With nearly 200 locations, Flow Control Group (FCG) aspires to be the preeminent provider of flow control, fluid handling and industrial automation  products and services in North America. They pair engineering and technical service capabilities with an unmatched product portfolio of mission critical, plantwide control and information visibility, alarming, analytics, robotic solutions, and pneumatic control solutions​.

With such vast operations spread over multiple locations, it has been challenging for the teams at FCG to manage projects and collaborate on them. At times, they had over 200 requests in a pile (in Connectwise or just in emails)  with no organization. Many had been sitting there for almost two years. Lack of visibility and standardization resulted in loss of control over projects and unpredictability. This had a direct impact on the overall efficiency and delivery of projects.

Brightwork recognized the above project management challenges at Flow Control Group.

Implementing our unique Start-Evolve deployment approach, BrightWork allowed project teams at Flow Control to group the projects by Portfolio and Program.  Now they can manage their projects by area.  Brightwork 365 project management solution provided visibility into the individual projects and to allowed them to save the key deliverables where every team member could view them. They now have a repository for current statuses with comments, estimated hours, requestor, project manager, project description and attachments. Their plan is to manage projects with the same rigor no matter what the size. With these new capabilities and functionalities brought by BrightWork 365, FCG could introduce all these project management elements for more streamlining and better collaboration:

• Requirements Document
• Design Document (Overall Solution)
• Project Plan (Individual Steps)
• Resource Requirements (Type of people; not individual names)
• Test Scenarios-Matrix
• Test Results
• User Test Signoffs
• Implementation Plan
• Backout Plan
• Close-out document with Lessons Learned document (if applicable)

With continuous assistance from their dedicated Customer Success Partner at BrightWork, they plan to provide training to their IT staff in the following areas:

• Understanding the Charter Fields
• Use of Statuses
• Use of Dashboards and Reports
• Use of Documents Tab
• Use of Stakeholders Tab
• Use of Communications Tab
• Use of Actions List and Issues List
• Use of Risk Register
• Use of Status Reports
• Use of Gantt Chart
• Other topics as needed

They have implemented a % status report to track and share project progress using different percentages to reflect stages like ”not started”, ”kicked off”, ”planning in progress”, ”development in progress”,  ”IT testing in progress”, and more. This way, their teams across departments get a clear picture of where a project is at. This further helps them communicate and collaborate better on the next steps.

They are also leveraging BrightWork 365 to provide customized dashboards via email to Leadership so they can have better control across projects over the entire portfolio. These project and portfolio dashboards, built using Microsoft Power Apps and Power BI (integrated with BrightWork 365) provide visibility and data-backed insights to senior executives for more informed and timely decision making.