Aramex is a leading provider of comprehensive logistics and transportation solutions. Established in 1982 as an express operator, the company rapidly evolved into a global brand recognized for its customized services and innovative multi-product offering. The range of services offered by Aramex includes international and domestic express delivery, freight forwarding, logistics and warehousing, records and information management solutions, e-business solutions, and online shopping services. The IT team at Aramex’s head office employs around 60 IT professionals with various specialties in software development, MIS, infrastructure, network and information security. A project office body is responsible for overseeing the various projects running within the IT team from initiation to closure, providing the various business stakeholders a high-level view of the projects progress.

There were a few project management challenges the organization faced before implementing BrightWork. Aramex had many different projects going on at one time, all of various sizes, complexity and stages of completion, making it very difficult for the company to use a standard PM process for all projects in the organization. The issues included:

• Time wasted when constantly meeting with project managers getting updates on project statuses

• Too time consuming for project managers to manually calculate the most efficient resource allocation, especially for those resources who were working on several projects at once

• Without a standard tool, it was difficult to keep up with project start and finish dates across all projects

• Other business units throughout the organization, not just the IT department, required assistance from the project management office as well.

Aramex uses BrightWork to streamline project management within their organization. With BrightWork, Aramex could utilize different templates for project management depending on complexity, some integrating Microsoft Project and others using basic project schedules and lists.

Their BrightWork deployment was set up with a few Project Offices, each one giving a list of all open projects in that Project Office. The hierarchy enabled reporting at the project level, the project category level (e.g. IT Infrastructure Projects), and at the project office level. Project dashboard reports of an overview on a projects’ main details and activities. A typical dashboard for a single project would have a work summary, project links, open tasks and issues, the project Gantt, and status indicators.

BrightWork enabled Aramex to use dashboard reporting at all levels of the project hierarchy, providing an overview of main project details and activities. The reports could drill down from the project office level all the way down to the individual project level. It also enabled bottom-up reporting, with team members able to update the status of their individual tasks, giving a very clear view into overall project health. BrightWork allows project managers to automatically send weekly status updates through the system to management, saving time that used to be spent on meetings. The reports can be used to track how resources are being utilized. With resource tracking, resources can be tracked by task at all levels so it is easy to see which resources are available and how to use them most efficiently. Aramex also uses the libraries in SharePoint as a central location to house project related paperwork.

BrightWork was deployed to streamline this process, giving team members, project managers and project stakeholders both high-level and detailed project statuses. Aramex now uses the full capabilities of BrightWork and SharePoint 2010 for project management across the organization.