How Dubai PCFC Streamlines Strategic Planning

50%

Reduction In Quarterly Report Prep Time

3.5

Days Saved For Every Ad Hoc Request

2001

Established In

About Crystal Consulting Group

Crystal Consulting Group delivers comprehensive services across the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Pakistan to make customers successful in implementing their strategies using Spider Impact.

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The Dubai Ports, Customs and Freezone Corporation (PCFC) oversees several institutions, including the main ports of Dubai, the Department of Planning and Development, and the Dubai Maritime Authority.

PCFC in Dubai struggled with time-consuming manual data collection and analysis for quarterly strategy reports, which took weeks and was prone to errors. By implementing Spider Impact with the help of Crystal Consulting Group, PCFC automated KPI tracking, centralized project management, and enabled instant report generation. This resulted in a 50% reduction in time spent on quarterly reports, the ability to generate ad hoc reports saving 3.5 days of effort each time, improved data accuracy, and increased team morale.

With Spider Impact, PCFC can now make data-driven strategic decisions more efficiently, leading to increased productivity and performance.

Challenge

As the Director of Strategy for Dubai's Ports, Customs, and Freezone Corporation (PCFC), Noura Al Shamsi oversees strategy and performance data for various organizations that report to PCFC.

Noura kept a close eye on KPIs to ensure all teams were aligned and working towards the organization's overall goals.

She and her team spent weeks each quarter combing through spreadsheets, comparing year-on-year data to track progress and create reports for quarterly leadership meetings. The company's C-suite and board of directors use that information to guide the company's strategy for the following quarter.

“Every quarter, it took three to four weeks to collect data, analyze it, and calculate all the KPIs and indicators manually through Excel sheets. It took a lot of time and effort from my team and from other departments to collect the data,” she says.

Noura and her team performed extensive QA to validate their numbers to make sure the data was accurate. Inaccuracies could have grave consequences for PCFC.

“You need to be confident in every number that you present to the chairman, the board, and the CEO,” Noura says. “It needs to be validated, accurate, and representative.”

PCFC needed to streamline and automate their strategic planning. By moving away from Excel spreadsheets, they could save time, give company leadership access to more accurate results more quickly, and simplify strategic decision making for all departments.

“As the Director of Strategy, I need numbers, data, and results to make decisions,” Noura says. “If I don't have all of that in one system, I can't evaluate the situation and forecast for the future.”

an RGA Enterprises employee aligned on strategy

Solution

A Central Platform for Strategic Data

After consulting with her team and colleagues across Dubai Government entities, Noura was certain that Spider Impact was the platform she needed to bring strategic planning into a single unified location.

“We compared Spider Impact with others and it was a clear winner,” Noura says. “It's user-friendly. It's simple. We could tell it would make our lives much easier.”

PCFC teamed up with Crystal Consulting Group to configure and successfully set up Spider Impact for their company.

“The Crystal Consulting team was very supportive throughout our implementation. They answered our questions quickly. When we had additional requirements, they helped us find solutions,” says Noura.

Ongoing Tracking and Instant Visibility

With Spider Impact, PCFC can automatically track KPIs and make sure they are on target to reach their overall strategic goals. Instead of manually sifting through rows of Excel data, Noura can use her dashboard to instantly understand performance, and accessing data is much easier.

“I didn't have an automated system to track strategic and operational KPIs for my strategic plan,” Noura says. “Now, I can see everything in my dashboard. I can spot any gaps early on and put corrections in place.”

With charts, reports, and dashboards providing overviews of historic data, Spider Impact makes it easier to spot and correct errors, too. She can track patterns over time and notice discrepancies.

“If there are any errors in the system, the dashboard will make it very obvious. It's much easier to spot and fix them than before,” Noura says.

With Spider Impact, PCFC was able to create a centralized database to track projects across the organization, which they didn't have before. Anyone with permission can see the status of all projects in one single location, which helps PCFC track their spending and ensure that timelines will be met.

“It's very important for any organization. You need to know where you're spending your money,” Noura says.

Fast and Accurate Reporting

Spider Impact has also made it much faster and easier to gather and validate data to generate reports for the organization's quarterly board meetings.

“The whole process is much more efficient, and we save a lot of time,” Noura says. “We created the report once, and now we just have to update the data to generate an updated version.”

Outside of quarterly reviews, Noura can supply any reports the board of directors needs with the click of a button.

“If someone from the board of directors calls me today and wants any strategic data, I can get it easily instead of having my team spend three or four days preparing a report,” she says.

All of this saves tremendous amounts of time for Noura's team, allowing them to be more productive and focus their time and energy on more valuable tasks.

“I can utilize my team better. I can give them better tasks. Our efficiency has increased and will continue to increase as we continue to invest in the tool,” Noura says.

“I didn't have an automated system to track strategic and operational KPIs for my strategic plan. Now, I can see everything in my dashboard.”

KPI speedometers showing example key performance indicators.

Results: Instant reports and more trustworthy data

Everyone at PCFC loves Spider Impact, from the board of directors down to individual contributors.

“We've received very good feedback from leadership, other business units, and people who use the system. Even my colleagues at other entities ask me about it, because they've heard that we use a good system. People talk,” Noura says.

On a departmental level, Spider Impact has changed everything. Noura and her team can generate and validate quarterly reports for leadership in less than half the time they used to require. One-off reports can be generated instantly.

And they can trust that the data is error-free.

“My team is more relaxed now,” Noura says. “This data is presented to the board of directors, so you need to be sure of every number. There's less tension, because they're confident the data is accurate.”

With instant access to year-over-year data, Noura and her team can track progress over time and use that information to forecast future growth and build their strategy accordingly.

Life without Spider Impact would be much more stressful.

Noura Al Shamsi Director of Strategy, Dubai Ports, Customs, and Freezone

Spider Impact has improved the quality of PCFC's strategic decision-making. For example, tracking projects and KPIs in a central location allows them to spot potential roadblocks early and course-correct.

“Let's say we can't meet a KPI because we are short-staffed, or we don't have the budget we need,” Noura says. “I have to escalate that, and I can't do that if I don't have the data to support it. We need to support our business decisions with data, and Spider Impact makes it easy to access that data.”

Today, Noura can't imagine life without Spider Impact.

“What I appreciate most about Spider Impact is the efficiency and the time I save now,” she says. “At the end of the day, time is money. When you use your time more efficiently, productivity increases. You have better performance, and better results. Spider Impact gives us all of that.”

“We need to support our business decisions with data, and Spider Impact makes it easy to access that data.”

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