Johannesburg, 16 Sep 2014
As part of its focus on enabling customer organisations to innovate for competitive edge and sustainability, Britehouse has created a Business Control Centre (BCC) that dynamically tracks customer data and processes with the objective of pre-empting pain points.
Closely aligned with the strategic objectives and functionality of SAP's Operational Control Centre, Britehouse's BCC is one of the first SAP partner-enabled control centres globally, and the first in Africa.
"Some multinationals with substantial IT departments have used SAP OCC to set up their own internal support centres and, thereby, extract optimal value from their SAP systems," says Deon du Preez, Britehouse Specialist SAP Division (SSD) account manager.
"For the majority of organisations, however, finding and retaining the necessary in-house technology and business consultancy talent to run such a centre is an onerous investment. So, we decided to make innovation and performance improvement cost-effective for all organisations by making the facility available on a hosted, fixed price basis.
"We've added significant extra value by taking a proactive rather than a reactive approach. Instead of waiting passively for a customer to call in an incident, we identify and resolve issues before the customer knows they exist. Because we are able to see all activity, we can even spot when a user is having difficulty with a process and help remediate that.
"Inherently, therefore, we are able to provide advice and practical assistance with all three of the elements that underpin a successful organisation: people, processes, and technology. As a consequence, we drive coherent innovation that leads to consistent performance improvement across the organisation, while also reducing cost."
Additional benefits conferred by the BCC include improved stability of an organisation's SAP environment, reduction in technical errors, alerts when business process KPIs are breached, and a positive user experience in relation to SAP. Powerful governance ensures the elimination or mitigation of business risk.
As with SAP OCC, Britehouse BCC is built on Solution Manager's approach of running SAP like a factory, using predefined key performance indicators and analytics.
Physically, the BCC consists of a set of video monitors and dashboards by means of which Britehouse technology and business consultants monitor the status of a customer's business processes along with its related IT components.
Britehouse has a strong strategic relationship with SAP, being SAP's only Alliance Partner in Africa and frequently contributing thought leadership regarding SAP usage and functionality that is then shared around the world.
"In the case of our BCC, we have added and will continue to add our own intellectual capital and insight gained over our many customer projects and engagements during the past decades," Du Preez says. "So, the BCC will provide a combination of global best practice and locally relevant insight."
A senior vice-president of SAP Global Active Support visited the Britehouse BCC in May this year, giving it his unqualified approval.
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