Artemis: Avoiding a Meltdown

Most companies see “zero defects” as little more than a lofty aspiration. But utilities—where Artemis seems to be the project-management tool of choice—cram tens of thousands of maintenance tasks into a scheduled outage, and don’t have the luxury of downtime. That stability counts, even for customers with less-volatile needs.But Artemis is “not a tool you can just load on the desktop and walk away from,” says VF Corp.’s David Draper. “It took us a year to get to where we felt we were fairly proficient.” To make matters worse, “we went with a consultancy that wasn’t very familiar with Artemis.”

Lockheed Martin’s Paula Ward says Artemis “has an excellent ‘earned value’ tool,” which can be used to apportion ongoing costs. “Others might offer two or three earned-value methods—Artemis offers 13. I can calculate right away.”

Artemis’ Gateway module “has the look and feel of Microsoft Project sitting on top of the database,” Ward says. “You can trick a user into thinking they’re on Project, but it’s really ProjectView behind the scenes.”

Chris Dodson, at utility Wolf Creek Nuclear, says it “would be helpful if Artemis could schedule down to more-precise increments of 15 minutes or less,” instead of the current hour. “We’ve been asking for years, but it’ll require a base algorithm change”—one Artemis says it has no immediate plans to make.

Praxair dropped Artemis for its technology initiatives about two years ago. The application, says CIO John F. Hill, was “a little too complex and inflexible.” Praxair opted instead for software that includes a project-portfolio element, but still uses Artemis for engineering.

Artemis’ reports “are fairly good for analysis purposes,” says VF’s Draper, “but they’re not reports you’d want to distribute to a broader audience. We have to extract information out to do our reporting, using Brio queries and Excel.” When Draper asked, Artemis told him that “reporting is difficult because clients use it so differently from one place to another.” Ward says, “We don’t worry about the weakness of their reporting—they make up for it by making you able to get the data out to do your own reporting” with other applications.

Most important, says Southern Company’s Thomas Ricketts, Artemis “allows us to answer ‘Who is working on what?’ and ‘How much is it costing?'” And that, at least, is a practical aspiration Artemis can fulfill.


Artemis
4041 MacArthur Blvd.,
#260, Newport Beach, CA 92660
(949) 660-7100
www.aisc.com

Ticker: AMSI.OB
Exchange: OTC-BB
Employees: 430 worldwide

Michael J. Rusert
President, CEO
Before joining in January 2002, he was CEO of GDP Consulting. Other stints included VP of operations at Canon Computer Systems and COO at Ameriquest Technology.

Carl Pregozen
Senior VP, Worldwide Development
Worked in software development and operations engineering with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and has studied clinical psychology.

Products
Artemis Views, as a package and in modules: ProjectView (project oversight); ViewPoint (Web-based portal); ActiveAlert (notification); TrackView (time reporting); GlobalView (executive-level reporting). Also: MSP Gateway (integrates with Microsoft Project); PortfolioDirector (for portfolio management).


Reference Checks

BAA
Jonathan Crone
Head of Project Controls
+44 208-745-7207
Project: The massive Terminal 5 construction project at London’s Heathrow Airport is being run from beginning to end on Artemis.

VF Corp.
David Draper
Manager, Project Office, VF Services
(336) 424-4614
Project: Apparel manufacturer has a 250-seat license of TrackView and is about to add 100 more users.

Praxair
John F. Hill
CIO
(203) 837-2574
Project: Industrial-gas manufacturer formerly used Artemis for all its technology projects, but now uses it only for engineering initiatives.

Lockheed martin
Paula Ward
Cost Schedule Analyst Specialist
(817) 935-5097
Project: Aeronautics giant uses Artemis to help guide the Joint Strike Fighter program.

Wolf Creek Nuclear
Chris Dodson
Technical Systems Administrator
(620) 364-8831 x8573
Project: Nuclear-power plant uses Artemis to schedule planned outages, for required maintenance and administrative tasks.


Southern Company
Thomas Ricketts
Mgr., Engineering Technology Projects
(205) 992-5955
Project: Utility uses Artemis for its project-control needs and to improve accuracy of engineering cost estimates.

AD OPT Technologies
Claude Desormeaux
Project Management Officer/Quality Assurance
(514) 345-0580
Project: Workforce-solutions provider uses Views across the company, for time-tracking, scheduling and reporting.

Executives listed here are all users of Artemis software. Their willingness to talk has been confirmed by Baseline.