Carestream Successfully Migrates Planview Enterprise from On Premises to the Planview Cloud

Located in Rochester, New York, Carestream is a global corporation with more than 100 years of leadership. The company, formerly Eastman Kodak’s Health Imaging Group, is an independent subsidiary of Onex Corporation of Canada, one of Canada’s largest corporations. Carestream specializes in medical imaging and IT, dental, and non-destructive testing of objects (such as fragile artifacts and suspicious containers). Carestream reported approximately $2.4 billion in revenue in 2015, and employs 7,000 people in 170 countries. IT supports 1,000 Planview Portfolios users in 17 time zones, making it a 24-hour operation.

Carestream has been a Planview customer since 2009 and was running Planview Enterprise on-premises. Three different divisions within the company use Planview Portfolios : Corporate IT uses the software for typical IT portfolio projects. The Healthcare Information Solutions (HCIS) group uses it to support all customer installations, with each install considered a separate project. The R&D group manages all efforts and tracks strategies in Planview Portfolios.

While Planview Portfolios was successful in helping these groups manage their resources and projects, the version they were using needed updating. Carestream wanted to improve capacity and demand and reduce the complexity of having 24 interfaces to other systems. “We had multiple sources of truth spread across the enterprise,” says Allan Shafer, Senior Applications Architect at Carestream. “We wanted a single point of view for capacity and project management. We were using Planview Enterprise to provide us with a historical view but had no insight into the future.”

To reduce costs and improve productivity, the CIO and IT leaders determined it was time to upgrade to the latest version of Planview Portfolios and move the entire platform to the cloud.

The decision to move to the cloud came after a thorough cost and effort analysis. The transition would mean IT could reduce costs by eliminating eight servers. It would also reduce software license and support costs. The cost savings was matched by the reduction in effort. Because Planview manages the backend support, Carestream was able to eliminate the need for specialized staff to maintain the software.

“Now, when I need something installed or have any script issues, for instance, I just put in a support ticket and Planview Customer Care fixes it,” explains Shafer. “Now we can focus on bigger things because Planview takes care of the support.”

The cloud also affords better response times for Carestream’s overseas locations. Planview Portfolios had been managed in Carestream’s datacenter and was struggling with incoming intranet traffic. With the cloud, there is better throughput going through a hosted site rather than through Carestream’s firewall, improving response rates considerably.

Carestream utilized Planview consulting and best practices, designing the upgrade to the new version to work like a typical IT project. They assigned a project manager and included key stakeholders from HCIS and R&D. The CIO was onboard, a key factor for an IT organization going through a major change. “Our CIO wanted this install to be out-of-the-box with no customization,” says Tony Morales, Manager of Carestream’s IT PMO. “His mantra became, ‘Out-of-the-box, no customization, best practices.’ We still had some project managers wanting to use spreadsheets so having CIO support made it easier for us to say, ‘No.’”

Today, Carestream has streamlined and improved its processes to eliminate complexity. Installs are now seamless and response rates for tickets are same day. Corporate IT has quicker delivery of status information and has eliminated the use of spreadsheets. All data comes out of Planview Portfolios. “During our leadership meetings with the CIO, we can pull up Planview Portfolios and they can look at it live,” says Shafer. “If everyone knows your CIO is looking at the data live, it’s a huge incentive to make sure it’s accurate. It’s also easier because you’re not manually inserting data into a spreadsheet to manipulate it.”

The consistency of information gives Carestream the single source of truth it desired. There is only one answer to data questions and it is no longer dependent on who is asked. Carestream has a secure connection from its network to the Planview site. Data is extracted, encrypted and sent in-house with no manual data entry. They use a Planview integration with their SAP environment that pulls the cost information into Planview Portfolios, which is the record for all effort. Now, Carestream has visibility into both costs and effort so they can forecast, plan and track all projects and expenditures.

Since upgrading to the latest version of Planview Enterprise and moving to the cloud through the Planview CloudLift Program, Carestream has:

• A single record of project information across the enterprise
• Visibility into capacity and demand management
• Reduced costs, complexity, and effort to support the Planview application
• Improved productivity and response rates
• Accurate, real-time data to drive decisions, planning and strategies
• Improved response time and efficiency for users across the globe

To learn more about what Planview® solutions can do for your organization, visit Planview.com