Case Study Title Case Study National Nuclear Laboratory

The UK nuclear industry has undergone significant changes in recent years.

The latest Government announcement The National Nuclear Laboratory that new stations would (NNL) for the UK is a Government- make a significant contribution to owned stand-alone commercial meeting British energy needs in the enterprise, which covers all aspects of future, has caused this controversial the nuclear industry. The team work with topic to once again, become headline academia, research councils, industry and news. At the forefront of the energy other National Laboratories worldwide policy will be the Government owned to ensure the UK shares and benefits British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) and from best practice and the latest its subsidiary, the National Nuclear advances in technology. Laboratory (NNL, formerly Nexia During 2006, a review of the project Solutions Ltd). As the only UK management systems used within NNL organisation with the skills, facilities and was undertaken. This highlighted that expertise to provide technical support in there were various project planning all aspects of the nuclear industry, NNL and control processes being employed will lead the way in skills development across the business, with non-integrated and technologies across the full nuclear systems being utilised to plan work and fuel cycle. monitor performance. These processes Employing over 600 staff and with an ranged from widely recognised software annual turnover of £75 million, NNL such as Microsoft Project and Primavera is built on a lengthy and successful P3 to manually completed spreadsheets track record in nuclear research and and semi-automated databases. The lack development. The business is focused of a single Project Management system on nuclear technology and delivers a and an inconsistent approach did not full range of products and services to meet the objectives of the organisation, customers. The company is based across which was to achieve an Integrated six separate UK sites with key customers Business System model. including Ltd, British Energy and The overall project aim was to the Ministry of Defence.

Case Study | National NuclearCase StudyLaboratory | Title Case Study implement a suite of integrated business Nigel Tinker, Project Manager at NNL systems that would ultimately provide a comments platform for the business to: ‘’Our initial discussions with Microsoft, • Improve resource and process identified CPS as one of their Gold efficiency by reducing the volume Standard implementers. During the of manual data transactions to tendering process, it was clear that CPS enable staff to focus on added value were more in tune with how we wished activities. to implement the new system, and their outline programme was on a realistic • Improve reporting capability by timescale. ’’ integrating data from multiple systems allowing consolidation and Once the contract was in place, Streamlining reporting of resource, facility and an early discovery and envisioning financial data across the business. meeting was held with CPS to agree our scheduling the overall programme timescales, the • Increase data accuracy and integrity scope of the implementation and the processes at by ensuring source data is held in deliverables. CPS follows the PRINCE2 each business the appropriate system, maintained methodology which meshed well with and accessed only by authorised level NNL’s approach. This meant that the individuals. initiation and planning stages went very As part of this requirement NNL has smoothly and that the implementation implemented the Agresso Enterprise was under way extremely quickly. Resource Planning (ERP) system and Further workshops were held to gather uses this technology for the majority of specific, detailed requirements. NNL its business/financial transactions and are high on the planning maturity curve reporting. Agresso is based on Microsoft and as such had a range of sophisticated .Net technology and utilises a Microsoft requirements including; SQL Server database for its storage. A • Full lifecycle planning; opportunity to key driver in upgrading existing planning closure tools, was there ability to complement Agresso and, in the future, share • Total resource planning; project and common data. non-project Alongside Primavera, NNL has used • Complete cost management; labour, Microsoft Project 98 as a scheduling tool. facilities and overheads There was general free access to this • Cross project dependency product across the organisation, which management made adoption of standards difficult. Equally, as 98 plans were file based, it • Earned Value Analysis was very difficult to produce summary • Multi level planning information, particularly at the Portfolio, Project and Resource levels. • Sophisticated management reporting Initially, NNL evaluated a range of “The implementation was extremely enterprise based products in the satisfying; the NNL team were well market place, short-listing Microsoft qualified, experienced planners who had EPM and Primavera P3e. After a a high level of planning maturity and detailed evaluation, NNL ultimately, a set of complex requirements. It was identified the Microsoft EPM 2007 exciting to work with such a motivated and suite as the product set that best met challenging team to implement a solution the organisations needs. Following a that met all their expectations.” tendering exercise, Corporate Project comments Ivan Lloyd, Managing Solutions (CPS) was chosen as the Consultant at Corporate Project implementation partner. Solutions NNL’s requirements for each of these areas were understood and agreed through the workshops and sign-off meetings and once a clear picture of the entire implementation had been formulated, CPS commenced on the configuration process. NNL staff were involved throughout the configuration process in order to facilitate a smooth handover when the system was complete. Once the solution was in place, a period of User Acceptance Testing and training of end user groups took place. Initially there were in the region of 20 Planners and 50 Project Managers, Engineers and Resource Managers within the core user groups, although in total, 80 people across the business undertook training. The courses were tailored to NNL’s requirements to the extent that the CPS on the existing requirements, greatly ‘’We still have some way to go to training documentation has since proven aiding the successful configuration streamline our scheduling processes at to be an invaluable reference material process. each level of the business, although now we’re using EPM we are rapidly carrying for all users. A significant learning point for NNL has out the necessary refinement. As a The implementation took nine months, been the level of change management business we also have the goal of using from the initial meeting in mid-April, that has been required during the ‘one set of numbers’ across the business to full roll-out including training, to implementation of this solution. Prior – to this end, we ultimately would like to end users in mid-December. A phased to commencement, it was believed that share common data sets (eg. resource ID’s, roll-out was employed, allowing the their planning team were reasonably cost tariffs, WBS) between our two SQL planners approximately six weeks to consistent in their approach to planning based systems – the EPM and Agresso.’’ transfer data over from the old system and that their processes were well and familiarise themselves with the new established. However, when everyone processes in place, before the system was moved on to one system, the fact was opened up to the project and that there had not been standardisation resource managers. There was then a in all areas was clearly highlighted. period after December of approximately The implementation process flushed out three months, when the focus was on a lot of plans that the planners didn’t embedding the product and processes. know existed and exposed planning ‘’CPS have an excellent understanding of issues from the Project Managers. There the day to day working level challenges is a higher quality of data now available faced by planners and how they wish to as more information is accounted for use the tool, but in addition, they clearly and standardised. appreciate how the information can drive Tinker explains; reporting at different levels of the business – this has helped us establish the new ‘’The process has thrown up more change system across the business.’’ issues and discrepancy in behaviour than we had originally anticipated, but these Tinker adds. were swiftly addressed with the help of Despite having a far-reaching CPS. The implementation of EPM has requirements document, the choices that enabled us to drive standardisation. All our the configuration allowed, meant that plans are now in the one system, which is NNL had to have more involvement very easily searchable and has enabled us in the configuration set up than was to quickly identify ‘gaps’ and address them.’’ originally expected. The approach taken by CPS to hold a series of workshops with the respective business areas proved an effective method for building

Case Study | National NuclearCase StudyLaboratory | Title Corporate Project Solutions Regal House, 4 Station Road Marlow, Bucks SL7 1NZ t 01628 895600 f 01628 895601 e [email protected] cps.co.uk