Cheetah Resources

SUMMARY

PMWeb was implemented by Cheetah Resources to help them manage their projects, cost, and documents. The initial implementation was completed with half of the budgeted hours remaining. It gave Cheetah the luxury to develop additional reports and consider adding more features before Go Live.

OVERVIEW

Cheetah Resources (Cheetah) is a 100%-owned subsidiary of Vital Metals Limited. Vital Metals is a public company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, focused on progressing mineral projects in Canada, Africa, Australia, and Germany. Cheetah’s primary focus of using PMWeb is to manage contracts and documents for running and managing these projects. Another focus of the new system was to give the site managers/project managers in each country the ability to provide site updates periodically.

CHALLENGE

Two of the primary users at Cheetah had been actively using PMWeb in a previous organization, and they understood the value of PMWeb in terms of project management, cost management, and document management. As they were gearing up to accelerate their site activities in several mineral projects around the globe, they decided to implement PMWeb and Go Live before major activities begin happening at their sites.

SOLUTION

Cheetah started the implementation with a quick-start implementation package to fast track Go Live. Their primary focus was to have the contract management and document management part ready before going live. The implementation started with Admin training. Being a previous user of PMWeb, the System Administrator was able to take the lead in many configuration activities including the security settings, document management folder structure settings, nomenclature changes, and other settings. That helped the implementation team to focus more on the process part. The Cost code mapping initially proved to be very challenging as Cheetah tried to include so many layers of cost tracking elements. Payment processing and tracking was another key challenge as integration with their accounting system (Xero) was not part of the scope. Both challenges were overcome through the intelligent design of the BI reports and workflows.

RESULTS AND BENEFITS

As Cheetah manages projects around the globe, dealing with multiple currencies is a day to day challenge for them. PMWeb’s advanced multi-currency capability enabled them to manage contracts and invoices with multi-currencies. Minor modification of the COTS reports gave them the ability to track costs with ease for multiple currencies with conversions. Cheetah also took advantage of using the PMWeb Word, which gives them the ability to create ad hoc reports.

Initially planned to Go Live in 8 weeks, the initial implementation activities were hindered by the outbreak of COVID-19 – but we were able to quickly move back on track with the active participation of the key Cheetah. SME’s. We were able to complete the initial configuration in record time in terms of the spent hrs. Cheetah is currently (July 2020) doing the final fine-tuning of the system before going live; still almost half of the budgeted hours remain unutilized. This gives Cheetah the luxury to develop additional reports and consider adding more features before they go live. Even though Cheetah purchased the Schedule module, it was not planned to utilize this feature until later stages. With the remaining hours, Cheetah is now planning to include this feature before going live.

With the active participation of the SMEs and the system administration, this is a good example of how a “Hands-On” approach from the client organization can fast track and simplify the implementation process. Although the implementation period took more elapsed time than what was initially planned, it was completed with half of the budgeted hours, thanks to the willingness of the client to engage and actively contribute to the configuration effort.