Shiji Unlocks Visibility, Streamlines Workflows, and Modernizes Service Delivery with Planview

Shiji needed to streamline processes and technology to gain more visibility into the state of the business. They were working with redundant tools and no integrations, causing employees to spend hours on activities that weren’t efficient for customers or the business.

Planview’s PSA solution helped Shiji increase visibility, simplify workflows, and gain more insight into project success. Better visibility and workflows meant Shiji could easily automate their data analysis, saving them time and resources that were spent on manual processes.

Founded in 1998, Shiji is a multi-national technology company that provides software solutions and services for enterprise companies in the hospitality, food service, retail, and entertainment industries. They serve more than 91,000 hotels, 200,000 restaurants, and 600,000 retail outlets worldwide. Key clients include Hilton, IHG, Hyatt, Mandarin Oriental, Peninsula Hotels, Kempinski Hotel, and MGM Grand.

Shiji’s Global Services PMO team is the primary delivery arm for global accounts, ensuring they maintain a consistent delivery model when working with accounts that span multiple regions and products.

Shiji had several redundant tools and few usable integrations. This created a misalignment between business and technology and made workflow optimization difficult due to disconnected teams, software, and systems, resulting in fragmented tools, processes, and data. They were looking for a solution to help them consolidate and streamline their processes in one system to help bring balance to their resource utilization and ensure visibility on what resources and skills were needed for future projects.

Increasing utilization transparency would help inform organizational goals and empower Shiji to leverage global resource load balancing more effectively, especially as the ebb and flow of business varies by region.

“Previously, with multiple systems, employees were using Excel to manually report on their utilization. The information was inaccurate and could not be rolled up from the team, to department, to region, or to a global level,” says Annie Moseanko, Senior Director of Global Services PMO at Shiji Group.

Annie Moseanko joined the organization to tackle critical business gaps around:

• Visibility
• Optimizing workflows
• Gaining transparency around utilization
• Understanding project success factors

“Those four pieces, for us, were the basic puzzle in terms of getting started with Planview in our early PSA journey,” says Moseanko.

Leadership visibility was also a challenge for Shiji. It was important for the executives to see what was happening across the entire portfolio, including all data and KPIs that could be reported from the individual, team, department, program, regional, and global levels. “Getting access to all that data was a key driver for us,” says Moseanko.

Finally, the organization wanted to define project success factors more broadly. In addition to answering questions such as, “How are we looking at the health of projects?” and “How are we evaluating when a Project Manager is doing a good job?”, Shiji wanted to ensure they could identify when a project is at risk so they can quickly intervene and provide corrective action.

Shiji needed to achieve the highest revenue potential for their resources. They chose Planview’s PSA solution because it empowered them to proactively optimize resource utilization and delivery execution from the same system.

Now, leadership could easily see which teams were delivering across a wide range of metrics, giving them the data to celebrate success. Planview’s centralized data and real-time visibility also helped management be more proactive in planning capacity and allocating resources, leading to quicker staffing and more balanced utilization.

With the help of Planview’s PSA solution, Shiji Global PMO team was able to leverage actionable insights and reports more efficiently. Accurate data was delivered to finance and business leaders more often. Their teams could automate the analysis of vast data and obtain results in a timely manner, which improved accuracy and reduced manual labor.

Teams could focus their efforts on billable work and gain more transparency around utilization. This way, the organization was able to save time and resources by automating what would have otherwise been a tedious process.

“Due to multiple systems and manual reporting methods used previously, the data lacked accuracy and couldn't be aggregated across different internal levels," says Moseanko.

Shiji also focused on eliminating multiple tools and optimizing workflows. Tools like Smartsheet, Saviom, Excel, and on-premises storage were abandoned in favor of Planview’s PSA solution. They integrated their Zoho CRM with Planview’s solution to streamline project setup, and integrated Project Outcomes through Zoho to revamp accounts receivable activities upon project milestones and closure.

Their team even utilized Planview’s solution as the primary driver of their Annual Global Portfolio Review, where they analyze a region’s overall performance against defined KPIs.

By working with Planview, Shiji was able to address critical business challenges.

Shiji achieved leadership visibility by leveraging the organization’s data, enabling the leadership team to make better business decisions. They also saved hundreds of hours by integrating their systems to automate and simplify workflows. Moreover, the organization improved their visibility into project success and can now more easily evaluate project performance and risk.

The Shiji team saw a massive improvement in utilization. “Our entire utilization rose about 35% for resource and project management engagement across the globe, so that was a monster win for us from an organizational perspective,” said Moseanko.

The success of this partnership paved the way for further collaboration between Planview and Shiji.

“After we got through those initial key deliverables, we took a step back and said, what’s the next level of evolution we’re going to have as a services delivery organization?” said Moseanko. “That's when our Customer Success Manager proposed the PSA journey workshop."

Planview's PSA journey workshop is designed to help Planview's customers continue to mature and drive more business value. It allows the customer success team to learn more about their customers and assess the current state of their business, goals, and how they can achieve them.

"We're now starting to flex those dashboards into future-looking forecasting – forecasting capacity, forecasting revenue," says Moseanko. "That's been a big growth area for us, from looking backward and at what we're currently doing, to now looking at the entire cycle. Then feeding that data back into multiple teams across the business to help maximize our delivery."

Planview helped Shiji map capabilities within their Planview solution, which will help them accomplish their goals, such as forecasting capacity and revenue using real-time dashboards.

"We’re going to continue to engage with Planview and our Customer Success Manager on Shiji’s Delivery Growth and Strategic Plans,” said Moseanko.