Britehouse and Bilfinger Power Africa were awarded silver in the medium-sized business category at the 2013 SAP Quality Awards for Middle East and Africa. The award acknowledges the positive impact on project outcomes of close collaboration between the implementation partner and client in ensuring the success of IT projects aimed at supporting the business.
Bilfinger Power Africa, a subsidiary of the multinational Bilfinger Group, is an engineering and service group that develops, builds, maintains, and operates plants and buildings for the energy, industrial, and real estate sectors.
The company took on the responsibility of developing all training material and end-user training in a project that replaced Bilfinger's previous transactional and operational system with SAP. Eleven SAP modules impacting crucial operations, such as Bilfinger's own project life cycle management, product sales, made to order sales, and production to order activities, affected 370 users across 24 locations around the country, including the Bilfinger head office.
"The business undertaking user training can be a challenge for an implementation of this size because the IT partners lose control of the training and user acceptance outcomes," says Britehouse project manager, Marco Windt.
"The advantage one gains, however, is that the business must become intimately involved in the project, which pays off in better and faster decision-making. With Bilfinger, we had the rare additional benefit of the Bilfinger project manager, Justus Wernecke, not only knowing the company inside out, but also having had experience of large IT projects. Deep insight of that nature irons out a lot of potential wrinkles in an implementation.
"Bilfinger also committed itself to making the project a success by dedicating internal resources to the implementation team and, towards the end, even having key super users working full time with the rest of us in a separate ops room. That kind of focus and drive from the client pretty much guarantees a successful project."
Bilfinger Power SA general manager of support services and lead project manager for the SAP implementation, Justus Wernecke, believes the project's biggest achievement was delivering a system that worked for the end-users, all of whom had been very comfortable on the pre-SAP system. "Change management is difficult enough without the geographical split we had with 24 different sites, and our utter dependence, operationally, on communications among our own branches and with our parent in Germany.
"So, the SAP Quality Award is the cherry on top of getting a very delicate and complex job done on budget, on time, and with total user buy-in."
The Bilfinger/Britehouse team initially worked from a template supplied by Bilfinger's head office in Germany, but very quickly began to initiate enhancements triggered by the need to customise the template for local circumstances.
"The system we implemented guides users in their various tasks, thereby ensuring correct use and functionality for all operational and reporting needs," Wernecke says. "It's a different approach but it works very well.
"Britehouse was instrumental in helping to make it work by understanding that SAP didn't have all the answers to our requirements, and instead of trying to build into SAP what was missing, they helped us integrate our processes with SAP to achieve an as far as possible standard system.
"Britehouse is extremely good at finding the optimal solution because they recognise that, when the project is over, the business must carry forward the changes that have been initiated. The implementation partner must, therefore, pass on a living process."
Windt says the Britehouse model, which makes use of Britehouse in-house specialists and 'permanent' consultants, who dedicate their time to Britehouse projects, means the best people for a given project are always working on it.
"It doesn't matter what the challenge is, we can always access the one person capable of solving it."
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