How Your Customer Projects Can Be Even More Successful with Meisterplan

Regardless of whether you manufacture machines, offer IT services, maintenance or implement consulting projects – the success of your customer is the main focus. But it is often no child’s play to satisfy the customer completely and not overload your own resources.

Which Meisterplan Features Help You with Project Planning?

It’s not easy to always keep track of all existing and new orders, plus pay attention to your own resources. Meisterplan features are perfectly suited to help you out. Here are just some of the things you can do with Meisterplan:

• Realistic Order Management
• Select the Right People at the Right Time
• Long-Term Capacity Planning
• Transparent Order Landscape
• Flexibly Respond to Requests for Changes
• Get Financial Figures at a Glance, at All Times

Realistic Order Management

Practice realistic order management by consciously deciding for or against new orders. In the Board View, you can see your pipeline and details of individual orders at a glance. Using scenario simulations, you can then determine which orders can actually be implemented and when, taking into account capacities and budgets. This way, you can make realistic promises to the customer right from the start and practice active expectation management!

Select the Right People at the Right Time

Choose the right people for your projects! The Team Planner in Meisterplan gives you a good overview of the utilization of your resources and teams. Find out which people are available and have the right skills and experience for a project. Avoid overloading individual employees, for example, by assigning parts of the project to people who are less busy. Alternatively, you can spread tasks out over a longer period of time or plan in additional employees to support the project.

Long-Term Capacity Planning

Set up your capacities correctly for the future so that you can be successful with your customers in the coming years. You probably anticipate a lot of new orders – but that means you’ll need people who can implement them. With the help of the integrated reports and dashboards provided by Meisterplan, you can identify early on where you need to hire new staff in order to ensure reliable delivery. Or, identify when you need to further develop skills for existing employees.

Transparent Order Landscape

Make your current order landscape transparent in Meisterplan – with the help of the Roadmap View. Get an overview of current and new orders, upcoming milestones and possible deadlines. Add a plan vs. actual comparison to the view to identify early on which projects could be delayed and where action is needed.

Flexibly Respond to Requests for Changes

Thanks to scenario planning, you can react quickly to your customers’ requests for changes. Create various solution options by checking in real time the effects of time delays or increased effort due to a changed scope of the project. Compare the various alternatives with each other and decide on the plan that is realistic for you internally and at the same time provides the greatest customer benefit.

Get Financial Figures at a Glance, at All Times

Do a profitability check – which of the projects are most worthwhile for you? Are there any customers that stand out in particular? By simply analyzing sales and costs, you can identify your biggest project drivers and the projects where you should make adjustments.

How Do Our Customers Use Meisterplan
for Their Customer Projects?

GFT Benefits from
Cross-Team Resource Planning

For the software manufacturer GFT, overarching resource planning across all teams and resources done in Excel proved difficult due to frequent change requests from customers.

With Meisterplan, all capacities – including part-time models, absences and non-project activities – are now fully taken into account. A sustainable and realistic resource planning process has been established through clearly defined responsibilities, roles and planning rounds.

Sovanta Creates Realistic Commitments
Thanks to Greater Transparency

Meisterplan customer, Sovanta, was also able to optimize resource planning for its IT service projects with Meisterplan. Constantly overloading resources is now a thing of the past! The feasibility of new projects is quickly made transparent and binding, and realistic planning commitments are made to customers regarding the start and end dates of projects.

Excelitas Delivers
More Customer Projects on Time

Meisterplan isn’t only limited to the IT environment. Excelitas develops components for space and aviation technology and has been using Meisterplan for several years. The daily work routine for Claus Spruch, Head of Development, has been made significantly easier:

With Meisterplan, we are able to deliver client projects and products on time. As a 100% client-driven company, our reliability has been our greatest factor of success.

Claus Spruch|Director Project Management|open_in_new

Excelitas Technologies Corp.

Since rolling out Meisterplan, we’ve seen a drastic improvement in the visibility of our project development, in particular our resource capacity. Thanks to Meisterplan, we recognize quickly which resources are at or over capacity, where we have untapped potential, and also which projects may need to be adjusted.

Claus Spruch|Director Project Management|open_in_new

Excelitas Technologies Corp.

With Meisterplan, we are able to plan more long-term. We see months in advance when bottlenecks are likely to occur and are able to hire new resources or skills to compensate.

Claus Spruch|Director Project Management|open_in_new

Excelitas Technologies Corp.

Do You Want to Introduce Meisterplan to Your Organization?
See How We Can Support You!

The Meisterplan team makes getting started easy by supporting you with years of experience! You can quickly and efficiently implement Meisterplan, which will make planning your customer projects even easier.

• Experienced Support
  Based on our proven implementation plan, your personal Customer Success Manager will support you in configuring and mapping your requirements in Meisterplan.
• Easy Import from Excel
  Do you currently plan using Excel, PowerPoint or some other tool? No problem – together with your Customer Success Manager, you can transfer your data quickly and easily into Meisterplan using the quick import function.
• Adaptation of Software and Processes Based on Your Needs
  Together, you will review and reflect critically on your current procedures and processes. This also involves identifying and developing areas for optimization. Then, you’ll map everything out in Meisterplan. Throughout the entire implementation, you will also receive best practices from our consultants on how to use Meisterplan in your company’s context.
• Connecting Your Tool Landscape
  In order to create a reliable database for your future planning, your Customer Success Manager will help you find possible interfaces to existing ERP, CRM or HR solutions. Many Meisterplan customers already benefit from an automated import of actual time worked, for example, from SAP CATS or Workday, as well as a comparison of the order master data from tools like Salesforce.
• Training for Future Meisterplan Users
  All that’s missing to get started is training your future Meisterplan users. The team at Meisterplan is here to help you with train-the-trainer offers or by conducting role-specific user training.