A new dawn for CFV Labs project management

About CFV Solar Test Laboratory

CFV Labs, or CFV Solar Test Laboratory, is an accredited and highly sophisticated institution that performs multistep, long-term testing and certification of photovoltaic assemblies with the latest equipment.

CFV Labs works on 20 to 30 certification projects at any given time, and since typical projects consist of dozens or hundreds of interdependent tests and procedures performed over several months, project management is one of CFV Lab’s core competencies. That means without excellent attention to project details and timelines, the company’s whole business model fails.

“The nature of our business is such that our projects can be complicated, last months, and have complex dependencies,” says Chase Henson, operations manager for the company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Since this is 100-percent laboratory work performed by engineers and scientists, most of whom are good coders, industry outsiders might assume that critical management tasks are handled either by one of the many available laboratory information management systems (LIMS) or by a heavily customized homegrown solution.

However, that assumption would be wrong; since 2017, CFV Labs has relied on Portfolio Manager by Tempo, a versatile, cloud-served project management tool with an industry-leading predictive scheduling engine. Since then, Portfolio Manager has helped the teams CFV Labs successfully complete the multistep, long-lifecycle, testing and certification projects that the firm and its clients depend on.

Why Portfolio Manager?

“We have a good reputation for being on time and for being transparent,” says general manager Jim Crimmins. “It’s an important differentiator for us; having more project information available, quicker, and it is important to everything we do, including marketing. Portfolio Manager is absolutely helping us with this, it’s proved itself over a year and a half of full implementation, and its importance to us is not up for debate.”

Henson agrees, highlighting how many complex projects they have to undertake and just how Portfolio Manager enabled them to prioritize their resources efficiently and get an advantage over their competitors.

He added: “Portfolio Manager enabled us to set more aggressive project completion dates and to hit those targets more consistently. It also provides better project reporting and feedback, and we can make that information more visible to clients – that reassures them, and makes us more accountable.

Illuminating the possibilities

CFV Labs is mainly composed of careful engineers, and they took a methodical approach to select new enterprise software, first listing all the features and qualities they needed in a project management solution and then comparing everything available to that list. They weren’t in a hurry.

“We tried out everything we could get a trial for,” says Henson. “When Portfolio Manager showed up in search engine results, it looked good right away.”

A few main criteria emerged during the review and selection process:

1. Lightweight, intuitive, and cost effective Reasonably, CFV Labs expected to find uncomplicated data entry and a simple interface in a modern project management solution; however, actually finding a solution with those two features proved to be frustrating, especially in the world of specialized lab management software. “Our experience is that most LIMS/ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems are designed for laboratories with drastically different workflows to ours – usually biological or chemical test labs – and they’re inflexible, requiring absurd levels of customization,” says Henson. “Additionally, most of the systems we looked at were well outside the range of what we wanted to spend on project management.”

2. Easy implementation “We wanted a PM solution that worked right out of the box and fit our workflows as closely as possible, with no customization,” Henson adds. “Ideally, my technical staff should be able to be up and running in 15 minutes for basic tasks and have decent proficiency within a week.” Portfolio Manager easily satisfied this reasonable requirement. Henson estimates that the solution met “90 to 95 percent” of CFV Lab’s needs without any adaptation on CFV Lab’s part for workflows or reporting procedures. Put another way, Portfolio Manager worked for CFV Labs, not vice-versa.

3. OS agnosticism and API access CFV Lab’s engineers knew they wanted a PM solution that was not dependent on any particular operating system and that required no locally installed software.

"The only way to beat out our competitors is to prioritize our resources more efficiently. Portfolio Manager immediately helped us to do that better than other labs."

Chase Henson, Operations Manager, CFV Solar Test Laboratory

Portfolio Manager gave them internal flexibility in a business that routinely requires the application of a great deal of skillfully implemented computing power, and it also let them avoid all the tedious hassles of installing, maintaining, and updating locally installed enterprise software.

They also wanted easy and rational access to the solution’s application program interface. Not for customization – but for connection; CFV Labs is stocked full of good coders, and they’re particularly handy with Python, the scripting language that many labs use to tie together lab equipment and specialized software.

In particular, CFV Labs wanted to integrate Portfolio Manager with three web-based systems the team was already using: Citrix Sharefile (document control and secure report sharing), Pipedrive (customer relationship and sales leads management), and LIMSey (lab management).

“Access to Portfolio Manager’s API allowed us to leverage our Python scripting skills to further automate and improve our business,” says Henson, “and implementing those connections was a breeze.”

Right out of the box

Within a day or two of implementation, CFV Labs was able to use Portfolio Manager to automate one of the company’s most difficult management tasks: The creation of detailed, customized project schedules. The certification of a particular photovoltaic panel, for example, might require more than 150 different procedures, performed in five interdependent sequences.

Manually scheduling all this work and prioritizing equipment time had typically been an extremely tedious task, but one that had to be done well for efficient project completion.

Portfolio Manager’s emphasis on resource scheduling and prioritization was critical to this automated scheduling. At many firms, ‘resources’ are mainly people – people with particular skill sets, such as graphic designers or structural engineers, who have a limited number of hours to divvy out to projects.

The ten or so engineers at CFV Labs are valuable resources, but so are the various testing chambers and pieces of lab equipment used to do actual project work.

These resource hours should be viewed as precious – in some cases, the equipment being used is so specialized that it’s not available anywhere else in North America. For CFV Labs, serving clients well and prospering economically means prioritizing and scheduling these hours as efficiently as possible.

Portfolio Manager improved resource utilization right out of the gate, and the improvement was measurable.

“Before Portfolio Manager implementation, we occasionally missed deadlines due to misallocated resources or bottlenecks that we didn’t anticipate,” Henson says. “After implementation, we have been able to increase throughput in the lab while meeting tight deadlines and providing clients with real-time scheduling updates. It’s made a big difference for us.”

All of this speaks to Portfolio Manager’s versatility as a project management solution. It’s an extremely powerful enterprise resource planning solution that’s simple to use and fast to implement, and it’s not overfocused on particular types or sizes of enterprises.

It’s been a smashing success for semiconductor manufacturers, web designers, accountants, and many other diverse firms. And, as CFV Labs has proven, it thrives when applied in the specialized, highly technical, and complex arena of certification laboratories.