended by Gaea gives LBCC total visibility, maximum efficiency, and reduces manual processes and errors by a significant margin.

U.S. Communities for the Best Project Management Information System Pricing

In order to secure the best pricing for LBCC and to streamline the contract process, we leveraged our partnership with DLT Solutions and U.S. Communities. Another win/win solution for another higher learning institution!

The post Project Management Information System Review: LBCC appeared first on Gaea.

We do it all.

I honestly do not think there is a partner out there who has the depth of skills we have in these products, much less combined with implementation skills to boot! Gaea has the largest Primavera consultant pool in the world. We are 125+ people scattered around the globe doing some tremendously cool things in this ecosystem.

We are not a single-dimensional, “hey, I do Unifier for a living…” organization. We take pride in stitching systems together and making them work together. People often tend to think of us as an integration company or just a bunch of techies who can tie systems together without understanding construction or complex project cost control.

Surprise!

You will be pleasantly surprised at the depth of knowledge at Gaea in all facets of enterprise project and portfolio management, its adjacency to other enterprise systems, and the overall understanding of how to make them work from a technology, domain, and implementation perspective.

Organizations in this ecosystem typically specialize in one or maybe two tools in an enterprise project management suite.

Gaea is different. Over the years, we have slowly and steadily built our talent pool to encompass the entire gamut of tools in the Primavera toolkit and I am very proud of that. Some examples:

Project Analytics.
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P6, Unifier, BI.
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P6, Contract Management.
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