The Head of Research and Projects at CIO of the KUHN Group shares his experience of project management and the benefits of a project portfolio management solution like Project Monitor.
Kuhn is an industrial group with 5,000 employees and sales of €1 billion, specializing in the design, manufacture and sale of mechanical machinery for farmers (tillage, sowing, fertilization, spraying, forage harvesting, baling, wrapping, residue shredding and landscape maintenance).
10 plants in Europe, North America and South America.
Their distribution subsidiaries and importers cover more than 100 countries.
Kuhn has in-house ERP, CRM, PLM, PIM, IAM, EAI and all the standard building blocks of an information system.
Kuhn also develops a range of IT tools for external use, such as websites, extranet sites, mobile apps and on-board tools, which enable farmers to control their agricultural machinery from the cab of their tractor.
The Corporate IT department is involved in the industrial integration of the Group's various entities, in the development of common tools such as ERP, ECR, PLM, CRM, etc., and in the rationalization and deployment of cross-functional processes.
Around fifty people work in the IT department at our headquarters in Saverne, Alsace. 30 developers, and 20 people in charge of infrastructures. To these must be added some twenty local IT correspondents at the Group's other industrial and commercial sites around the world.
The Information System provides infrastructure and functionalities for a large number of users (over 3,000 internal users, and over 35,000 external users via their extranets).
"We manage an annual envelope of several thousand days of IT activity devoted to new projects."
The aim is to be able to answer a few simple questions on a daily basis:
Efficient management of IT activities means providing team members and IT management with a steering framework that enables them to :
"The software solution Project Monitor, as a technical support for our IT management framework, has enabled increased visibility and a culture of transparency between IT and the business, as well as between employees and managers".
And also :
"All this, characterized by a particularly low Total Cost of Ownership."