Movex Project Processing—
Product Highlights
Movex Project Processing manages all aspects of projects, including overview, functionality and integration.
Movex Project Processing (PJP) is a comprehensive project management solution that improves information sharing and decision making during the life cycle of a project. Whether you are a project-oriented company or only carry out projects occasionally, powerful project management tools will simplify your tasks and enable you to achieve your goals, on time and within budget.
A company’s project management operations can be roughly divided into five areas:
- Development projects
- Engineer-to-order projects
- Construction projects
- Installation projects
- Projects with a short duration.
A key benefit of using Movex PJP is that a project viewpoint is applied to all the various activities that comprise a project. Movex PJP also helps you manage and control all project phases from quotation, through engineering and production, to delivery and after-sales.
In the early stages of a project, you might need several versions of quotations and costings to facilitate negotiations and eventually win a contract. The costs involved in the quotation process can have a major impact on the overall financial result and should therefore be included as part of the overall project result.
In production, when meeting deadlines and achieving milestones is crucial, the complete range of project activities should be consolidated and possible to review. Project managers demand instant access to both detailed and consolidated project information for fast and accurate decision making and control. Variations and contingency plans must be managed properly. These factors can quickly turn any project from a success into a disaster (or vice versa) depending on how they are managed.
In the after-sales phase, it is necessary to link warranty costs and additional sales to the project in order to achieve a true measure of overall performance. The after-sales phase also provides an indispensable source of information when creating an information database for future projects.
Scalable Project Structures
The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) defines how contractual work is broken down and organized. The WBS is defined in Movex PJP as a multilevel project structure including an unlimited number of project phases and subprojects.
The initial project structure can be created during the quotation phase and then gradually refined as the project proceeds and the workscope becomes defined in detail. Additional sales, variations and after sales activities are easily added to the overall WBS.
In Movex PJP, project templates are important input when a new project structure is defined. By using well-defined templates, you save time entering new projects. More importantly, Movex users can become more efficient by reusing information from previous projects to create a set of best practices.
Tight Integration
One of the strongest advantages of Movex PJP is the fact that it is a tightly integrated solution. Further, since Movex PJP is an integral part of the complete Movex package, you always have quick access to all operations controlled via Movex.
When planning and performing project activities in areas such as manufacturing, sales and distribution, you can plan and release orders from Movex PJP, continuously track the order status and perform individual drill-down activities.
All project-related information is collected at the source regardless of whether it involves work order operations, accounts payable or any other transaction. This minimizes administration and cuts lead times from events to decisions. From a project manager’s viewpoint, the quick and comprehensive project overviews eliminate the need for periodical closings to review project performance.
Budgeting
The benefits of accurate budgeting depend on a company’s ability to report the actual costs of material labor for a project. Being able to identify costs as the project develops is key to the project’s success. However, many companies struggle to establish budgets, but do not dedicate enough effort to following up on their budgeted items.
Movex PJP makes budgeting easy. You can place a budget on any level in a project structure for cost and revenue. For example, a budget on the subproject level covers all underlying activities. You can also place a budget on the detail level for each specific activity. When a budget version is locked, all budget items are totaled from the bottom up in the project structure, providing you with a total budget on the top-level structure.
Budget templates connected to a project element enable you to control and simplify your work. Movex also makes it possible to transfer the actual cost from a closed project into a budget for a new project.
Highlights of the budgeting functionality in Movex PJP are that:
- You can choose from several budget categories, such as original budget, committed budget and cash flow budget.
- Functionality is available that enables you to compare different budget versions and forecasts to outcome.
- Budgets can be distributed according to predefined distribution curves with a manual override capability.
- Different distribution curves are available for different budget categories.
- The budget is aggregated from a predefined cost structure.
- The cost budget can be divided into distributed budget, undistributed budget and management reserve (contingency).
- Invoice planning can be calculated according to percent of completion, advance invoicing, partial invoicing or on-account invoicing.
- Project revenues are part of the project budget to keep the budget within desired project margins.
- Several currencies can be managed in a project budget.
Forecasting
Movex PJP offers extensive forecasting features with a combination of automatic and manual forecasting tools. You choose whether to use a top-down or bottom-up approach, which enables you to forecast at the project activity level or the subproject level.
Continuously updated forecasts help you maintain control of each project’s financial development and guide you in adjusting forecast figures. Forecasts with version control let you control and follow up on the financial development in a project on a regular basis.
New forecast versions enable you to process any changes in estimated costs and revenues. A new forecast version is automatically updated with actual cost, committed cost and activity close. The result of the forecasting process serves as input to project recognition.
Cost Control
Maintaining a healthy profit margin in project-oriented industries depends heavily on controlling project costs. The best way to achieve a healthy margin is to establish an effective approach to project management and make sure that your project management activities are thoroughly integrated with all your key business processes.
Extensive financial functionality covers all the financial aspects of a modern organization. Movex uses multidimensional accounting strings, whose structures can be flexibly designed. Complete integration throughout all aspects of the system helps to ensure that all financial transactions, external and internal, are correctly controlled and analyzed. In addition to containing the financial functionality you need, Movex PJP is also a highly effective information tool that helps you meet all your statutory accounting and business requirements.
Cost control functionality enables you to manage budgeting, committed costs, actual costs, forecasts, variation orders, project closings and reporting. From the very beginning of each project, you must focus on each project’s total cost and profit margin. For example, unplanned costs at the beginning of a project can drastically reduce or eliminate planned profit.
To prevent this sort of unpleasant surprise, completed work must be compared to its cost. Therefore, your project budget must be able to absorb unforeseen costs. This sort of reserve is known as management reserve. Movex PJP provides you with the dynamic cost control and logging functionality you need to easily redistribute and track costs in different areas of a project.
Time and Resource Planning
A cornerstone of efficient project management is optimizing resource utilization within single projects and throughout all projects for a company or a division. Improperly managed resource allocation often causes project backlogs. Any deviations from the project plan are also a source of budget overruns.
Movex PJP offers a flexible resource allocation framework where long-term resource allocation is done according to roles and qualifications. This enables you to have a comprehensive overview of resource utilization and quickly obtain additional resources when needed.
In the short run, you can specify resource requirements in detail by pinpointing individual resources or people to be assigned to tasks. Using advanced search capabilities, you have the option of searching through available resources on a detailed level based on criteria you define. Individual resources then replace the previous rough-cut allocation, resulting in an integrated approach to managing resource dilemmas.
A standardized interface to Microsoft Project offers direct access to a standard desktop application so you can visualize and carry out the actual plan. An open API also enables integration to other planning tools.
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