Success Stories

C&S Wholesale Grocers Uses the Express Lane to Better Project Portfolio Management

Business Issue

C&S Wholesale Grocers is a family owned and operated $20 billion wholesale grocer headquartered in Keene, New Hampshire with more than 20,000 employees. Over the past 25 years, the company has experienced strong growth, both organically and through multiple, rapid acquisitions. While good for business, the growth added a lot of complexity and quickly taxed the capabilities and capacity of the C&S IT department. Specifically, the IT department lacked an overall project management approach and the right tools to keep it running from A to Z, and to keep up with its growth.

Within the IT team itself, there were varying philosophies and toolsets, running the gamut from Microsoft Project to a hodgepodge of Excel spreadsheets. Additionally, the lack of a central help desk meant that business users would have to contact IT on a one-off basis in order to request needed features in production systems. C&S found itself in the position of throwing people at problems as they came up, and they were unable to easily answer the fundamental question: what are our people working on?

In the competitive world of the grocery industry, where supply chain optimization is the competitive differentiator, speed and efficiency are the keys to making sure already thin margins don't shrink. For C&S, it meant rethinking how it looked at its IT management and putting the right tools in place to be more efficient.

In closely analyzing its needs, the C&S team decided that they required a portfolio management system that delivered in the following core areas:

Visibility into a central repository of all projects in IT

• Provided new levels of business intelligence and let data drive their process
• Established a framework for tracking production changes
• Easily enabled budget and time tracking processes
• Suitable to the innovative culture and philosophy of the company

"Since we were a very large mainframe environment, we first looked to an onsite package from Computer Associates (CA) for a project management and help desk solution," explains Madeleine Kerr, Director of the IT Program Management Office (PMO) at C&S. "After going down the road with CA, we found that the total cost of ownership was prohibitive when factoring in maintenance, infrastructure costs, consulting expenses and additional headcount."

Solution

Ultimately, C&S decided that on-demand vendor Daptiv’s PPM6 was the one solution on the market that fit all of the company's requirements and would most easily adapt to their needs over time. Due to its hosted, web-based model, PPM6 proved extremely fast and simple to roll out to the team.

It took C&S less than 8 weeks to implement Daptiv which included configuring the environment to support their specific business process including time tracking and resource management reporting, and even building some brand new functionality using the Daptiv Dynamic Applications toolset to help address the change control process for production systems.

Once C&S was live on Daptiv, the first key step was to understand and examine exactly how much time was being spent where. To get a better sense of their projects and process, C&S used Daptiv to look at support, administration, application development, and other key business functions requiring time and effort from the IT organization. Having a wide portfolio in one central repository became vital to gaining visibility into and understanding time investment in the company's major technology initiatives.

Value

After six weeks of being live, C&S was able to determine that too many projects were underway at once, and then leveraged the data and analysis provided by Daptiv to determine which areas were most vital and should take precedence. For the first time, C&S had very concrete data to see where IT time was being allocated—an important first step in making resource decisions and portfolio decisions. They now are beginning to develop insight into key questions like how long a merger or acquisition takes to complete and if a certain project is strategically aligned with business goals. PPM6 also provides C&S with a system for SOX compliance and production change management. Ultimately, they've gained the ability to do a lot more with fewer resources.

Kerr sums it up by saying, "We were able to rapidly deploy Daptiv to our entire team, and immediately realized value in terms of improving our visibility into the project portfolio, understanding the time we're spending on projects and improving the overall project management process. We're also experiencing great success in using Daptiv’s Dynamic Application functionality to create customized applications in Daptiv that are improving many fundamental day-today processes within our IT department, such as our change control process. We expect to expand use of Daptiv into other areas of the company, and truly let data drive our day-to-day processes and activities."