TPG The Project Group Implements International Enterprise Project Management Solution at Agere Mobility

Munich, Germany. 3 January 2007 – TPG The Project Group GmbH, a leading Microsoft Premier Project and Gold Certified Partner, announced today that it has successfully completed an extensive international implementation of Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) at the Mobility Solutions business unit of Agere Systems, a leading manufacturer of semiconductor components for mobile telecommunications. The solution’s special features include high performance and availability. In addition, the capabilities of the Microsoft Project solution have been comprehensively extended with multiple add-in products from TPG.

“This project’s particular challenge was to reconcile the various different system requirements,” said Dr. Thomas Henkelmann, Director Consulting Services at TPG. “The project planning philosophies in the countries involved – the USA, Britain, and Germany – are sometimes very different, even if we’re talking about one and the same company with operations distributed internationally. We resolved this question by involving Agere’s management from the outset, enabling us to keep up the momentum throughout the project. As a result, we were able to complete a rapid implementation in only three months, from the first requirements workshop through to the production system going live,” Henkelmann added. Currently approximately 100 project managers and 500 staff at different locations worldwide are working with the TPG solution, which includes load balancing features to ensure high performance and availability.

Following an international request for proposals, to which multiple Microsoft partners responded, it was Munich, Germany-based TPG’s bid that was accepted. “The complexity of our project, program and portfolio structure, along with the formal definition of project workflow, time, and resource management processes within the division, revealed the need for integration of project management information into an enterprise project management (EPM) system. The concept that TPG showed us was really convincing,” said Chris Gehman, the project manager in charge of this initiative at Agere Systems. “The fact that we had made the right decision was further confirmed during the requirements workshops. During these workshops it emerged that we needed certain extensions to the EPM solution and TPG made these available very quickly,” added Gehman.

Comprehensive expansion of Microsoft EPM Functionality
The enterprise-wide project management solution based on Microsoft Office Project 2003 has been extended with several TPG products.
- One of TPG ResourceLink’s capabilities is the flexible import of resource data from an external personnel database into the Enterprise Resource Pool.
- The distinctive multi-project structure, including multiple main and sub-projects, required the deployment of TPG MilestoneLink, a product that transparently communicates milestone dependencies across projects.
- The Milestone Trend Analysis (TPG MTA Client) enables the visualization of how important milestones are progressing over time for meaningful reporting.
- TPG MilestoneRollup shows an at-a-glance overview of all marked milestones in the whole project portfolio and
- TPG AssignmentRollup accomplishes the same function for all the tasks of a given staff member.

About Agere Systems Inc.
Agere Systems is a world leader in telecommunications semiconductor design and manufacturing. Business units for new product development include: Storage, Mobility, Enterprise and Networking, and Telecommunications. Corporate headquarters for Agere Systems are located in Allentown, PA, USA. Agere Systems Mobility Division is the second-largest business entity in Agere whose products include design and manufacturing of integrated circuit digital signal processor-based system solutions for wireless communications systems. Headquartered in Ascot, UK, the Mobility Division manages principal design centers located in the United States (Allentown, PA), Great Britain (Ascot, UK), Germany (Munich, GE), Australia (Sydney, AUS), India (Bangalore) and, most recently, Israel (Raanana). Mobility Division currently has ~200 active MSProject schedules under ~ 10 programs. These also will aggregate into 3 - 5 portfolios.

About The Project Group
The Project Group GmbH (TPG), based in Munich, Germany, is a team of internationally-recognized experts in IT solutions for enterprise-wide project management. TPG is the leading developer of Microsoft Project add-ins and offers implementation services for Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solutions to large and mid-sized enterprises. TPG places particular emphasis on the integration of EPM in the financial controlling area as well as on IT support for Project Management Offices (PMO). TPG’s range of services is complemented by seminars for Microsoft Project users and developers.

The Project Group is a leading Microsoft Premier Project Partner in the German-speaking countries. The company’s management team, composed of internationally-acknowledged specialists in EPM, collectively has over 60 man-years experience with Microsoft Project since Version 1 Beta appeared in 1989. The Project Group is a member of the Partner Advisory Council, an international advisory committee for the Microsoft Project development team, which counts only twenty members worldwide.

The Project Group’s customer base includes global enterprises like Agere, Agip, ATLAS, Audi, Bentley, Bosch, British Aerospace, Cognis Specialist Chemicals, DaimlerChrysler, Israel Aircraft Industries, Irish Rail, Keiper-Recaro, MAN B&W, Microsoft, Miele, Roche, SAP, Schukra, Siemens, Swisscom, and Texas Instruments.

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IMPORTANT NOTE TO EDITORS:
The Project Group Informationstechnologie GmbH is a German-based company and is not related to the similarly-named The Project Group based in Houston, Texas.

For further information, please visit www.theprojectgroup.com/index_e.html
Press contact: Mr. Achim Schmidt-Sibeth
Email: AchimS@theprojectgroup.de
Phone: 49 (89) 61 55 93 51
Fax: 49 (89) 61 55 93 40

This release was published on openPR.