This case study is presented by Horacio Escalada, Project Manager of Toromont Industries Ltd. Information Technology.

Company Profile

Toromont Industries Ltd. is a Canadian publicly traded company (TSX: TIH) that operates through two business segments: The Equipment Group and the Compression Group.

The Equipment Group includes one of the world's largest Caterpillar dealerships by revenue and geographic territory in addition to industry leading rental operations.

The Compression Group is a North American leader specializing in the design, engineering, fabrication, and installation of compression systems for natural gas, fuel gas and carbon dioxide in addition to process systems and industrial and recreational refrigeration systems. Both groups offer comprehensive product support capabilities.

Toromont employs approximately 4,500 people in more than 130 locations.

Challenge

To manage projects the I.T. Solutions group was using a combination of an in-house developed time tracking application and Excel spreadsheets. As a result, there was no central place to easily access the necessary projects information. Because of the different formats it used to take days to consolidate all the data and produce project status reports. Obviously the system was difficult to maintain.

Solution and Results

After researching and evaluating several project management systems, Easy Projects .NET was selected. The concepts of Easy Projects .NET were very similar to what we needed. The option of being able to obtain access to the source code for EP.NET allowed us the possibility to add enhancements to suit our operation precisely.

EP .Net is currently being used to manage software development projects for five business units. Our internal clients access EP.NET to log their requirements and review the progress of their projects.

There are 60 users active on the system with approximately 200 projects entered. To date, implementing EP .NET has saved time. For example, billing reports that used to take one to two days to compile can now be completed in a few hours. Also the accuracy of tracking of development hours has improved significantly.

So far the EP.NET implementation has saved us project management time and effort. With all the information stored in one central database, reporting has become much more streamlined and accurate. We continue to use EP .NET because we have found it easy to use and we have had excellent post sales support.