Acsian strikes programme management deal with Rolls-Royce
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Following a successful pilot project, Rolls-Royce has entered into a four-year collaboration agreement with University of Southampton spin-off Acsian for its engineering programme management software.
Lisa Laughner, vice president of corporate ventures at Rolls-Royce, says: “During the trials Rolls-Royce staff found Plexus to be a highly disciplined, good visual method of mapping complex processes across many dimensions, which aids process communications and targeted process improvement.
“Rolls-Royce sees potential in Plexus-Suite for achieving substantial improvements in programme performance, timeliness and cost control.”
Acsian was co-founded by Jim Scanlan, Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Southampton and Ian Poccachard, an engineer at Rolls-Royce in Bristol. Together they developed the software and methodology for large aerospace organisations.
Plexus-Suite provides flexibility for timeline and material changes that arise in complex engineering development projects, which can otherwise lead to spiralling costs, missed milestones and potentially costly project failures.
Many project planning suites don’t handle multiple remote users very well, but Plexus-Suite allows many people to interact via the system simultaneously. Rolls-Royces’ pilot showed that it thus encourages contributions and knowledge input from all participants.
Also, in very large scale projects with multiple cyclical activities, there are crunch points for the big and expensive decisions. Plexus calculates how many times smaller cycles can be run before big decisions, saving money and reducing risk of failure.
