Greif, Inc. gets project costing right with Replicon

Greif, Inc. is a global leader in industrial packaging products and services and is pursuing its vision to, in industrial packaging, become the best performing customer service company in the world. The company produces steel, plastic, fiber, flexible, corrugated and reconditioned containers, intermediate bulk containers, containerboard and packaging accessories, and provides filling, packaging and industrial packaging reconditioning services for a wide range of industries.

Greif also manages timber properties in the Southeastern United States. The company is strategically positioned with production facilities in over 45 countries to serve global as well as regional customers.

Challenges

• Inefficient project and time tracking for employees and consultants on both external and internal projects complicated invoicing, chargebacks, and tracking the capitalization of project costs.
• Lack of granular and real-time visibility into project progress and hours worked called data inconsistencies into question.

Lack of Real-time Project Visibility Causes Chargeback Delays

Greif's IT department has a mix of 230 internal resources and external consultants who support an array of applications globally for business units across the company (including enhancements, upgrades, etc.), but they also engage in capital funding project work. This means meticulously tracking project time against capitalizable and non-capitalizable project costs.

Legacy System Pangs

They were challenged by their on-premise time tracking system. In relying on this system to capture time worked against a predefined list of projects into their legacy system, Greif IT grappled with frequent delays, a lack of visibility into both project progress and resource availability, lack of granular data on how time was spent, and — ultimately — problems with data consistency.

New Emphasis on Project Visibility and Administrative Efficiency

For a multinational business like Greif, Replicon’s cloud capabilities played a critical role in reducing IT’s administrative overhead. Though based in Delaware, Ohio, Greif has a multitude of ongoing projects around the world at any given time, so it could take weeks to onboard consultants by deploying their on-premise time tracking tool locally to their computers. With Replicon, Mike Domansky, Director of IT Portfolio Management & Governance, affirms that the process of adding users has now been reduced to “about 10 minutes.”

After switching to Replicon, Greif IT was able to capitalize on their new system’s advanced functionalities to enhance governance over what their users had access to. In doing so, they not only made the data entry process less tedious, but they also increased data accuracy and overall holistic visibility by ensuring that the right people had access to the right project information. In turn, this increased level of detail and accuracy afforded by Replicon systems enabled more granular and accurate invoices.

Solution

• Automating processes for collating, tracking, and analyzing data on who worked on which projects and when leaves little room for error.
• Tagging hours worked specifically based on user, project, and task clarifies chargebacks and enables project and resource visibility.

Today, Greif administrators responsible for handling invoices and cost capitalization have the granular visibility they need to better understand what work is being done, for how long, and by which resources. They no longer have to make the time and effort to parse out this information themselves — the system just provides it, and they know it’s reliable.

As a bonus, this newfound visibility into resources and projects has also dramatically improved Greif’s resource allocation, both reducing the time it takes to make resourcing decisions, and instilling renewed confidence in the integrity of these decisions.

Results

• Reduced administrative work for chargebacks from a 3—5-week process to just one day
• Collated data is consistently reliable, thanks to an intuitive, configurable user interface and automated time and project tracking for cost capitalization
• Resource allocation decisions are based on deep knowledge of real-time resource availability and made more quickly