Shaw Pipeline Services (SPS), a division of the Canadian Shawcor Corporation, will go live on an iport project management portal this week (16-Jan-06). The development was the culmination of a long search for a suitable project management and scheduling solution for their pipeline supplies division. SPS already use Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains but found that the complexities of their manpower and material scheduling were too complex for standard application software to handle. Much of the tasks were being managed by spreadsheets which was time-consuming and labor intensive, as well as costly to administer.

The new iport portal allows them to create and track projects cradle to grave and to schedule manpower and materials dynamically to them. Changes in one project's manpower roster can have an knock-on effect on other projects so the iport portal also tracks this giving the organization complete control over the entire project workload. Timesheets and purchase ordering is also handled via iport and the costing information fed back directly to Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains.