Tyco Healthcare manufactures, distributes and services medical devices for clients worldwide.  Tyco Healthcare's portfolio includes 50,000 different medical products, including disposable medical supplies, monitoring equipment, medical instruments and bulk analgesic pharmaceuticals and chemicals. The world’s leading supplier of acetaminophen, Tyco Healthcare employs nearly 38,000 employees in nearly every country and generated more than $9.1 billion in revenue last year.

The Challenge:

Cost management was Tyco Healthcare’s primary challenge. Tyco Healthcare's Respiratory segment had no uniform method for determining project costs that would be used consistently across each division and project. Information was spread across multiple systems and required input from multiple people. Lack of consistency meant that costs could not be compared across projects, or against historical costs. Managers had no discipline for meaningful comparison between forecast and actual project costs. There was not a single point of visibility for project costs within a division, and divisions even had different methods of calculating R&D labor.

The Solution:

Tyco Healthcare engaged Project Solutions Group to develop a solution that would automate product development cost tracking and forecasting and implement a process and tools to allow project teams to track project costs, standardize project cost and forecast spend reports. The company wanted a level of detail that would track projects by state, phase, month and functional group and track forecasts against actual costs. Also needed was a method to accurately capture research and development costs eligible for federal tax credits, which provide significant savings on project costs.

PSG's team of PMI-certified professionals worked closely with Tyco Healthcare's management to create a simple-to-follow process flow for participants at every level. Leveraging its expertise with enterprise project management systems integration, PSG integrated Microsoft Project Server with Tyco Healthcare's existing J.D. Edwards financial software to automate cost collection. Core team leaders would no longer have to separately enter time and expense data, and now had an automated, reliable mechanism for sharing project cost data between systems.

PSG built a simple, stable and bug-free interface and developed custom reports that would allow Tyco Healthcare's core team leaders to present critical project metrics in a clear, concise format. PSG's team stayed with Tyco throughout the implementation, providing meaningful project management guidance above and beyond simple tactical instruction.

The Results:

With an effective, accurate project management system in use across the enterprise, Tyco Healthcare's core team leaders are able to see their full project costs at any point in the cycle.

The core Tyco Healthcare team can now run custom reports that provide a single source of information that is easy to interpret and is consistent across projects to enable comparative analysis. With the newfound ability to manage resources by functional area, constraints can be identified and mitigated in advance. Baseline costs can be compared with forecasts and actuals with the push of a button. The result is a much clearer window on projected and actual costs that has enabled Tyco Healthcare to tackle an additional priority issue: more efficient resource management.