Identifying goals
Turner & Townsend (T&T) is a global professional services company headquartered in Leeds, United Kingdom, specializing in program management, project management, cost management, and consulting. Emerging from the COVID pandemic, T&T’s Client, Heathrow Airport recognized the need to enhance existing processes, procedures, tools, technology and reporting in order to better manage their portfolios, programs and projects. Their goal was to enhance their visibility of performance data to support more informed decision-making across the enterprise, including project selection, incremental works authorization, delivery performance and overall management of the capital plan. Heathrow Airport appointed Turner & Townsend to enhance the existing PMO by:
Defining Integrated Project Control processes and procedures
Replacing legacy systems and intensive excel with best-in-class software solutions
Automating reporting outputs aligned to user requirements
Overcoming challenges
Heathrow Airport is the world’s busiest airport and one of Europe’s most important transportation hubs. In addition to being a transportation hub for passengers, Heathrow is also a critical hub for cargo.
Heathrow’s current process, procedure and systems architecture required enhancement. The system landscape consisted of legacy systems that operated in isolation and did not share data; reporting outputs were labor-intensive, and processes and procedures needed to be more consistently applied.
Lack of integration resulted in additional resources, duplication of effort, manual intervention and double data handling. For example, the project team spent several hours manually inputting data into various systems from spreadsheets they had created from different sources.
Additionally, reporting was static, and any ad-hoc requests for information outside the standard month-end requirements took a lot of work to compile and deliver.
Heathrow recognized the need to transition from Excel to enterprise systems for cost, change, performance, schedule and risk integrated into a single data repository so that users see real-time data instead of waiting until end-of-month reports are generated.
Realizing results
Turner & Townsend did an internal assessment of the tools on the market and went through the requirements for Heathrow. They selected Sequence Enterprise as the cost, change, performance and portfolio management solution.
The Sequence Enterprise (formerly EcoSys) application supported the digitization of enterprise-wide processes and procedure (Portfolio management; Project Selection; Gateway approvals, Change Control, Financial Control and Performance Management). Sequence Enterprise was able to integrate seamlessly with other Enterprise-wide systems (e.g., Oracle). The application integrated seamlessly with the data warehouse, with data updates three times a day, providing real-time visibility of performance data to the client teams.
In addition, the Octave Team also carried out six weeks of training for Turner & Townsend to use Sequence Enterprise, starting with awareness to process step training/instructions followed by four months of integration consultation. Approximately 60 users use the current system. The system currently manages 500 live projects, including construction, operations and technology.
“Sequence Enterprise has been a perfect fit for our client’s requirements due to its out-of-the-box configuration. We could get it up and running without involving our client’s IT team. Since then, there have been regular improvements to the system that have made it even more efficient”, says Dan Ryan, Account Manager, Turner & Townsend. “Sequence Enterprise was able to provide us with data that is as reliable as the current one but more efficiently,” he added.
Moving forward
Turner & Townsend is delighted with the new system, which has been implemented as planned, on time, and within budget. The client is keen to work with Sequence Enterprise again in the future, as they have been very flexible in adapting the project to meet their needs.
