Increased Manager Productivity
Increased Team Time Savings
Reduced Admin Overheads
Reduced Licensing Costs
About Consilium Technology
Headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia, Consilium Technology designs intelligent machines to complement, augment, and replace human cognition.
Consilium Technology is a Research Service Provider, specialising in Machine learning, Modelling and Simulation, Data Analytics, Mixed Reality, and Human Sciences.
Their Challenges
Consilium Technology was using Replicon in conjunction with Microsoft Project for their project management activities. Their key challenge with this setup was that the 2 systems were not compatible with each other. Data from the online Replicon system had to be manually fed into Microsoft Project. “Our big issue was the fact that we had to use two pieces of software and there were discrepancies because one was a manual input in Microsoft Project. So if you made a change in the online system, you had to manually make the change in Microsoft Project, which was just creating errors all over the place,” recalled Rachael Crozier, who is the Administration & Digital Support at Consilium Technology. “The other challenge we had was managing our resources. We didn't really have an indicator of like how much people were working and whether we'd over allocated them across several projects because what we were using previously didn't allow clarity between projects.”
The main challenges that prompted Consilium Technology to look for a comprehensive project management software included:
Zero Cross-Project Visibility
The teams at Consilium Technology were working across about 50 different projects at any given time. The Replicon-Microsoft Project combination did not offer cross-project visibility thereby making it extremely difficult to manage and deliver on their projects on-time and under-budget.
Inaccurate & Error-prone Reporting
Reporting was extremely inflexible and limited. It was very hard for managers to get the data that they actually wanted for their reports. It also required a lot of spreadsheet-driven data manipulation. This resulted in right reports not being available or delayed reports, hampering their abilities to make decisions that were based on facts.
Tracking and Fixing Resource Overallocation
The team leaders did not have visibility into what their resources were working on and how loaded they were across different projects. This often caused over allocation issues because they had people working on many different things at the same time.
Poor Demand Management
Consilium Technology did not have a centralized intake for new projects based on resource capacity. Because of this they would often take on new projects without having the necessary manpower to support it.
System Incompatibilities
The 2 systems that Consilium Technology was using were incompatible and could not be seamlessly integrated. This resulted in manual data entries and data duplication resulting in a highly inefficient and error-prone system for project management.
Why Celoxis ?
Celoxis instantly eliminated the need for multiple systems and could securely house all of their project data in one place for seamless access and availability. “Reporting in Celoxis was definitely the big one,” exclaimed Rachael, recalling all the reporting nightmares they had with their earlier systems. The other aspect was its ease of use. “Celoxis looked quite user friendly for the staff because I don't need to see much as an administrator,” explained Rachael.
Their reasons for choosing Celoxis were:
- Celoxis was cloud-based and web-based solution that could securely house all of their project data and eliminated the need for multiple systems.
- Celoxis was extremely flexible and customizable to their needs. They could easily juggle team leaders as project managers without worrying about multiple license types and costs.
- Celoxis’ powerful reporting engine put comprehensive, real-time project analytics within reach for Consilium Technology’s managers and executives.
- The Celoxis mobile application was an ideal complement for their mobile teams to track time and report progress on the go.
- Celoxis’ interface was fresh, intuitive and user-friendly requiring almost-zero lead time to system migration and user onboarding.
- Celoxis had a flexible and web-based API that was necessary to integrate with other business platforms that Consilium Technology was using.
How Celoxis Solves Their Business Problems
Celoxis gave Rachael and the rest of the team at Consilium Technology a level of visibility and insights into their projects that was not possible with their previous solution, providing the ability to filter a variety of views and share a variety of real-time reports with their program manager and executive team. The key business benefits included:
- Allowing teams to be flexible in the ownership of the project, something that was ideal for Consilium Technology’s organization structure. “A really great thing about Celoxis is the fact that you can add normal staff members and assign them the role with a project manager for a particular project, which is really useful because we only have one program manager but within each project there is sort of a team leader. So it's really useful that you can let that team leader have the management of that project in Celoxis,” added Rachael.
- Detailed and real-time reporting to provide visibility into all important projects.
- Reporting flexibility and CSV export has enabled managers to efficiently present data to their clients providing them a clear summary of their projects.
- Effective resource capacity planning and scheduling based on resource availability and workload. “Overallocations and resource shortages are now a thing of the past,” adds Rachael, “with Celoxis, we have been able to balance our incoming projects with existing resource loading eliminating bottlenecks and overallocations.”
- Allowing managers to include and track billable and non-billable activities within a project.
- Early warning indicators and visual cues into a project’s health without going into each project.
- Allowing team members to easily track their time spent on different project and correct mistakes effortlessly.
- Bring accountability into their financial and payroll processes and reconcile invoices.
- Customizable Dashboards enabled the teams to log in and just see what’s relevant to them and update what’s relevant to them all in one place. “The staff have that level of visibility that they can see when they're coming to the end and they can raise the flag with their managers if they're about to run out of hours. It's a little bit of self management instead of project managers have having to check it every single day, day in, day out to see if someone's about to go over,” said Rachael.
- The Celoxis API helped Consilium Technology to seamlessly integrate with their HR and other business systems. “What we have done is automatically pull in all the employee leaves from our HR system into Celoxis and into their timesheets so that they don’t have to duplicate the efforts and it streamlines payroll for us,” added Rachael, “the API also allowed us to pull out very specific data for our clients. Our clients, being from the defense space, require certain levels of classification of data and Celoxis allows us to do just that.”
- Eliminating multiple platforms that could not support their project management activities and using a single system to bring visibility and accountability to all their projects. “This definitely reduced our frustration and boosted team morale,” exclaimed Rachael.
What They Like About Celoxis ?
Consilium Technology wanted to optimize their project management activities, improve reporting and enable their teams to work more quickly on their projects.
With the implementation of Celoxis, projects came together quickly, collaboration was easy, and made things easier for the teams to work on.
Key Celoxis features that Consilium Technology is taking advantage of include:
Dashboards and Reports
Real-time reports provided visibility into all important projects. Consilium Technology periodically generates project status, timesheet and resource utilization reports for their executives and payroll reconciliation reports for finance teams. Dashboards helped their managers to monitor project health and locating work information. “Dashboards and reporting have eliminated a lot of the constant status emails and team meetings,” added Rachael.
Timesheets and Auto-fill
The setup for the team was super-simple. Just click on Add Timesheet, add the time, submit and done. The auto-filling of tasks in the timesheet also has been a great time-saver to the team. “There's no complication of having to search through projects, it's just automatically filled out in their timesheet if they want. So that was a really great thing was it was really simple for the staff to use,” said Rachael.
Task-based Billing
This feature enabled Consilium Technology to manage all their billable and non-billable tasks within the same project, making it easier to manage overall project schedules and reporting. Their earlier systems did not allow for this and they had to separate out the 2 types of tasks into different projects making it cumbersome for their managers to plan and track their projects.
Interactive Gantt and Sub-tasks
Consilium Technology’s projects being defense related and also related to machine learning and visual simulation, were very large and involved projects requiring several level of nesting, task hierarchies and deliverables. Celoxis’ Interactive Gantt Chart and essentially unlimited levels of nesting allowed Consilium Technology to effortlessly plan large projects, and making it easy to manage and tackle complex projects.
Visual Health Indicators
With Celoxis’ sophisticated RAG indicators, the project managers knew well in advance if projects and tasks were at risk of time missing deadlines or exceeding costs.
Cross-project Workload and Capacity Planning
The cross-project resource workload chart enables the managers to identify resource overallocation and quickly see how much work each team member has and how much capacity they have to take on additional work. This helps streamlining incoming new projects and also helps the team get work done faster.
Views
Celoxis Views gave Consilium managers and administrators a quick and generic list of projects, tasks, and time entries so that they could quickly scroll down and see whether there were any issues or delays.
Custom Fields
Consilium Technology extensively uses custom fields including formula fields to capture additional fields such as job number and report on project and resource metrics for their executive reporting.
CSV Export
CSV export of reports made it possible for Consilium Technology to easily export their report data into Excel for additional number manipulation (specific to their defense clients) to provide a clear summary of their project numbers for their clients.
API
Using the intuitive web-based API, Consilium Technology was able to seamlessly pull out very specific data for their internal data classification, additional data computation, and also integrate with their HR and Financial systems and automate processes and eliminate manual and double data entries.
Mobile Access
Mobile access enabled the staff to track time and submit updates on the go.
SSO
Implementing SSO enabled Consilium to improve the experience for their staff, eliminate the extra login and allowed users to move between services securely and uninterrupted without specifying their credentials each time.
The Results
Improved client billing
With Celoxis, Consilium Technology was able to fix billing leaks in their customer invoices. Managers were able to keep track of what amounts have been invoiced and keep them in sync with their finance teams. Celoxis also helped fix oversights in client billing and delayed invoices.
Reduced administrative overhead
Celoxis enabled the administrators to cut down their time spent on ‘busy’ admin work, fixing user mistakes and preparing ad-hoc management reports by almost 8-10% each month roughly translating to 3-4 hours saved per week.
Reduced license costs
Moving from 2 systems to an all-in-one platform has helped Consilium Technology save considerably on their software licensing costs. Moving away from Microsoft Project to Celoxis alone resulted in 55% reduced license costs for their project and program managers.
Do more work in less time
For managers, Celoxis was a huge blessing. Eliminating the complexity of using 2 systems and doing all of their project management activities in Celoxis, right from scheduling to monitoring to reporting, they were able to get 15% more work done. For team members, filling and correcting timesheets alone saved about 70% in time and effort.
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