FirstEnergy Achieves World-Class Project Lifecycle Management with Oracle’s Primavera Solutions

Energizing the future with technology

FirstEnergy is a forward-thinking utility with the goal of providing power to happy customers while improving the environment and strengthening communities.

The utility oversees the distribution, transmission, and generation of electricity in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. FirstEnergy is constantly working to improve how they manage and deliver projects given the inherent complexity and dynamic nature of their business.

FirstEnergy realized how a centralized, open solution could help streamline processes, improve predictability, and maximize customer benefits. The power company chose Oracle’s Primavera Portfolio Management and Oracle’s Primavera Unifier to manage their project planning, delivery, and operations.

Improving project management

FirstEnergy began investing heavily in transmission to help improve system reliability, expand utilization, increase security, and improve customers’ experience.

The utility realized they needed more robust project management processes and systems to help manage this significant increase in project load.

The organization launched a corporate initiative called Achieving Performance Excellence (APEX) that offers a consistent, streamlined, and transparent process to support their project delivery.

Teams, assemble!

FirstEnergy assembled teams to help support the APEX initiative. FirstEnergy then began looking for software to help improve overall efficiency and visibility into project progress, including accurate and timely reporting of costs.

Teams designed new processes before recreating them in Oracle’s Primavera Portfolio Management and Primavera Unifier to help manage these processes.

Three key elements to the APEX initiative:

1. A standardized project lifecycle management process.
2. Improved and integrated systems to better manage project planning, delivery, and operations.
3. New organizational functions, such as project development and program support, that offer better insight into project scope details, constructability, and costs prior to major project design, procurement, and construction activities.

Systems integration: a key component to portfolio and project management

FirstEnergy understood the importance of having open integrated systems to ensure data integrity and to eliminate time consuming and error prone double entry.

To support this, FirstEnergy upgraded their existing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system and implemented new systems: Oracle’s Primavera Portfolio Management and Oracle’s Primavera Unifier.

The utility wanted a seamlessly integrated system for evaluating, defining, and managing FirstEnergy Transmission’s (FET) project portfolio – including effectively managing projects and assets within that portfolio.

FirstEnergy leveraged Oracle’s Project Information Framework (PIF) to move business process, schedule, and approval information between Oracle systems and external systems. The information is automatically synchronized to keep information up-to-date across systems.

What happens next?

The next focus area for FirstEnergy is mobility. Team members are working on managing and updating task progress from anywhere.

FirstEnergy employees will be able to work on project data without network connectivity and synchronize locally saved changes with Primavera Unifier once network connectivity is available.

Computers directly connected to FirstEnergy’s network via a virtual private network or mobile devices can access the system.

FirstEnergy signs of success

FirstEnergy now has a centralized and consistent solution that supports efficiency and data quality thanks to their implementation and integration of Oracle’s Primavera Portfolio Management and Primavera Unifier.

In addition, Primavera Project Portfolio Management and Unifier also connect to other systems and software through portlets and data integrations.

Lastly, project members can now collect, prioritize, manage, and track capital project information as needed. FirstEnergy has one consistent methodology for managing their numerous business processes and a single source of truth for all project information that’s available to the project teams.

FirstEnergy: Five key takeaways to improve your software implementation

1. Engage and involve users, both in planning and with early access to the systems. Use, learn, iterate.
2. Revise processes: review the business processes and look for ways to streamline and improve them.
3. Integrate with active directory (one global directory to support multiple applications): this enables single sign-on and reduces the entry barrier for usage of the new tool.
4. Strong change management: businesses must become an integral part of the development process in addition to management support at the executive level.
5. Data clean-up: evaluate what data you have—and what you need—to best support your business decisions.

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