How Does Sciforma Facilitate the Management of Projects and R&D Resources at Gravotech?

Gravotech Company Overview

Gravotech Industry: Manufacturing

Founded: 1938

Located: France, USA, China

Clients: 60,000

Website: www.gravotech.com

The leader in permanent marking and engraving solutions, Gravotech designs, manufactures, and distributes innovative solutions for engraving, marking, and cutting. The firm has a strong presence in the identification and traceability market (e.g. serial number marking for manufacturing), industrial or architectural signage, and finally personalization (among others for the luxury sector).

Challenges & Expectations

Upon joining Gravotech as Head of R&D, Cédric Tuaillon worked with his teams on reshaping the project management process for new product development (NPD). The goal was to improve efficiency and predictability. A cross-functional project management unit, led by PMs like Gabriel Kretzschmar, was created for the R&D department.

Ever since then, the R&D team has strived to optimize project management processes, practices, and skills.

Part of that optimization was the adoption of the phase-gate methodology. However, this methodology required thorough planning and monitoring, and Excel was no longer sufficient or efficient for managing projects. Therefore, it became crucial to adopt a proper project management tool to centralize the management of resources, budgets, deliverables, phases-gates, and to optimize efficiency.

The Sciforma Solution

Implemented in early July 2021 in the R&D department, the Sciforma tool facilitates planning and management of NPD projects. Additionally, it helps plan and track the R&D team’s time on non-project activity portfolios (innovation, monitoring, support activities, etc.).

Realized Benefits

A Dramatic Efficiency Boost for Gravotech Project Managers

The newly implemented phase-gate management process requires taking a systematic approach to planning and monitoring projects and resource time. Project schedules, technical performance, and actual versus forecasted budgets are now reviewed at each gate.

Manually consolidating all of this information from Excel-based data was time-consuming and complex for project managers. Since the implementation of Sciforma, project managers have reduced time spent preparing gate meetings threefold.

With Sciforma, standard project templates with pre-filled resource plans, costs, and deliverables are significantly simplifying planning activities. Moreover, consolidating all forecast expenses and resource needs into a single platform greatly facilitates the preparation of the profitability estimates expected at gate reviews.

“We reduced the time spent preparing reviews by two-thirds. In addition to boosting efficiency, this is enabling us to perform this preparation work at the last minute so we can get the freshest data.”

Gabriel Kretzschmar
Project Manager, Gravotech

Informing Phase-Gate Decisions

Project managers can now easily share reliable and comprehensive information with business leaders in order to enable decision-makers to green-light or red-light new product launches based on resource capacity. Cédric Tuaillon uses Sciforma’s data as a foundation to perform his bi-monthly reviews of the resource needs/capacity balance over the next 3 months and to consolidate R&D budget forecasts for the next 3 years.

For the first time, we have a consolidated, shared vision of resource occupation and availability, team by team, and not just project by project. It’s easier to manage and it enables us to make decisions based on hard data. What I appreciate the most is probably that all teams have direct visibility to the schedule and deadlines: everyone is on the same page.”

Cédric Tuaillon
Head of Research and Development, Gravotech

Next Steps for Gravotech

Now that Gravotech has improved project planning and monitoring as well as resource management thanks to Sciforma, the company plans to implement the Agile management capabilities of the tool to manage its engraving software research and development projects.

Other ongoing initiatives include expanding the use of “actions” to formalize workflows. Sciforma enables project managers to create lists of actions — e.g. specific tasks to be performed by an individual or a group, such as mitigating a risk, solving an issue or addressing a change request —  in order to tackle specific operational concerns without over-inflating project plans.

At Gravotech, team leaders and project managers are using the action boards to manage resource meetings. Moving forward, these boards will be made available to team members to give them a better handle on the work pipeline.