Cerri PPM, configured to actually run the portfolio.
Stage-gate governance, capacity-aware resource planning, and earned-value reporting your CFO trusts. Built on Cerri Project, the Swiss-headquartered PPM platform used by 500+ manufacturers.
The enterprise PPM platform: stage-gate governance, portfolio management, capacity-aware resource planning, earned-value cost management, risk scoring, 500+ standard reports.
Stage-gate governance
Portfolio + Resource
Earned value + budget
Risk scoring + escalation
Fit: Manufacturing, pharma R&D, engineering, public sector with 30+ concurrent projects.
Cerri Work
Task & deliverable management
Flexible task and deliverable management. Lighter than Cerri Project. For teams that do not need the full PPM weight but still want shared discipline over the work.
Tasks + deliverables
Flexible assignments
Project-optional
Built-in collaboration
Fit: Teams that have outgrown spreadsheets but do not yet need full PPM.
As Cerri Platinum Partner we implement both. We scope which one fits on the first call.
Industries we deploy Cerri for
Where stage-gate and earned value actually land.
Cerri is strongest across 500+ manufacturers, but the model carries further. These are the industries where PPM with gate discipline moves the year-end number.
Manufacturing
Plant expansions, product launches, continuous improvement, major maintenance. Cerri's founding vertical with 500+ customers and named references like Hitachi Aqua-Tech.
Pharma & life sciences
Drug development pipelines, clinical programs, healthcare IT. Structured governance and audit-ready control across R&D, quality, regulatory, manufacturing, and IT.
Engineering & EPC
Capital programs, design-build, infrastructure. Gates with structured criteria, dependencies, and program-level earned-value reporting.
Public sector & non-profit
Budget-funded programs, reporting requirements, multi-year cycles. Disciplined stage-gate keeps allocation honest across constituents and donors.
The problem
PPM at scale is where most ops dashboards fall apart.
01
The status report is theater.
Every project is 'yellow' because nobody wants to escalate. By the time something turns red, you've missed the window to do anything about it. Stage-gate governance only works if the gates actually mean something.
02
Capacity planning is a guess.
You don't know who is actually committed to what across the portfolio. Three managers think the same person is available next month. Two of them will be disappointed. Without capacity-aware allocation, every quarter starts with a re-baseline.
03
The CFO cannot see ROI.
Each project tracks its own metrics in its own spreadsheet. There is no portfolio-level view of where the money went, what shipped, what earned value was delivered, and what came of it. Audit-ready reporting is a slide deck, not the system.
Deliverables
What you get.
A Cerri Project deployment scaled to your portfolio (50, 100, or several hundred concurrent projects) with project types, stage-gate criteria, and the governance model defined deliberately
Stage-gate workflows that actually gate: structured gate criteria, decision tracking, and escalation when a project misses its gate
Capacity-aware resource planning across teams and BUs with named allocations, conflict surfacing, and a forward view of where the slack and the bottlenecks are
Planning and Gantt with dependency management so cross-program dependencies are visible, not assumed
Cost and budget tracking with earned-value management and budget control, rolled up to portfolio level
Risk management: risk scoring, escalation workflows, and a portfolio-level risk register the steering committee can run on
Reporting on Cerri's 500+ standard reports plus the dashboards your CFO and your steering committee actually open
Integration with your finance system (so spend rolls up automatically), your HR system (so capacity reflects actual headcount), and your team-level work tools (monday.com, Asana, Jira) so program work flows up to portfolio
Choice of cloud, private cloud, or on-premise deployment, configured for your security and compliance posture
The 60-day plan
What sixty days looks like.
01
Days 1-20: Portfolio inventory and stage-gate design
Catalog every active project. Surface the zombie projects nobody wants to admit are dead. Establish the project taxonomy (program / project / phase / workstream), the stage-gate criteria, and the metric definitions you'll govern by.
02
Days 21-40: Stand up Cerri
Configure project types, gate criteria, capacity model, cost and budget structure, risk scoring, and integrations. Migrate active projects in. Train PMs and program leads on the new tooling and the new cadence.
03
Days 41-60: Operate the cadence
Run the first weekly portfolio review on Cerri. Run the first stage-gate decision meeting using the new criteria. Run the first monthly steering. Refine metric definitions and gate criteria based on what people are actually arguing about.
Engagement model
How engagements are structured.
Cerri implementations are typically 60-day fixed-fee starters, scaled to the size of your portfolio and the complexity of your governance model (a manufacturing PMO running stage-gate is a different scope than an engineering team adopting Cerri Work for task management).
As a Cerri Platinum Partner we can also handle license sales and route enterprise terms through Cerri directly, so license, implementation, and ongoing support live under one engagement instead of three vendors.
After the starter, ongoing PMO advisory is offered as a quarterly retainer, usually with a senior operator embedded part-time as your fractional PMO lead.
Deployment options
Where Cerri runs. Your call.
Unlike most modern PPM platforms, Cerri supports all three deployment models. Material in pharma, regulated manufacturing, and any environment with data residency or air-gap requirements.
CLOUD
Cloud (SaaS)
Cerri-hosted, live in weeks. The default for most commercial implementations. Updates managed by Cerri.
PRIVATE
Private cloud
Dedicated tenant, usually in the client's preferred cloud. For enterprises with data-isolation policy or region-of-record requirements.
ON-PREM
On-premise
Deployed on your own infrastructure. For regulated environments (pharma, defense-adjacent), air-gapped requirements, or strict data-residency compliance.
We scope the right model in the discovery call so the implementation matches your security posture.
FAQ
Frequently asked.
Are you a Cerri partner?
Cerri Platinum Partner. We can resell Cerri licenses, route enterprise commercial terms through Cerri directly, and our delivery team has implemented Cerri at portfolio scale across manufacturing and adjacent industries.
We have monday.com / Asana / Jira already. Why Cerri?
Cerri is built for portfolio-level project operations at scale, with stage-gate governance, earned-value cost management, and capacity-aware resource planning out of the box. monday.com and Asana are excellent at the team and program level but they were not built to be the PPM system. The good news: Cerri integrates with both. It sits above them, not in place of them.
Cerri Project vs Cerri Work. Which one is right for us?
Cerri Project is the enterprise PPM platform: stage-gate, portfolio, resource and cost management. Cerri Work is the lighter-weight task and deliverable management tool. Most engagements we run are Cerri Project. We can scope Cerri Work for teams that need flexible task management without the full PPM weight.
Can Cerri run on-premise?
Yes. Cerri supports cloud, private cloud, and on-premise deployment. The on-prem option matters in pharma, defense-adjacent manufacturing, and regulated environments where data residency or air-gapped operation is a hard requirement. We scope the deployment model in the discovery call so the implementation matches your security posture.
How big a portfolio is this for?
Anywhere from 30 active projects up to several hundred. Below 30, you can run effectively on monday.com or Asana alone. Above several hundred we'd talk about whether Cerri is sufficient on its own or needs to be paired with something heavier (Planview, Clarity) for specific subdomains.
We don't have a PMO yet. Should we build one before doing this?
Often the answer is no. The Cerri rollout is frequently the operating-model intervention that creates the PMO. We have done both: standing up a PMO from scratch alongside the tooling, or implementing for an existing PMO that has outgrown its current stack.
Is Cerri only for manufacturing?
Manufacturing is Cerri's strongest vertical (500+ manufacturer customers, used by names like Hitachi Aqua-Tech), but the platform is used across pharma R&D and clinical, engineering, public sector, and IT portfolios. The stage-gate model that makes Cerri strong in manufacturing maps cleanly to drug development pipelines and regulated workflows.
What about ongoing support?
Optional fractional PMO retainer post-launch. Many clients take it for the first six months while the operating cadence establishes, then go independent.
The system that's been on the roadmap for two years. The migration that's already failed once. The AI strategy that didn't make it past the deck. That's the one we want.