provalida GmbH

• Support ambitious digital expansion plans by ensuring IT projects run smoothly
• Accelerate key month-end employee and contractor timesheet processing
• Resolve configuration issues and remove process bottlenecks

As an expert consultancy in digital transformation, provalida GmbH helps large organizations in Germany tackle a broad range of challenges. One of its long-term clients is a major German retail group and Europe’s leading consumer electronics retailer, with more than EUR 20B in annual sales.

The retailer was beginning to invest more in online shopping when the global pandemic struck. This immediately accelerated the company’s transformation and led to a new concept of integration between the online and real-world channels. The idea was to enable consumers to find and buy products online, then collect them from a selected physical outlet within as little as one hour.

Attila Mozes, managing director and founder of provalida, said, “This was a new retail concept for Germany, enabling customers to enjoy the convenience and speed of online shopping without having to pay for and wait for delivery. Of course, building and maintaining the required back-end system integrations to enable a smooth and accurate service significantly increased the number and scope of IT projects.”

To manage and develop its growing online presence, the retailer relies on a combination of internal teams, external freelancers, and third-party service providers. These employees and contractors use OpenText™ Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) to log the time they spend working on IT projects. At the end of each month, a PPM process runs to freeze the timesheets and collate all the data, generating a huge file that is imported into the retailer’s SAP ERP system. Using the timesheet data, the retailer validates invoices from external contractors and vendors. It also generates internal charge-back invoices for each project owner, so that all costs—millions of Euros monthly—are allocated to the appropriate team.

“Due to historical misconfigurations and errors, there were reliability and performance issues surrounding this critical month-end process running in PPM,” said Attila Mozes. “Incompatibilities in the underlying server clusters led to nodes silently failing, which created significant performance bottlenecks.”

Given frequent system halts and restarts, processing all timesheets took around nine hours. The slow processing meant that managers and budget-holders faced delays in understanding how much they had spent on projects, making it difficult to plan future activities.