ABB Experiences of Boosting Controlling and Monitoring Activities in Collaborative Production

In globally distributed projects, successful product development requires companies to pay special attention to project management and controlling activities during the projects´ life cycle. If controlling activities are not done well, the productivity of product development decreases. This is due to, e.g., unnecessary work caused by unclear responsibilities, missing information, and not managed dependencies. This paper highlights ABB experiences in boosting globally distributed project management activities by integrating those actions to the portal of the company. The case showed that the implemented reporting practices together with other improvement actions such as enhanced process descriptions, practices and engineering tools, reduced the unnecessary or free work done at ABB by even 45%. This successful result was achieved by careful current state analysis where the requirements and goals for improvement actions were defined. The improvement actions were defined by discussions with essential interest groups as well as considering the best practices and research results from the literature.