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Project Portfolio Management

Flexibility Is Your New Competitive Advantage

See how Planview can solve your complex business challenges

Published By Brandon Harville
Flexibility Is Your New Competitive Advantage

Today’s professional landscape is a tapestry of new possibilities, unique challenges, and a myriad of solutions to address those challenges.

In this environment, the key to success is adaptability.

Organizations need solutions that can bend without breaking. Solutions that can adapt to address challenges like economic uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, and new and disruptive technologies.  

Having an effective solution that enables your organization to adapt to your unique, changing industry demands means you’re better equipped to deliver tangible business outcomes.

Conversely, if you’re relying on inflexible project portfolio management software that restricts the way teams work, you could fall short of reaching those goals.

How do you evolve alongside an ever-changing business ecosystem?

With the support of a modern, flexible solution capable of navigating you through complexities by enabling you to:

  • Orchestrate seamless collaboration across departments, disciplines, and business units
  • Support traditional, Agile, and hybrid work
  • Integrate existing systems and tools, so teams are supported to deliver their best work
  • Solve challenges unique to your industry

Now for the good news: Planview AdaptiveWork is a flexible solution that’s capable of addressing your business needs while tackling those unique challenges that inflexible PPM software can’t.

This post showcases how three organizations – Cargill, Conagra Brands, and Xtract – leveraged Planview AdaptiveWork to solve their complex challenges. See how Planview’s holistic capabilities helped organizations realize business outcomes across industries, departments, and business units.

Creating the Connection Between Portfolio Management and Sustainability  

Global food giant, Cargill, needed a solution to consolidate their approach to portfolio management that enabled them to use one platform for managing their portfolios. After exploring dozens of tools and platforms, they chose AdaptiveWork as their solution for managing thousands of global projects across 70 portfolios. With Planview, Cargill was able to:

  • Gain visibility through disparate technologies across 46,000 active projects and 3,000 products
  • Measure the impact of projects and products related to sustainability in three key areas: climate change, water, and land use
  • Enhance financial oversight by tracking the spend and value of each individual product

The implementation of AdaptiveWork led to several significant improvements, including:

  • Improving accuracy and efficiency around identifying areas of sustainability: Cargill used Planview to easily monitor the status of their projects and products, and the impact they had on Cargill’s sustainability goals
  • A 5% increase in project value capture: Cargill was able to better understand the value of their projects and products and whether they support the company’s sustainability initiatives
  • A 2% improvement in capital efficiency: Planview gave Cargill the necessary visibility to make informed decisions around resource allocation, leading to better capital management

Planview also enabled Cargill to reduce time spent on manual updates, meetings, reporting, and analysis by 25%.

“Sustainability is central to Cargill’s growth plan and is seen as a business imperative, which is a driving factor in our need to incorporate it within our processes internally. As it is a journey and always changing, the flexibility of Planview is very helpful as we start to expand and bring in other areas of sustainability as we go forward.”

– Peter Dahm, Senior Director of Sustainability & Operations at Cargill

Access this on-demand presentation to listen to Cargill’s story.

Streamlining Global Product Development Process

Conagra Brands has been a major force in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry for more than a century and needed a solution to streamline their global development process and improve data-driven decision-making.

They turned to Planview because they needed a flexible solution that allowed them to work efficiently while addressing new challenges around emerging competitors, nontraditional retail outlets, and technology disruption.

Conagra used AdaptiveWork to collect and track CPG data from more than 150 food categories. They used data around consumer behavior and store purchase activity to make better decisions around their 3,500 active projects.

What’s more, Planview brought real-time visibility into Conagra’s portfolio of projects by:

  • Acting as the single source of truth for all project information
  • Providing instant access to data on brands, factories, ingredients, and packing materials

Planview also helped Conagra facilitate better collaboration and alignment around projects by connecting teams across the organization, in departments like R&D, food design, engineering, packaging, food safety, product lifestyle management, and more. This end-to-end connectivity made it easier to complete a broad portfolio of projects across different product lines.

As a result, the company minimized costs thanks to reduced waste and greater efficiency.

“[Before implementing Planview, Conagra] might have changed packaging six times over the next year and a half to execute these six projects. Now, project managers can coordinate these changes, making it easier in the plant and reducing the amount of waste.”

– Mark Evans, VP Product Readiness and Conagra Brands

Read Conagra Brand’s story.

Bringing Speed and Flexibility to the Automotive Industry

Xtrac is a world leader in high-performance transmissions and driveline components for motorsport and automotive applications. The nature of their industry means teams are constantly working remotely at racing events or customer sites worldwide, and they needed a solution that supported real-time collaboration with distributed teams.

Xtrac chose Planview AdaptiveWork because of its enhanced flexibility and collaborative features that seamlessly connected employees working in the field to their in-office colleagues. Choosing Planview meant:

  • In-office and remote workers had real-time access to important, centralized project data through one hub
  • Project data is updated in real time, preventing any data discrepancies that could undermine productivity and efficiency
  • Teams and stakeholders could communicate in real time, reducing gaps in knowledge and facilitating better decision-making through good collaboration

Implementing AdaptiveWork led to several improvements, such as:

  • Fewer data inconsistencies: Centralizing all project data into AdaptiveWork means the solution acts as the single source of truth, thus ensuring all teams and stakeholders are working with the same up-to-date data
  • Better productivity and efficiency: Real-time communication and collaboration means there are fewer stoppages and setbacks, as everyone has access to the same project data regardless of whether they’re in the office or out in the field

“It was taking my boss a full day to prepare for some meetings – now it is done in minutes.”

– Phil Smith, Project Analyst at Xtrac

Read Xtrac’s story.

Don’t Let Complexities Hold You Back

Most organizations need the capabilities that traditional project portfolio management software provides, but that’s not always enough. Some challenges are unique, and your enterprise also needs the power and flexibility to address the diverse needs and challenges modern organizations face.

That’s where AdaptiveWork can help. Watch our on-demand demo and see firsthand how Planview AdaptiveWork is a flexible solution that goes above and beyond traditional workflow and project portfolio management tools – addressing your PPM needs, as well as the other challenges your modern organization can face.

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Written by Brandon Harville

Brandon is a content strategist at Planview. Before coming aboard, he spent 5 years writing about Agile project management. He truly believes that core values like empathy, communication, and learning from mistakes make Agile more than just a business philosophy--they make Agile principles a life skill.