Symbol Technologies uses the Estimate-To-Complete (ETC) tool for their plan managers to plan, track, analyze and predict the total cost of their project at any time until project completion. This helps them stay on time and within budget.

Symbol Technologies allocates resources, such as employees, materials, equipment, and overhead, to various divisions, cost centers, disciplines and activity codes. At the start of a new project, the plan manager for the project specifies the plan details, selects appropriate resources, and inputs in their estimated time (in hours) and cost (in dollars). ETC provides them with a running cumulative total of various costs and overhead rates based on the centralized database for each unique combination of division, cost center, discipline, and activity code.

As a further complication, projects can span a calendar year boundary, and the rates for various resources are set yearly and change from one year to the next. If the company reorganizes, departments may move into different cost centers, and ETC must handle the analysis and project planning automatically.

As projects are approved and go live, the actual time and cost data flows into ETC from the company’s SAP accounting system. As the accounting months are closed, the plan manager loses the ability to make changes for that month and can make changes for future months only.

When the actual data comes in from SAP, various anomalies can occur which may be logged for review or may be handled automatically. For example, a plan manager may not have allocated any forecasted time or cost for certain resources. However, if the actuals for that resource are assigned to a particular project plan, ETC automatically creates the missing detail lines, allowing plan managers to review more accurate project detail. If some rates are missing for a particular year, an exception report will show the details.

ETC allows plan managers to copy existing project plans as a starting point for their next project. Some projects can take a full week to plan since plan managers are evaluated on their accurate planning and finishing the project within the allocated budget. At any time, plan managers can view a snapshot of their plan with the actual time and cost data (from SAP) and forecasts (from plan managers) to prepare reports and variance analysis.

Moreover, because the Finance department uses Microsoft Excel for most of their analysis, the ETC tool looks and feels like an Excel spreadsheet with row highlighting, instant calculations, the ability to shift columns, and the ability to enter comments at a specific cell, to name just a few of ETC’s features.