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Customer stories

provalida GmbH logoprovalida GmbH

A German retail giant engages provalida to help it manage IT project resources with OpenText™ Project and Portfolio Management

provalida GmbH logo

About provalida GmbH

The person explaining a project to a colleague on a computer

Based in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region of Germany, provalida GmbH provides expertise in digital relationships, processes, and transformation. provalida helps companies design, create, and run digital solutions to meet their business goals.

Summary

Challenges

  • Support ambitious digital expansion plans.
  • Accelerate key month-end timesheet processing.
  • Resolve configuration issues and remove bottlenecks.

Solution

  • Optimized month-end processing.
  • Supported ongoing system management operations.
  • Introduced new concepts for better resource management.

Results

  • desktop-gauge Accelerated key processing step by 80%
  • new-data Simplified software upgrades
  • teamwork-workflow Strengthened partnership

Challenges

  • 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  to log the time they spend working on IT projects. At the end of each month, a OpenText Project and Portfolio Management 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 OpenText Project and Portfolio Management,” 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.

A person using his laptop while pointing to the side

We have reduced the month-end processing by more than 80%; our client is highly satisfied with the solution from provalida and OpenText.

Attila Mozes
Managing Director and Founder, provalida GmbH

Solution

To clear the performance bottleneck, provalida redesigned the month-end timesheet program and optimized the configuration of OpenText Project and Portfolio Management.

Products deployed

Optimizing month-end processing

provalida ran an in-depth analysis of both the month-end routine and the existing configuration of OpenText Project and Portfolio Management . Based on its findings, the consultancy completely redesigned the environment by changing the software configuration and rebuilding the cluster of servers it was running. provalida also later managed the migration of the entire OpenText Project and Portfolio Management landscape to the retailer’s Google Cloud Platform private cloud.

Supporting ongoing operations

provalida checks the health of the OpenText Project and Portfolio Management environment every day as part of an operational support contract with the retailer. This work helps ensure the system is always in optimal condition, especially during the crucial month-end period.

In addition to running the internal helpdesk, provalida is responsible for change management on the system—anything from adding a new item in a drop-down menu to match a change on the SAP side, through to the deployment of new functionality.

Introducing new initiative concepts

The retailer recently added the concept of ‘initiatives’ alongside the existing concept of ‘products’ within its internal organization. In this context, an initiative is a collection of products grouped around a single theme or objective. Monitoring initiatives is an effective way for senior management to understand the bigger picture.

provalida assisted with this transformation by building the new concept into OpenText Project and Portfolio Management, so that the retailer can understand resource management within the context of initiatives.

A person looking at a laptop

We recommend OpenText Project and Portfolio Management and other OpenText solutions to our clients because we are very confident in their quality and ability to solve business challenges.

Attila Mozes
Managing Director and Founder, provalida GmbH

Results

With its optimized OpenText Project and Portfolio Management solution supported by provalida, the retailer has accelerated month-end processing of timesheets, enabling budget-holders to access reliable data sooner.

Accelerated key processing step

By eliminating system instability and increasing throughput, the optimization executed by provalida cut month-end timesheet processing from around 540 minutes to just 90 minutes. As a result, managers can approve invoices and pay suppliers more rapidly, and get a faster understanding of their monthly expenditure.

“We have reduced the month-end processing by more than 80%; our client is highly satisfied with the service and the solution from provalida and OpenText,” said Attila Mozes.

Simplified software upgrades

provalida upgrades the retailer’s environment to the latest version of OpenText Project and Portfolio Management annually to keep the organization on the current support path and up to date with new functionality.

“Now that we have set up the OpenText Project and Portfolio Management environment correctly, it is an easy and highly automated process to update the software,” said Attila Mozes.

Strengthened partnership

provalida works closely with OpenText in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH) to ensure that it can offer the highest-quality services to its clients. The consultancy has other clients using OpenText Project and Portfolio Management as well as application lifecycle management solutions from the OpenText portfolio.

“We appreciate our close ongoing relationship with OpenText, including joint attendance at events and conferences,” said Attila Mozes. “We recommend OpenText Project and Portfolio Management and other OpenText solutions to our clients because we are very confident in their quality and ability to solve business challenges.”

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