Transforming project management capabilities

The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited (Towngas), one of the largest energy suppliers in Hong Kong, China, knew better management of their end-to-end project lifecycle was crucial to support their rapidly growing business. The legacy project management system was no longer met their business and technological needs.

Towngas has collaborated with Accenture to launch a new digital engineering project management solution – Corporate Project Information Management (CPIM) – with automated business processes and mobile capabilities.

Accenture designed, developed and deployed the solution, working with Avanade to host it on a scalable cloud platform. CPIM incorporates the industry leading practices for managing engineering projects and integrates with corporate systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to offer the end-to-end project lifecycle from project initiation, tendering, scheduling, materials management, cost monitoring, inspection and invoicing to project closure.

The team also developed a custom Android application for site engineers to access the CPIM on tablets, and leveraged Avanade infrastructure design to meet technical requirements.

“This has been a truly collaborative effort with Towngas,” said Kenneth Cheng, Managing Director - Resources Lead, Greater China, Accenture. “It’s a great example of digital transformation of project management tools, from planning to execution to making faster and more insightful business decisions. Going forward, it creates a model for utility and oil and gas companies in Greater China to apply cloud and software-as-a service (SaaS) capabilities to project and portfolio management using the latest infrastructure and mobile technologies.”

The cloud-based system helps to improve scheduling and material management, and control costs. Site engineers and inspectors can use new mobile app to update the status of projects in real time. Towngas is now promoting its use to its 300-plus subsidiaries in Mainland China.

“The new solution achieves greater flexibility and efficiencies across all areas of project-management,” said Susanna Shen, Head of Corporate Information Technology, Towngas. “With a consolidated view of our material requirements, our site engineers and inspectors can make real-time updates on project progress, capturing photos and videos with an Android mobile application. Moreover, our customer service agents can obtain more accurate, real-time information and respond more quickly and effectively to our customers’ needs.”