How Portfolio Manager helped save BHS Robotics from project pandemonium

Who are they?

BHS Robotics is a world-class system integrator offering leading technology solutions, comprehensive capabilities, and extensive technical expertise. With over 3,000 installations nationwide, BHS Robotics system solutions work with a broad range of customers across dozens of industries with special emphasis on corrugated containers, plastic processing, packaging, building materials, and consumer products.

BHS Robotics has experience in the application of many automation technologies, including Drives, PLCs, HMI, Motion Control, Vision, Robotics, and SCADA. What they is combine these components to create custom solutions for their customers to improve productivity at all levels.

Challenges

BHS Robotics faced two main challenges before working with Portfolio Manager: Properly estimating timelines for custom orders and capacity issues related to engineering staffing. A surge of new orders and projects meant that these issues simply couldn’t go unaddressed for long. To compound both of these problems, they were running outdated systems for tracking their resources and labor costs and they knew there had to be a better way.

Results

BHS Robotics implemented Portfolio Manager fully in April 2022; here are the results they are seeing:

• The public declaration of aligning on priorities helped the entire organization to rally around the priority to streamline the process. Now everyone knows the priorities they should be working on without any guesswork.

• Portfolio Manager has reduced the calls from the sales and management teams to the engineering team requesting continuous status updates. Everyone can see an updated project timeline in real-time.

• Teams are able to estimate project timelines more efficiently and accurately by allowing individual team members to update their projects and estimate their tasks.

• Portfolio Manager gives the opportunity to each of BHS Robotics engineers, managers, and sales team members to foresee issues, allowing them to course-correct before it is too late.

A breakdown of their issues

Broken timelines

A large portion of BHS Robotics business focuses on custom orders, each having unique specifications. This poses a significant challenge for estimating project timelines as each new project is completely different from the last. When every new project isn’t replicable from past projects, BHS Robotics could not rely on building a project timeline from past results.

As a result, many projects weren’t accurately estimated upfront and ultimately shipped to customers well past their due dates, causing stress on their relationships with customers.

Capacity overload

BHS Robotics were facing record-breaking numbers of orders, and that means needing to find more highly-qualified engineers who can manage the complexity of the custom products they design and improved workflows to make life easier for the existing engineers.

This heavy increase in demand without visibility into the reality of capacity constraints led the engineering team to miss project deadlines more often. That led to engineers becoming overworked, stressed out, and BHS Robotics risked losing their incredibly hard to replace workforce.

Tracking way off-target

Before Portfolio Manager, BHS Robotics used a simple Excel spreadsheet to track projects and labor. For the amount of complex resources they were trying to manage, it was a cumbersome and tedious system. Simple inputs couldn’t be changed easily, tracking was taking far too long, and it was exacerbating all their other issues.

BHS Robotic’s increase in orders was great for the bottom line, but they didn’t have a robust plan for how to complete all the work in time. Their simple project tracker didn’t help them understand how prioritizing one project would affect another, and it didn’t account for dependency planning or tracking between projects, labor, and other resources.

Due to the complexity of their projects, difficulty predicting timelines, and resource constraints, it was challenging to plan ahead and predict when the various projects would be complete.

How Portfolio Manager helped

“I’ve gone through multiple programs with regards to resource and project management. This one by far is the best; it’s the only one that is truly fluid. It really helps plan the timeline for your projects and shows you the path of how you will achieve it.”

Bradley Brockmeyer, Engineering Manager, BHS Robotics

The main challenge they needed to solve was managing uncertainty amidst shifting priorities. Although other project management software they trialed had similar pain points to what they were already experiencing, the software was very manual, rigid, and difficult to maintain.

Flexible and intuitive

BHS Robotics needed the new project management system to be easily adopted and used by the entire organization. Portfolio Manager is designed with ease-of-use in mind, automatically updating itself to provide real-time insights into project timelines and capacity so no-one has to battle their way through spreadsheets.

A more balanced workload

BHS Robotics needed a solution that helped to manage the workload of their team of engineers. It was important to ensure they did not continue to be overbooked which could lead to team burnout and inaccurate project schedules. Portfolio Manager helps reduce overload with automatic resource-leveling to show when one person or asset is a bottleneck.

Aligned priorities

BHS Robotics needed software to give them insights into the impact of shifting priorities. Portfolio Manager helps by giving the entire company visibility to the status of all the projects so they could understand the impact of their shifting priorities and how that affected other projects’ timelines.

Accurate timelines

BHS Robotics continually delivered projects late due to their resource constraints and high level of demand. Portfolio Manager allowed input from each engineer rather than a singular person estimating timelines for the entire organization. This helped BHS Robotics ensure that the working time required for each project was accurately stated to help them meet their deadlines.