Agriculture
Project Financials Transformed
Primary Area
Organizational Project Management (OPM)
Service Area
Project Management & SAP Integration
Products Used
Project Online, SharePoint, Power Platform
Roles Impacted
Portfolio Manager, Project Manager, Business Analysts, Project Accountants
Impact Highlight
80% reduced time for project financial reporting
Opportunity
At a Fortune 100 agriculture enterprise managed costs sat in siloed Excel files with no SAP tie‑out, making reconciliations slow and error‑prone. Leadership viewed the gaps as a chance to build disciplined, data‑driven stewardship across business units.
Manual Excel roll‑ups across projects; version conflicts and broken macros.
No direct SAP actuals feed; month‑end CSV uploads and manual rekeying.
Forecast changes circulated by email; no audit trail or approval workflow.
Shadow labor rates + local chargeback rules caused misallocations and disputes.
Limited portfolio visibility; capex/opex vs budget required multi‑day reconciliations.
Duplicate effort across PMO, Finance, and BU controllers to align numbers.
Solution
Our team convened finance, PMO, and field ops leads to co‑define a common cost taxonomy and data ownership model that would scale globally. They we delivered an integrated Microsoft‑centric platform—linking SAP to the Power Platform and Project Online.
People: role‑based training; finance integration champions; PMO playbook; change network in each BU.
Process: standardized cost breakdown structure mapped to SAP; gated forecast cycle; automated accrual + chargeback workflow; data quality rules with exception queues.
Technology: Microsoft Project Online + Project for the web portfolio layer; Dataverse as the project finance hub with Power Apps intake & cost adjustments; Power Automate SAP connectors; Power BI dashboards; Entra ID conditional access.
Migration: Consolidated various extracts, Excel cost trackers, and spreadsheet macros into governed Dataverse entities; archived static history to low‑cost Azure storage; decommissioned redundant SharePoint logs.
Impact
Finance close cycles shortened and leaders now see near‑real‑time cost, forecast, and variance across capital and operating portfolios. Automated data movement and governed workflows replaced email spreadsheets, cut effort, and improved confidence in numbers used for funding decisions.
Modernized PMO: Project Online integrated with SAP via Power Platform; automated inter‑BU chargeback; email reports replaced by dashboards—reporting effort cut ~80% and cost allocation accuracy improved materially (variance to SAP actuals dropped).
Month‑end project cost reconciliation time significantly reduced.
Auditable forecast/adjustment history; improved compliance with corporate finance policies.
Faster reallocation of under‑run funds to growth initiatives within the same quarter.
Reduced spreadsheet proliferation: most legacy financial workbooks retired; single governed data source.
Higher adoption: most projects managed in the new platform within 6 months.