Microsoft Enterprise Project Management

Rosgosstrakh – the insurance company, largest in Russia, which has significant effect on formation of insurance market. Rosgosstrakh is the only insurance company which locates the branch network comparable on a scope with Mail of the Russian Federation and Sberbank of Russia. The companies of Group include about 3000 agencies, insurance departments and the centers of settlement of losses. Total number of workers of a system of Rosgosstrakh exceeds 97 thousand people, including more than 60 thousand agents.

Before project management center of the headquarters of the largest Russian company of the market of insurance services Rosgosstrakh (TsUP of RGS) there was a problem of creation of reporting system of projects. In 2004 in TsUP of RGS the solution Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) designed to provide information support of procedures of management of multiple projects of the company was implemented. Important process within a project management system was preparation of the reporting under projects. Standard opportunities of Microsoft Office Project 2003 allowed to generate the project reporting, but them was insufficiently in view of need to create reports according to the corporate standard and taking into account corporate style of the project reporting of Rosgosstrakh company. Therefore some project reports formed manually the staff of TsUP of RGS and project managers in the Microsoft Excel format. This problem became the reason of emergence of a problem of development of the customized system of generation of the reporting expanding possibilities of standard set of reports of Microsoft Office of EPM.

As contractors specialists of the company "the Center of Implementation TEKORA entering into Project PRAKTIKA group were involved to creation of the center of the reporting.

At the first stage the following project tasks were formulated:

• implement the automated reports generation on projects in a required format according to standards of the corporate reporting and project management;
• provide storage of archive of all generated reports with a possibility of editing and removal of reports;
• provide express administration of a system of reports generation.

Choice of technology

When choosing possible ways of solving the task specialists of TsUP of RGS elaborated a number of criteria with which future system had to satisfy:

• all work of users with a system had to be carried out from the Microsoft Project Web Access web pages;
• the generated reports should be submitted in different formats, including in the Microsoft Excel format and in a format of web pages;
• a system should be simple in further completion:
• ensuring flexibility at possible changes of a format and style of reports;
• existence in the market of the qualified supplier on system development, its implementation and support;
• an opportunity to receive practical results from system implementation in the shortest possible time.

As a result, specialists of TsUP of RGS jointly with specialists of Proyektnaya PRAKTIKA Group stopped on the integrated, web focused solution based on use of the following technologies:

• ASP .NET — as the platform of development of business logic of a system;
• Microsoft SQL Server of 2000 — as storage of reporting data;
• XML — as the solution on integration of a system into other office applications (in particular, for export of the generated reports to Microsoft Excel);
• HTML — as the main language of formatting and a marking of reports, a format of reports, convenient for flexible change.

Solution

At the first stage of creation of a system forces of a joint team of specialists of TsUP of RGS and consultants of Proyektnaya PRAKTIKA Group prepared detailed technical specifications on system development according to which automation of the following processes was provided:

• generation of the project report;
• preserving of the project report in a report archive;
• viewing report archive;
• change of the report in archive;
• export of the report to Microsoft Excel;
• sending report on e-mail;
• formatting of the report for printing;
• express administration of a system.