Information-technology executives at DaimlerChrysler Services North America LLC are ditching the homegrown and packaged applications they use to track and manage personnel, projects, budgets, and requests. In their place, the financial-services subsidiary of auto manufacturer DaimlerChrysler AG is substituting Evolve Software Inc.'s workforce-optimization product, which will track the skills and workloads of 500 employees and contractors, as well as technology project requests from business managers.

By integrating the information from these separate systems under one interface, the company expects to see a division productivity increase of 112 hours per week, as well as undisclosed cost savings. The software will simplify project development, from the initial service request to the identification of IT assets, costs, and business benefits upon the completion of the job.

"We'll be able to compare the project's estimated costs to the actual ones and really improve our estimating of project budgets," says Pauline Kelly, VP of information technology management at DaimlerChrysler Services.

Evolve 5, a suite of Web-based applications that starts at $500,000, lets managers rank project importance so they can prioritize IT efforts, shifting resources from low-priority endeavors to more-critical projects. It also lets them analyze projects to see whether they could have been handled more efficiently. The ability to look at each project in relation to others to better plan and manage jobs is a key goal, Kelly says.

Such functionality, dubbed portfolio management, is vital for balancing resources and controlling costs, says Gartner principal analyst Ted Kempf, but few companies have automated portfolio-management systems in place, he says.

Preliminary findings of a Gartner study of 60 IT decision makers on the topic show nearly 30% lack portfolio management, while 40% rely on manual data gathering to gain visibility into operations. Says Kempf, "That's labor-and time-intensive and error-prone."