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Success Story: Denso reaches highest efficiency in R&D Projects with Project Objects PPM Solution

DENSO Thermal Systems designs, develops, manufactures and sells air-conditioning systems, engine cooling systems, heat exchangers, radiators and compressors for cars, commercial and industrial vehicles and also for tractors, earth moving machinery, buses etc. It is also active in designing and assembling integrated cockpit and front-end modules for cars.

The Company is continuously expanding and concentrating its product research and development on continuous innovation with constant attention paid to quality. DENSO Thermal Systems S.p.A. supplies the major automotive manufacturers as Alfa Romeo, Audi, Citroën, Ferrari, Fiat, General Motors, Iveco, Lancia, Maserati, Mitsubishi, Opel, Peugeot, Renault, Saab, Scania, Seat, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo together with Caterpillar, Case New Holland (CNH), Lamborghini, Massey Ferguson, Piaggio and Same.

The Challenges
The development of R & D projects in Denso is characterized by the use of highly skilled resources and the multidisciplinary contribution of various specialist units. This is a multi-project context crossed annually by hundreds of project initiatives with dimensions and characteristics often very different from one another, carried out for a multitude of clients.

The need expressed by Denso was to optimise the flow of resources allocation and reporting of the various cost centers and collect in a timely manner the internal and external costs associated with each project. Cost controllers wanted a tool to monitor R & D projects in terms of costs and hours.

In addition, the Client expressed the need to accurately identify the allocation of resources and costs for customers in order to carry out performance analysis on various clients.
The tools in use, mainly Excel sheets, did not allow an integrated view to be used as a basis of analysis.  

The Solution
The choice of Project Objects was motivated by the need to adopt a suite of PPM where all these analyses could be conducted in an integrated manner from one database.  After evaluating many solutions Denso decided on Project Objects as they met all of the requirements; a single integrated solution to manage all projects, costs and resources.

The ease of use and the ability to configure the solution to meet the specific needs of the many different project managers across the business was also critical. Denso made use of many of ProjectObjects key modules to drive efficiencies; Project Management, Portfolio Management, Resource Management and Cost Controls.

The Benefits
The adoption of ProjectObjects has enabled Denso to:

• define and implement a new control model for the Research & Development team 
• organise the management of the entities committed in accordance with the control model (articulation, classification, nomenclature, life cycle, ...)
• define and launch new internal procedures for the government and reporting activities
• adopt an integrated database containing the summary data of internal and external contract costs, respectively balanced with the resource usage and  accounting records
• lay the foundations within the R & D organization to encourage and promote a culture of greater control of the business and a greater ability to monitor time and costs absorbed by the various initiatives 
• provide management of the R & D structure complete visibility of:
  • Situations on the business trend at different levels of synthesis / retail
  • Analysis views structured by activity / product / customer / market
  • The overall effort spent on R & D resources balanced against the needs of the business 

Denso has been able to collaborate more effectively amongst the executive & operational teams driving efficiencies that have resulted in significant cost savings and an overall improvement in their projects on-time and on-budget results.