Recruited to join a Centre of Excellence (CoE) team helping drive consolidation and harmonisation for a global energy organisation with geographically dispersed business offices.

Tasked with defining the road map for to-be infrastructure to support the future application components for a standard global finance template including additional regional variants, then socialising the solution with various project managers, architects, engineers and delivery partners in support of a multi-phased roll out world-wide.

The team facilitated several workshops to engage the internal stakeholders and influencers ensuring elimination of any ambiguities and to socialise all roadmaps, principles and policies before publishing in the CoE artefact library.  External speakers were invited to provide industry challenges and peer perspective.

I was the go-to lead, building out the technical components of the new architectural framework and advising on technical matters to ensure steering decisions were in line with strategy. This influenced SAP transactional systems and middleware systems which adopted many of the MI architectural principles.

I engaged directly with SAP product development, managing to secure the team a position on SAP’s beta development programme. This allowed hands-on access to SAP’s latest software 12 months before general release, facilitating early trials and permitting CoE input into product design.

I assisted the business analysts and process owners with blueprinting to ensure the technical platform supported all non-functional requirements, from accessibility and performance to reliability and security.

A demo environment was built as an accelerator for all new projects to share. It provided both practical hands-on capability, backed up with all the documented theory and models from the artefact library offering a fast-track for standardised best-practice Finance Management Information reporting requirements.

The organisation’s business units were able to adopt a core set of SAP business models for Management Information that facilitated uniform reporting across the world and easy consolidation at head office.

Regional variations to the core model were simple additions that were managed locally.

Costs for project deployment were halved.

Time to deliver was halved.

Savings were achieved on hardware and software and additionally on training.

Direct positive impact on staff satisfaction due to reliable systems, user-friendly training and expert support.

• architecture
• BI
• infrastructure
• SAP