Project Management Software Success Story

A toy manufacturing company selects Project Insight, online project management software, to help improve oversight, and streamline product development projects.

Funrise Toy Corporation

"We're really able to maintain timelines in a way we could never do before, so it's a huge win from that aspect."
--J. M., CIO, Funrise Toy Corp.

Funrise The Company
Founded in 1987, Funrise Toy Corporation is completely dedicated to creating fun for kids of all ages. Recognized as an adventurous innovator and an industry leader in the manufacture and distribution of superior toys, the Funrise North American office is located in California with international offices in Hong Kong, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The company's core property portfolio encompasses brands like Gazillion Bubbles^®, Nylint^®, Dr. Dreadful^™, and leading licensed power brands such as Tonka , Disney , Scooby-Doo , and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory™.

The Challenge
Funrise is an international organization that develops new products in both the United States and Asia. With the geographically dispersed creative team as the driving force behind its toy designs, Funrise needed a way to efficiently and fluidly manage its projects that did not require study in advanced project management. The company's occasional use of Microsoft Project only served to highlight the tool's inability to adapt to the way the company worked.

J. M., Chief Information Officer at Funrise, explained, "We were grappling with growth, moving rapidly from a real entrepreneurial environment with a few people all the way up to several dozen people in each development group. We were continuously struggling to get a handle on the development cycle. We're always developing new products, several dozen new toys at a time at a minimum, and sometimes even 100 at a time. Resource allocation, milestones, time and budget tracking had been a real struggle."

The Solution
Launching a search for a project management tool that would assist with the creatively-driven product development process at Funrise, J. M. looked at everything, including very expensive, very sophisticated product lifecycle management tools, configuration management tools, of which project management was only a part. "You really need to have project management specialists in house to use that type of tool. All of our people are more creative, more artistic in nature."

Not knowing whether he would spend $25,000 or $200,000 on a solution, J. M. spent six months specifying the solution Funrise wanted in house. "We created the entire project methodology around the solution, then started looking for tools that would meet those goals." Specifically, the product:

Had to be web-based due to the geographic separation of Funrise teams among Europe, the United States and Hong Kong.
Had to meet standards for project management without being overly complex, yet not so basic that the system could not grow with the needs of the company.

J. M. continued, "I found a few tools that did what I wanted, and at the end of the day I was most comfortable with the technology, people, and solution that make up Project Insight. I was able to find it, put it on my short list, and ultimately issue a purchase order within 10-15 days. That says a lot about the product and the people that support it."

The Results
Funrise brought Project Insight in-house and performed some customizations, then began familiarizing themselves with the system. After a few weeks, the company put 50 users online in the United States and in Asia. "We've got 200 ongoing projects in the system right now that are being accessed and used daily," J. M. reported.

"Much of the improvement we've seen has been in our ability to maintain timelines with our projects. We've got about six or eight product managers who are simultaneously working on 20-30 projects each. Whereas before, a milestone would slip on one project, but they might not call Hong Kong to check on it for a week or two. Project Insight automatically shoots off alerts to task owners. We're really able to maintain timelines in a way we could never do before, so it's a huge win from that aspect."

Yet J. M. might said an equally big win is the ability of the firm's founder and president to keep his eye on any aspect of a product or of the overall product development process whenever and wherever he would like. J. M. noted, "Project Insight allows him to go in and get a very high-level view of all projects and the state that they're in, then drill down or get a timeline of the projects susceptible to failure. He can look at 200 projects at a time and just by color codes see which are doing well, which are overdue, and which are in danger."

Next up for Funrise: incorporating features that allow for granular time and expense tracking. "We'll be able to build up some kind of knowledge of how long individual tasks take. Whether they're Gazillion Bubbles toys or Tonka fire trucks, many of the development steps are pretty much the same. The artwork has to be completed, then packaging completed; most products require molds at some point. You can really define how long a toy will take based on its complexity. So we'll be able to build up more specific knowledge on whether it takes approximately 60 days to mold the average toy. We'll know whether that represents 20 hours of management time if the process takes 60 days. These are the things Project Insight is already helping us with and will help us with even more."