Boosting Innovation and Productivity: Colder Products’ Journey to End-to-End Visibility with PPM

Colder Products Company (CPC), a global leader in the design and manufacture of quick disconnect couplings, fittings, and connectors, operates in a highly specialized market. With a commitment to meet the fluid handling challenges across various industries, CPC’s thermal management division occasionally faces the unique challenge of creating customized solutions for customers. These components often need to be adapted for broader commercial markets post-production.

Leading the charge in this complex environment is Ruth Pechauer, the project manager who leads cross-functional engineering teams that design, develop and release new custom couplings and fittings for high growth markets. Tasked with spearheading continuous improvement efforts, Ruth’s goal is to ensure the success of product launches while navigating the intricacies of a company that progresses through constant evolution and improvement. 

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Jumping into the Deep End of Spreadsheets

For a business that thrives on a culture of constant evolution and improvement, Ruth walked into an environment that was ruled by spreadsheets spread across several business units and departments. 

Leadership spent a lot of time attending meetings to stay up to date, and they weren’t easily able to capture what the entire company was doing. They wanted to make strategic decisions faster. Ruth found herself doing a lot of manual work to prepare inputs for those spreadsheets, which created a lot of frustration. This was compounded when you consider the lack of visibility across departments to determine how to best use the resources on those teams to get projects approved, funded, and resourced.

“This took time away from doing my primary job – getting customer input as to what products they need and are willing to buy,” Ruth said. “I was regurgitating information that already existed and putting it into a different format. I did it as quickly as I could, but it was challenging. As a result, I wasn’t doing as much project work as I needed to because I was helping other people understand what was going on. It negatively affected project momentum.”

Ruth explained the stakes at risk on how operating with spreadsheets creates confusion with resource and capacity issues. “Over time, our businesses may fluctuate by 300%, and that’s no exaggeration given what’s going on in the economy and the markets we serve.” 

“Reacting quickly was exceedingly difficult when you see a bunch of spreadsheets that look like eye candy – lots of reds, blues, and yellows. You get a headache trying to determine what you’re looking at. We needed to visualize data in a way that’s clear, concise, and actionable. That was clearly lacking.”

Ruth Pechaur explains how Colder Products enhanced their decision-making and saved time and money by implementing Planisware.

Time for a Solution – Enter Planisware Orchestra

Ruth and her peers researched solutions that would help them with visibility across the company. Ruth discovered Planisware from reading Gartner Peer Insights. Planisware was the chosen vendor and was deployed in August of 2023.

The initial application required CPC team members to enter information into the system for resource tracking. If people don’t utilize the Timesheet module, incomplete information waves are felt all the way up to management. 

Ruth was candid. “People need to understand the importance of the contributions they each make. Their managers may not need to use the system on a day-to-day basis, but they want to see what they need to see. That incentivizes them to make sure their teams use the system the way it was intended.”

As Orchestra adoption grew, reliance on spreadsheets waned. Benefits were shared among leaders and project management teams. This led to more inquiries from people who want to get their data formatted from Planisware, a positive sign, says Ruth. 

“People are tiptoeing into the system, but they really do want to fully transition into it. Once they know how the project management modules work, they want to go into idea management and investment portfolios. Next, that leads them to think about how to extend idea management into the funnel. That’s exciting. Since we’re working in the context of ever expanding markets, we have to pay attention to the main reason we’re here and not get distracted.”

Breaking New Ground and Creating Value with Leadership

CPC’s use of Planisware Orchestra is stimulating conversations that help leadership make decisions more quickly. This is because executives can now better understand nuances among different projects and how those projects should be prioritized. Prioritization is less arbitrary. 

Cost input is also now measured more effectively. Ruth explains, “Leaders were missing some information that helps them steer better according to organizational goals. For example, having better visibility into the size and types of investment activities being generated by our projects is important. We need to know how close we are to meeting budget versus overspending. We can ask, ‘should we invest elsewhere?’ That visibility becomes much clearer through Orchestra because we are inputting budgets and costs by type, and it shows how company assets are being used within projects and portfolios.”

“So, when it comes to prioritizing things; whether based on time to market, or if it will be profitable now or later, seeing those Gannt charts and timelines of the various projects demonstrates where we can get quick wins and where to invest to pull in timelines if we so choose.”

Measuring Success, One KPI at a Time

Ruth speaks optimistically when asked about measuring the success of their Planisware implementation. “The main KPI we can do right now is timesheets. When people report the hours spent on new development projects, that data goes directly into our R&D tracking for tax credits. That reporting has a direct monetary impact on our parent company when it comes to our reporting. It will provide an initial savings of many, many thousands of dollars.”

“Previously, managing projects in spreadsheets did not cover everybody who spent time on product development cycles. We left things on the table on which we could otherwise report. We’ll soon know how much savings we provide the company.”

Colder Products can now see precisely which resources are allocated to which projects. This is becoming clearer and more interesting with an increasingly sophisticated approach. “We have gained much broader visibility to all our projects in real time. That’s a strong argument for getting a platform like Planisware Orchestra. That was the primary intent for my colleagues and me to free up our time because we are responsible for answering many questions from various parts of the organization. Team members had to ask because there was no visibility, but now that we have that visibility, it allows us to be much more productive.”