Why Standards Matter

Based on guidance from the AQM program, Neusoft Huiju reviewed all of its processes for the bid and delivery cycles. Specifically, the company enhanced opportunities for review processes, included a formal handover process from the pre-sales team to implementation team, and implemented a customer satisfaction survey as well as knowledge management processes.  It also standardized all project management documentation, including the project plan, issue log, communication plan, project status report, and customer satisfaction survey.

One of the biggest improvements Neusoft Huiju made was in the area of its project quality audit process, where it developed an audit sheet that is fully aligned with SAP’s ASAP methodology and includes checkpoints for each project phase. “By using this quality audit sheet, it is easy for the project manager to evaluate and monitor the project quality status. With the result of this evaluation, we can have a clear picture of the project status – which is in a good status and which is not. Especially for the unsatisfied points, we can have follow-up activities, such as what is the mitigation plan and who will be the owner for the improvement, also when is the deadline,” says Wang. “From the process point of view, it is very helpful for us to standardize our quality review activities by using this document as the quality baseline.”

As another tangible benefit from the AQM program, the knowledge management process has been improved significantly. “I can give you an example of this,” says Wang. “Before, we needed six resources for an archiving project, since the project required covering five modules (FI, CO, PP, MM, SD) with five consultants and one project manager. And normally the project took two to three months to complete.”

After Neusoft Huiju had completed several similar archiving projects, its consultants participated in the AQM program’s “lessons-learned” session, and summarized the technical solutions and approaches of the archiving projects. Additionally, they standardized all the necessary project documents, which can now be shared internally with other consultants as a training material.

“Now, we only need two resources to complete the archiving projects. One is for FI/CO and project management; another can cover all other logistic modules,” says Wang. “Compared with the previous approach, after the knowledge was structured and transferred, we saved around 60 percent of the budget for archiving projects.”

Write a comment

cforms contact form by delicious:days