Engen wins BI Excellence award

Engen has been crowned the winning entrant in the first ITWeb Business Intelligence Excellence Awards, held last week as part of ITWeb's annual BI Summit, in Bryanston.

James Taylor, keynote speaker and CEO of US-based Decision Management Systems, introduced the awards, which recognise excellence in deploying successful and ongoing BI projects that have generated value to their businesses.

Vaughan Cooksey, Engen programme manager for Project Portfolio Management (PPM), said that Engen was proud to be recognised as the overall winner of the awards.

“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 resources to projects to maximise returns,” noted Cooksey.

According to Engen, its PPM BI strategy extends across its distribution network in sub-Saharan Africa. The strategy aided Engen's business planning process around prioritising projects and aligning the capital plan with corporate strategy.

Cooksey said: “With the implementation of standardised PPM definitions, categorisation and data structures across the business, the reporting has provided an effective means to direct the capital spend of the organisation, facilitating executive debates in a structured manner by providing visibility of project information.

“The end result provides senior management with reliable information, operational transparency, and allows Engen to respond effectively and efficiently to the challenges it faces.”

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) was the runner-up in the award. Brenda Hore, SARS GM of process and information management, said: “It's an honour to be recognised by your peers who understand what it takes to implement a BI project such as ours.

“The journey of moving into BI is still a young one for SARS. The BI project has been running for eight years now and is in its operational phase.”

SARS developed an enterprise data warehouse with BI capabilities that resulted in cost savings and return on investment. The BI capabilities have decreased the turnaround time for information from one week to instant, on-demand reporting. This has improved SARS' taxpayer services as well as enforcement, risk and strategic services.

The judges - Alistair Hofert of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Bill Hoggarth, an independent consultant, Ranka Jovanovic, ITWeb's editorial director, Avinth Rabbipal of Dama, and Werner Swanepoel of Deloitte -were looking for entries that showed clear business impact and went beyond traditional data warehouse/reporting into the realm of predictive analytics and business innovation.

Bill Hoggarth, chairman of the judging panel, congratulated the two winners: “We looked at entries that were innovative in deploying BI solutions and we wanted to recognise excellence in the predictive domain.”