The IT industry, and business environment in general, holds many economic and organisational challenges, and this has created a growing need for open and collaborative best-practice and knowledge-sharing forums.
This is according to Nico Harris, Business Application Solution Centre Manager at Eskom`s Business Application Solution Centre (BASC) in Johannesburg, which recently held its annual User Forum at the Eskom Conference Centre in Midrand.
"The importance of effective networking and experience-sharing cannot be underestimated in today`s business and IT world, because IT has become a business enabler and to do so successfully, IT must not only assist users to be more productive and do better business - but must add value in terms of understanding the business case and objectives of the organisation," Harris maintains.
"In acknowledgement of these needs, we have opened the BASC User Forum up to the industry as well as the internal users within Eskom itself for the second consecutive year.
"We were delighted to host a significant vendor and industry representation, as well as a wide cross-section of executive and management-level users within Eskom itself," Harris comments.
"Forums such as this one provides vendors, third-party suppliers and internal users with the opportunity to network and collaborate - to share best-practices, challenges that they have faced and ideas of how to constantly understand the business case better and so direct IT projects and implementations in an increasingly cost-effective and efficient manner," he points out.
BASC, which was formed recently as a result of a merger between the former Finesse Solution Centre and the Distribution Business Services Group within Eskom, acts as an enterprise-wide IT applications training, support, project resource and business process enhancement and modelling centre.
"We have effectively been assisting various divisions within Eskom through business application process support to better manage and optimise their business processes within the financial, commercial, human resources and revenue management arenas since the 1980s," Harris advises.
"BASC also has an important contribution to make in terms of assisting the organisation to achieve smooth project conversions, such as the past and current SAP and non-SAP implementations," adds Harris.
Although Eskom partners with a variety of vendors and third-party suppliers, historically SAP runs the largest solutions-stream within Eskom, with some 9 000 R/3 users and 20 000 ESS users at the present time. BASC has also been an accredited SAP Customer Competency Centre (CCC) since 2000.
In 1998 Eskom implemented SAP R/3 in one of the largest and fastest implementations at the time. It earned several international awards, including one from the Smithsonian Institute in the US, for exceptional project management skill in executing the project on time and within budget.
"As a customer whom we have partnered with successfully through accelerating technology and business shifts and challenges over the past several years, SAP is committed to assisting Eskom meet the current and future challenges of upcoming electricity distribution industry (EDI) deregulation, and to helping the organisation achieve its business goals more effectively via the benefits of integration and end-to-end business processes," comments Claas Kuehnemann, Managing Director of SAP Africa, who was also a keynote speaker at the BASC User Forum.
"As such, SAP has been very pleased to participate in the BASC User Forum, which is fast becoming a benchmark in terms of industry best-practice and knowledge-sharing," he concludes.
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