Artemis has created a niche for itself in Areas of Project Portfolio Management for Investment Planning and Control.

-By Ajit Mishra

In the PPM Tool Review Series by Epmguru.com, we have reviewed WorkLenz, PowerSteering in the earlier posts. Today, we will focus on Artemis.

Artemis has been leading the way in the development of Enterprise Portfolio, Project and Resource management software products since 1976. This unique track record has seen the emergence of successive families of leading edge software that has set, and is setting, the standards worldwide.

Products & Solutions
Artemis’s current product offerings ranging from Artemis 7, recently introduced web-based project portfolio management software that provides the framework for investment planning and control solutions for both industry and the public sector, to Artemis 9000 and its amazing 20 year history of successful bespoke customer solutions. To complete the picture Artemis Views with over 500000 users provides the optimal solution for intensive project and resource management across the enterprise.

Artemis LINKS and Artemis Ontrack provide project and resource management e-learning programs and training simulations to accelerate the learning process for all project professionals. Drawing on the consolidated experience of a global network of consultants specialized in portfolio and project management, Artemis Consulting has developed a structured Solution Management Methodology (sm2), to provide a logical phased approach to business process improvement.

While Artemis has provided project planning and management tools used by Global 500 companies since 1975, during the 1990s it encountered finanical problems similar to many other high technology firms in the post dot.com bubble era. In July 2006, Artemis was purchased by Versata. In order to improve the financial standing of the company, Versata/Artemis has pursued major worldwide organizational changes. The most notable changes were the consolidation of Artemis's product development in India and the reduction in Artemis' employee base worldwide.

History & Background:

The origins of Artemis occurred in 1976 when Metier Management Systems created Apollo, the forerunner of today's Artemis 9000 toolset. In existence since 1983, the current version of 9000/EX is Version 10. Metier was started by Richard Evans, Robin Lodge, Roy Brown and James Miller. It was James Miller who programmed the original single-user version of the software in a Suffolk attic in Debach. He went on to write the multi-user version of the software with Richard Nobbs and Alan Playford. Artemis Views has its origins in K&H's Prestige tool. In the 1990s, Artemis purchased software vendor K&H and began marketing their Prestige tool as Artemis Views.

Artemis 9000 runs on both Microsoft Windows and IBM OS/390 operating systems. It is a scalable and customizable tool to integrate project management processes such as planning, scheduling, aggregation, and reporting. Although the Artemis toolset was originally a mainframe based tool, today it can act as a server application that can communicate with web based user interfaces.

• Artemis runs on a variety of Windows and Web based platforms using Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Artemis Views is an integrated enterprise project management application that provides the capability to accomplish project planning and scheduling, resource allocation and tracking, time reporting, and earned value management.

• Artemis ProjectView is a robust critical path methodology (CPM) scheduling system capable of handling extremely large projects (over 20,000 individual activities) with the associated resource requirements and logical dependencies.
• Artemis CostView is full earned value management system and is compliant with government and industry EVM standards. CostView integrates with ProjectView to provide full cost and schedule integration. Artemis TrackView is a integrated time reporting system used to record, approve and report time charged against projects.
• The current version of Artemis Views is Version 8.
• Artemis 7 is the newest addition to the Artemis's product line. Artemis 7 in an investiment planning and control Web application. Designed to support senior and mid-level management financial investment and planning activities.
• Artemis 7 contains several major components -- Investment Portfolio Management, Demand and Initiative Management, Financial Planning and Budgeting, and Program and Project Management, Resource Management, Work Management and Dashboards and Analytics.
• The current version of Artemis 7 is Version 7.

Capabilities & Strengths:

Following are some of the important capabilities & modular strenghts that comprise A7. Artemis is normally sold module-wise based on the customer’s functional requirements.

Investment Portfolio Management:
Formerly Portfolio Director and designed for business strategists, allows users to create investment portfolios and then budget, resource, and prioritize them from multiple perspectives while also defining interdependencies and performing user-defined analysis of ROI and efficiencies. Multiple executive views enable tracking of organizational budget and resource capacity against the allocations made to the portfolios and down through their component investments. These views can be configured based on user-defined investment characteristics used to compare alternate investment portfolio scenarios, summarize data from different perspectives and to ensure the correct level of risk and strategic balance in the current portfolio.

Program Management:
It breaks investments further down into programs. These programs represent top-level work content. The budgets and resources allocated at the parent investment level are distributed across these programs. Executive views enable tracking of investment budget and resource capacity against the allocations made to the programs. All of the functionality and analytics available at the investment level are available at the program level.

Project Management Tooling & Integration:
Programs are broken down into distinct projects. The top-down allocation of funds and resources is extended down to the project level to ensure project spending and resource allocations can be compared to the program budget and resource capacity. Artemis provides a lightweight project planning component, but also integrates with MSP, Views or some competing PM tools.

Collaboration:
Provides some document management features, including check-in/check-out functions. This functionality is lightweight and provided natively. It uses the A7 repository to store the documents, and users can check in and check out documents. Users can subscribe to the documents so if the document is changed, they are alerted of the change.

• Time Reporting — provides functionality for collecting time reports (actuals) and forecasting finish dates against planned work and feeds this data back to the project plan. The cost of the actual hours can be summarized and compared to the project and program budgets.
• Resource Allocation — allows a project owner to do a skills search and view the availability and use of specific individual resources. They can request the individual specifically, or other resources with similar skills or roles. Workflow routes the request to the resource owner and the individual resource to secure the assigned resource for the work. Soft booking is possible until confirmation is made and the resource is ultimately hard booked to the project or program.
• The Program Management module is required if the customer’s needs include the Project Management and Resource Allocation modules. The Project Management module is required if the customer wishes to implement task-level Time Reporting.
• The default installation of the application configures the various levels of investment definition using generic terminology. These levels can be re-captioned via Unicode text file map to processes employed by customers in specific industry verticals. For example, A7 implementations using the company’s packaged solution for new product introduction have re-captioned these levels as follows:
  · Investment Portfolio = Product Family
  · Investment = Product Line
  · Program = Product Release Cycle #
  · Project = Product Development

Portfolio Management
Artemis offers industry-specific solutions that include portfolio management methodologies and programs for specific vertical industries within its customer base to help users determine what the initiatives should be. These solutions include Corporate IT Management, Government IT Management, Fleet & Asset Optimization for the Energy industry and Pipeline Management for the Pharmaceutical industry and provide algorithms, methodologies and formally defined processes for determining on what initiatives the organization should focus its efforts based on best practices identified in these respective markets. The system also provides a user-definable scoring mechanism, enabling the user to score, rank and prioritize investments according to industry best practice if it exists and a scorecard mechanism enabling user definable algorithms to score and rank the investments from alternate perspectives. The system also providers user-definable value types for use in generating mean average returns on investment with associated standard deviations. Report formats and graphics are dependent on the data mart and third party tools used. As long as the criteria for investment selection are known, they can be built into the system.

A7 is a stand-alone PPM system providing key modules, and like other PPM tools, it depends somewhat on MSP or other PM tool integration to provide a full PPM suite. Alternatively, it provides a native project planning piece featuring a Gantt chart and resource histograms. Like other PPM systems, A7 by design is not intended to support critical path scheduling and many other traditional PM functions, such as resource leveling, and estimation.

A7 can leverage MSP for time reporting and resource allocation, or these functions can be handled by Artemis natively. With respect to the use of MSP on the desktop, the vendor describes A7 as being an alternative to Project Server, but with the additional functionality for performing investment portfolio management. The system allows Artemis to sell a PPM system to a customer without layering a huge complex PM system like Views or other competing PM products that impose a single PM discipline across the company.

A database stores information for resource allocation. The resource repository holds individual resource profiles and skills at the server level of the database. This database handles all resource profiles and splinters MSP data from *.mpp files to populate Artemis data tables. It does not store the .mpp files themselves.

Other niche areas that come as strengths of Artemis are:

• Robust Top-Down Management and Process Support
• Support interfaces to financials systems, such as SAP and PeopleSoft, and integration to help desk tracking systems, such as Remedy and TrackIT
• New Product Development
• Information Technology Management
• Strategic Asset Optimization
• Interdependencies and Cost Allocation
• Departmental Views
• Investment-Level Portfolio Management
• Capacity Simulation Features
• Methodology Support
• Competitive Pricing Tag

Weaknesses, Comparision with other PPM Tools, Pricing Info & EPMGuru Verdict:
This section is available on request and we are not publishing keeping the product vendor's interest. However, independent reviews, price comparisons & potential buying/implementation risks can be availed upon a request to epmguru@epmguru.com .

References: Artemis International, Wikipidia, Gartner