Success Stories

USPS’s Supply Management Group Delivers Millions in Cost Reduction with Daptiv PPM

The United States Postal Office’s Supply Management Group was created to reduce company costs and improve overall service. The group comprised of five divisions: services, supplies, transportation, mail equipment & facilities.

Need

Within USPS, Supply Management (SM) has a Supply Chain Management (SCM) Strategies Group that focuses on SCM improvements and strategic alignment both horizontally and vertically. This includes projects in customer relations, SCM solutions, communications, supplier relations and e-business groups. Problems arose within the company when the teams weren’t coordinating or communicating with each other effectively. Projects would overlap; numerous calls and Excel spreadsheets would be made without any clear lines of project management. “There were too many things going on at once with no visibility into overall projects tracking time against projects,” says John Eisaman, Manager of Strategic Alignment, Supply Management. “We had Microsoft Project in place but most were against using it because it wasn’t comprehensive. We needed something that was simple to use yet offered robust functionality and applications.”

The Postal Service’s IT department developed an in-house project management tool to manage their IT projects but it didn’t suit the needs of the SM organization.

Solution

“When we began doing an online search to see what’s best in the market, a colleague forwarded me an email about Daptiv (then eProject). We found that Daptiv PPM was the best solution because of the simple user interface and robust functionality,” says Eisaman. The company started out with a 40 user subscription and when it came time to roll out Daptiv PPM within the organization, the process was “amazingly simple,” relates Eisaman. “The support at Daptiv helped us set up the right framework, onsite training and more detailed educational sessions.”

Using Daptiv PPM was part of a strategic initiative for the Supply Management group to help track projects and increase accountability. USPS implemented a requirement for SCM Strategies employees to actively log in and learn how to use the tool over a period of two months.

Value

“Before implementing Daptiv, we would identify a project and project managers and team members would say that things were going great and things were getting done, but when it came time for a performance evaluation, it was clear that things had not been progressing as planned,” says Eisaman. With Daptiv PPM’s dashboard, there is added attention to the project because USPS can get a snapshot of the projects they are working on, including the status. “Now, managers are able to track projects and spend more time on them, prompting more accountability.” Because one of the Supply Management’s main objectives is to reduce USPS costs, monitoring resources is extremely important. “Tracking budgets used to be a huge mess at the end of the year,” explains Eisaman. “Now, with Daptiv PPM, we can track information based on our specific criteria on a monthly basis. We know exactly how projects are progressing and which individuals are contributing.”

In 2007, the Supply Management Group worked on 26 projects with Daptiv PPM. Upper management often logged into the tool to evaluate the progress of the projects from a strategic standpoint. “Because Daptiv PPM was so powerful, we increased our number of licenses from 40 to 190 to help us track project budgets and increase visibility into overall project work,” says Eisaman. “Our goal for last year was to save $840 million off our bottom line and we actually saved $1 billion. Daptiv certainly helped us accomplish this.”

In addition to project management, SM found that they could use Daptiv collaboration features to manage the commodity strategy plans. There had been no central repository, and tracking of changes and required updates was unmanageable. “Currently, we use Daptiv PPM to create over 100 commodity strategy plans and special project types,” says Eisaman.