Engen takes silver in 2010 SAP Quality Award for Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA)

Friday, 21 May 2010

Engen Petroleum, the African energy group, has taken Silver in this year's SAP Quality Award in the new business application category for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), announced at the enterprise software vendor's SAPPHIRE event in Frankfurt, on May 17-19.

The outstanding honour recognises Engen's SAP portfolio project management (PPM) implementation for the third time in as many months, after taking Gold in SAP's Quality Awards for the African Market Unit, and winning South African publisher ITWeb's BI Excellence Award in March.

The EMEA and African SAP awards cited the quality of Engen's integration of various SAP modules into PPM, while ITWeb commended the "clear business impact" of Engen's PPM BI programme, which "went beyond traditional BI into predictive analytics and business innovation".

Capital project planning

Dave Wright, Engen's General Manager for Corporate Planning, explains the rationale behind the wide-ranging SAP implementation, which started in 2007. "Behind every Engen forecourt in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa lies an exhaustive business planning process that assesses which capital projects should be undertaken to provide the facilities on offer. With finite capital available to us, we select only those that are in line with our strategic objectives," he says.

The complexity inherent in this process is evident from Engen's wide geographic spread across 17 African countries (and growing), and in the large number and wide spectrum of projects put forward - some involving significant engineering resources, others not.

Using SAP to achieve PPM

To cut through this complexity, Engen undertook an 'integrated PPM' programme. PPM envisaged a consistent, end-to-end approach to Engen's capital projects, by establishing group-wide PPM processes, structures and support systems, integrated capital expenditure tracking, capacity planning at divisional level and an enterprise-wide view of projects for measurement against strategic objectives.

The CIO, Peter du Plooy, noting the trend of the need for an overall company-wide prioritised view of investment initiatives early on, was instrumental in initiating the programme based on the current ERP platform. The programme integrated a number of SAP modules, including SAP Investment Management, SAP Project Systems, SAP Resource and Portfolio Management, SAP Materials Management, SAP Controlling, SAP Business Intelligence and SAP Enterprise Portal. SAP RPM was the key system at the core of the PPM implementation.

The programme further encompassed the entire organisation, taking 30 months since November 2007 for the phased rollout to be completed. Engen engaged IT and service company Collaborit to design the technology, managing the implementation itself, says Vaughan Cooksey, Engen's programme manager for PPM.

The implementation closely adhered to SAP's Quality Principles.

• The programme came to a thorough understanding of Engen's business and technical objectives by involving business process owners.
• The different implementation phases were approved in accordance with a programme charter, divisional implementation projects and a high-level programme plan. Progress was monitored weekly and change management principles applied.
• Key stakeholders were engaged in accordance with a detailed communication plan. A working group of divisional business process owners met during the blueprinting process to achieve consistency. Key business users were involved in education workshops and user acceptance testing.
• Programme Roles and responsibilities were agreed upfront. Due to the scale and complexity of the programme, a detailed organisational structure was designed, including an executive steering committee and programme work streams (change management, rollout of seven projects, business process management and technology)
• Qualified people were appointed, based on the priority of the PPM project at the highest levels within Engen.
• Formal SAP methodologies were used from a programme and implementation perspective including blueprinting, testing, and formal infrastructure change management.
• A text-book approach to risk management was adopted.
• A quality plan was devised.
• The programme leveraged standard SAP best practices – as provided in SAP RPM and all other modules.
• Attention was given to training, change management and operational readiness, using a maturity model at divisional level.

These resulted in wide-ranging plaudits for Engen for the implementation.

"Making the extraordinary look ordinary and delivering software solutions that bring significant benefits to the business takes careful planning and execution that can be measured against firm criteria for excellence," says Joschi Huber (SAP South Africa). "Engen's implementation stood out as one that conformed to best practices and standards to deliver those benefits."

For more information visit http://www.sap.com/about/qualityawards/index.epx.