Med-X - a Pharmaceutical Giant Case Study

CASE ANALYSIS REPORT

ARIBA IMPLEMENTATION AT MED-X

MANAGING EARNED VALUE

TEAM 04

Gargi Yadav

Kumud Ranjan

Ruying Xia

Sai Gireesh Pokala

Xinyan Chen

Yong Lin

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

MED-X Inc. is a pharmaceutical giant with a worldwide presence. MED-X’s main objectives were to revamp its procurement organization into a self operating decentralized purchasing model . Med-X chose Implementation technologies for consulting services and Ariba to provide them e-procurement solutions and manage their spendings well.

There were issues in the project which was leading to delay in Final deployment. The major issues in the project were lack of experience of the Project manager who was skilled technically but had no experience in full-life-cycle e-procurement implementation. Also, there were issues in Project planning of resources, risk analysis ,reporting.and inter-team communication .

The Earned value analysis was conducted on the project to monitor cost performance using - Integrated Performance report, Schedule Impact Report and Cost Impact Report. Both, combined and individual analysis was performed on the two critical components of the project – Technical Infrastructure and Software Customization.

The CPI and SPI of the Software Customization component are 1.18 and 1.13 respectively and for Technical Infrastructure component are 0.91 and 0.94 respectively. This states that Software Customization is on track while Technical Infrastructure is behind schedule and over budget. The combined CPI and SPI are 1.04 and 1.03 which seems good overall in cost and schedule.

There could be multiple solutions to rectify the project issues like hire more resources, reduce the scope, seek for extension of the project. But the best solution seems to be hiring more skilled resources onboard to cater the delays and deliver a quality product on time. This will make the stakeholders and the client happy with minimal inputs as other solutions might require to spend extra cost and time .

PROBLEM STATEMENT

The major issues that impacted the implementation of ARIBA and raised concerns in the management team of the project are:

The project manager was not very efficient and experienced to plan or control the project well.

Lack of proper Project Planning & Design impacted the whole project execution. Issues that should have been identified as part of Resource allocation, Risk analysis or Project dependencies were not in place.

Lack of skilled resources to perform periodic Earned Value analysis on the project components and unavailability of part time staff also contributed to the project problems.

There was a huge communication gap in all project phases, between major stakeholders and inter-team which delayed some of the crucial tasks in the project like - getting the Sun Server Equipment, MED-X staffer was repeatedly pulled off the team for other tasks.

BACKGROUND

The stakeholders in the project are Senior management of MED-X, Implementation Technologies and Ariba while the external stakeholders are the customers, suppliers, partners and distributors. The project manager did not have vision to review critical project tasks independently and raise flags looking at Earned value analysis. The factors like Project planning, risk analysis, monitor and control and communication were very critical to this project. Good knowledge on effective project management and Earned value management is important to solve the project case.

METHODOLOGY

Earned Value Analysis(EVA) was crucial to understand the cost and schedule variance of the project versus the plan. EVA provides a method to measure the project progress. The project manager can use this to forecast a project’s total cost and date of completion, based on trend analysis or application of the project’s “burn rate”.

The ARIBA implementation was broken up into several phases. However, the critical path composed of two major components:

● Technical infrastructure

● Software customization.

Along with the combined EV Analysis on the two components, analysis of individual component was done to understand components level delay and cost overrun. The data was collected by Martin from his Project Staff (Exhibit 5,7,8) and same data we have used for the analysis mentioned below:

1) Integrated Performance Report- This report was created to compares the work completed versus scheduled and budgeted.

2) Schedule Impact Report- This report was created to analyze actual work done in comparison to the planned schedule. SPI Value