American Express Travel

The Challenge

With an organization as large as American Express Travel, it’s difficult to know how employee time is spent across the divisions. With offices and workers across the continents, finding a way to capture the costs and labor associated with projects, and support calls becomes a daunting efforts.

The Solution

Implementing Microsoft’s Portfolio Project management tool, Project Server, the company leveraged the scheduling power of Project Professional to create master templates for the decentralized office departments while extending the functionality of PWA’s time management components. With the power of these tools in the hands of Project managers, it was now possible to track time spent on activities in a single centralized data source.

But the story doesn’t end there. Project Server is a powerful platform with highly extensible reporting capabilities. SunStreet Technology designed and built reports to allow for their travel division to audit and measure data based on weekly, monthly and annual goals. Also part of the solution was a robust error checking tool designed on the front-end interface using custom code. With their manual error checking process now automated, the process went from hours to seconds of time saved per week for each user. With a good, clean, data entry system in place, key performance indicators (KPIs) were easy to build for real-time governance and metrics of the division using SQL server and SQL Server Reporting Services.

The Results

The successful implementation gave way to an invitation from the accounts receivable department to optimize a data collection tool that prevented the operator from doing any work. When the program was run, it locked the workstation up for several hours. Her strategy to executing the job was to schedule it around lunchtime and hope it didn’t fail. It took only a week but our re-coding and optimization eliminated the excess wait times. The job now takes about 22 seconds to run.