Kemira is a global chemicals company serving customers in water-intensive industries. Kemira provides expertise, application know-how and chemicals that improve customers’ water, energy and raw material efficiency. (www.kemira.fi)
Thinking Portfolio is a cloud service that is efficient and easy to use.
With the establishing of the new project template, Kemira’s IT and Operational Excellence Department made the joint decision that it was time to commission a tool to manage the project portfolio that would replace the Excel files and separate resource management application previously used. The more effective application should facilitate the management of the project portfolio and resources using the same interface.
A benchmark test was conducted among service providers during the acquisition stage and all the various alternatives and ultimately Thinking Portfolio was deemed to have the qualities that best corresponded with Kemira’s needs. In addition to being easy to use, Thinking Portfolio was quick to implement and was highly cost-effective as a cloud service.
Thinking Portfolio creates synergy
Kemira’s Thinking Portfolio currently features IT projects in addition to various activity enhancement projects, one of which is a portfolio holding around a hundred projects. The portfolio has 350 users, 50 of which are active users with 100 time-entry users.
Free user rights have been applied to the project portfolio. This means that Thinking Portfolio operates as a communication channel for various projects and it also provides details about persons to contact who can provide more information.
The resource planning within Thinking Portfolio is regarded as being a very useful attribute. “There is an excess of projects conducted simultaneously within the organisation and this causes timetables to overrun”, states PMO Manager for Kemira IT, Taija Turkia.
“The resource planning attributes are flexible and they provide excellent reports.” In addition to Thinking Portfolio being an outstanding tool for visualising the situation, its high functioning resource planning also provides us with a better synergy between business and IT.
“Bottlenecks are easily visible in Thinking Portfolio”, adds Turkia.
Project managers grateful for time saved
Kemira’s users also praise Thinking Portfolio’s ease of use. Project managers in particular have been grateful that there is no longer the need to do the same work several times over, which used to be the case when separate reports were used.
“Time is saved when starting and completing a project, once information is amassed in the same place and reported automatically.
The project portfolio is regularly inspected in connection with various meetings. It is a great deal easier when data does not need to be selected from different places and you can see when the data has been updated”.
We highly recommend it and we are in the process of making further developments
Cooperation between Kemira and the Thinking Portfolio supplier has also been excellent following the completed supplier project. “Implementation of the tool was also assisted by the fact that Kemira was itself clear about what topics needed enhancing”, Turkia highlights.
One of the topics for further development at Kemira is the improvement of mobile use for making time entries. Furthermore, there will be an expansion of Thinking Portfolio’s integration and reporting properties, which make full use of existing reports and dashboards.
“As a company, Thinking Portfolio has a flexible customer service and its employees are very service oriented. I definitely recommend Thinking Portfolio for others seeking similar solutions. It is important to note though that it is worth first getting your own processes in order in order to achieve the best possible benefits, including expertise on the supplier process during swift project implementation.”
Taija Turkia
Manager, IT PMO
Kemira
taija.turkia@kemira.com
