GRIP - IT COST CENTER MANAGER

SOFTWARE AND PROCESSES FOR MANAGING
ACROSS COST CENTERS

What is your challenge as you see it?

”We want to see if every cost center is profitable, and it is utilized to the fullest extent possible. As a Finance Manager sitting at our Corporate Headquarters, part of my job is to manage the relationships across cost centers – both in house and outsourced cost centers. For every project or application activity that comes in as a new demand, and in-progress, we would like to see the baseline numbers, reforecast as well as monthly actual spending, on a cost center by cost center basis. We need to compare that with the workload/work done by every cost center.”

What solutions do you have today?

”Today, we do not have ANY tools that would directly accomplish that. We download cost center based data from financial systems and then we download planning data from project planning systems and then try to compare and manually create a match of workload-spend data. It is VERY hard and time-consuming to true up the numbers. There is no consistency in the way the financial systems look at cost centers versus the way the planning systems enter cost centers.”

What exactly do you need and why is it different?

You need a flexible, yet robust process that brings all cost centers to the table, right when we do baseline for every new project or operational activity. You then need a software that collects all cost center estimates from a spend as well as workload perspective. We then need a formal decision support mechanism that monitors on a weekly/monthly basis, every cost center with respect to their commitments, their hurdles and their delivery and the cost associated with it.

What does GRIP-IT Cost Center Manager do? (What are its features?)

GRIP-IT Cost Center Manager is a “one-stop shop” for all project managers, requesting for new projects to come in and shop for the right cost center to meet their needs, and engage them through a very powerful estimation and commitment process. Once engaged cost centers become part of the project team and deliver work according to their committed time and money. On a different dimension, the Cost Center Governance Team can go and look individual cost centers, look at their workload and profitability, on a weekly and monthly basis. This allows the Cost Center Governance team to report on the progress of projects, look at the common issues that occur at the cost centers and address them in a timely fashion.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

GRIP-IT Cost Center Managers is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.