BP IT&S division provides IT support to the BP group of companies. This requires many projects to be managed across the globe- which in turn requires that costs relating to each project be extracted from all the accounting systems across the world and presented to the global project managers so that they are able to manage, forecast and report on their costs.

We achieved this in the following manner:

1. We created a small financial transactions database (FTD)us a SQL database which included a staging area for the incoming data
2. We created a Microsoft Access tool that manages the data upload process, access to the database and the data cleansing in the staging area
3. We installed the global mapping table into the BP SharePoint 2010 platform and set up the user interfaces to that mapping table using the Microsoft InfoPath tool together with the workflow capabilities of Sharepoint to manage the change approval process.
4. We created a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template to import the data from the FTD to the specific user. This allowed the user to
   1. Take a snapshot of the current project data and store that snapshot for further processing.
   2. Refresh the Excel spreadsheet template at will thus getting the most recent data.

Thus, by using the Microsoft Office toolset, we were able to to create an efficient global process servicing the needs of some 200 odd project managers at a fraction of the cost of any of the alternatives.