Engen wins ITWeb's BI Excellence award - deployment shows strategic business value

Monday, 08 March 2010

With the ever increasing scarcity of resources and the mounting pressure on business to continually improve delivery, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is enabling Engen to ensure the optimum allocation of all resources to projects to maximise returns," noted Dave Wright - Engen's General Manager for Corporate Planning.

Engen Petroleum, the sub-Saharan African marketer of refined petroleum products, has won the inaugural ITWeb Business Intelligence Excellence Award for its PPM business intelligence - pipping tech powerhouse SARS to the finish line.

The recognition is a triumph for the company and not just because Business Intelligence (BI) can be extremely complex. When its architects get it right, the technology has a central role in supporting company strategy with the intelligence it needs to make decisions.

BI as a strategic tool

Peter du Plooy, Engen's chief information officer (CIO), says it is one of the project's biggest success factors that it was defined in strategic terms. "To us, Bi is a tool that helps us make the best possible capital projects decisions at all times, prioritise them and monitor their progress and execution."

He explains that each capital project at Engen, from manufacturing to sales and distribution, goes through a thorough selection process. "As we expand into new and more complex business environments, the business increasingly requires an integrated, multi-dimensional view of data, to facilitate a 'portfolio approach' to capital projects," he says.

To this end, Engen adopted a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) initiative across sub-Saharan Africa. While PPM orchestrates Engen's capital investment portfolio, BI provides the 'visibility' to enable it.

This requires routing project data from Engen Refinery, Sales & Marketing, International Business, IT and other divisions, and presenting it in an aggregated view to enable easy project selection, tracking and adjustment in conformance with strategy.

Project notes

A number of integrated systems went into its making - SAP Investment Management, SAP Project Systems, SAP RPM and SAP BI. "BI's role within that environment is to provide visibility of capital projects," says Vaughan Cooksey, Engen programme manager for PPM. "The programme covered the people, process and technology changes."

He notes both technical and human challenges with the implementation, "On the technical front, the design of the solution was crucial and challenging. The main requirements were flexibility in the structure of reports, scalability as data grows and a visible audit trail," he says.

On the human front, challenges were even tougher, he says. "BI depends on good quality data. But while people value good output, there is not always an appreciation for the need for solid input. This is addressed by demonstrating the content during the development process." Cleverly, technology and process components were implemented simultaneously, demonstrating the value of PPM early on.

Cooksey also championed the role and value of PPM throughout. "Ultimately, continuous, open communication between all team members ensured a shared vision directed at overcoming any technology or human challenges, it really is a team effort," he says.

Clear benefits

In line with expectations, the technology generates a consolidated presentation of data from various divisions, providing not only a corporate view, but also allowing individual divisions to drill down to view their own projects, resources and investments, says Cooksey.

Data is delivered to different audiences via:

• dashboards at executive level,
• comprehensive data cubes for analysts, through to
• bespoke reports for a large user group

Du Plooy says the PPM BI strategy has succeeded in allowing Engen to select the right projects and track their progress across its entire supply chain and distribution network, across South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. In a very short time, this has resulted in:

• significant shifts in planned spend patterns aligned with strategy
• shifts in project scheduling, resulting in a more achievable project portfolio
• better governance by keeping an audit trail of project snapshots
• expediting of capitalisation process on the closure of projects

Significant business contribution

"PPM BI has made a significant contribution to the business planning process, improving Engen's decision-making around prioritising projects.
It also allows us to monitor progress on our capital project portfolio and track our progress towards our EPIC 2016 vision of becoming a Champion in Africa," says Dave Wright, Engen General Manager for Corporate Planning. "With the ever increasing scarcity of resources and the mounting pressure on business to continually improve delivery, Project Portfolio Management is enabling Engen to ensure the optimum allocation of all resources to projects to maximise returns," noted Wright.