McGladrey & Pullen's consulting division has many locations across the U.S. M&P has a number of audit requirements that must be verified in the process of managing a customer engagement. Tracking compliance and the status of a wide assortment of projects was a major organizational requirement and compliance was difficult to verify without considerable labor and travel expenses.

M&P selected Project Tracker to streamline the overall reporting and compliance aspects of managing their engagements. They had considered the build vs. buy scenario and came to the conclusion that the existing code base of Project Tracker would allow for a fast start to getting their exact requirements met. Automation Centre met with key project participants in the Minneapolis branch to devise a method for customizing Project Tracker into a tool designed specifically for M&P's consulting team. M&P has a first-class Lotus Notes development team because Tracker tools are licensed with open source code; they quickly assembled the finished product and have begun implementation of this solution into 63 offices across 16 states.

Automation Centre provided Project Tracker, a project management and reporting tool, which runs on Lotus Notes. This tool provides:

• Easy-to-use process templates, which allow the rapid assembly of new, project plans.
• Automated approval cycles for specific project documents.
• Assignment tracking and status reporting.
• Weekly status reporting that defines the current state of the engagement and provides a means for tracking plans versus actual milestone delivery.
• Automatic exception reporting to notify key project participants and the audit team of any milestones or processes that are past due.

Further, Automation Centre provided services to assist in the integration of the standard application code base into the specific reporting requirements defined by M&P's current and desired processes.

In providing a Notes based system, Automation Centre is helping M&P implement a system that will allow them to pursue two of their primary goals: decentralized growth and quality assurance. This new project management methodology will allow M&P to add personnel and projects in any location and immediately integrate those projects into a reporting process that ensures the quality of service they are committed to. Estimated savings due to reduced travel and compliance audit frequency should exceed $100,000 per year. Streamlined project assembly and management processes should save an additional $75,000 per year.