SAP BPC Planning & Forecasting Business Transformation, Programme Managed by the Snell Consultancy, Selected as a Finalist in the BCS & Computing UK IT Industry Awards 2012
September 16, 2012 by Ivan Snell
A planning & forecasting business transformation programme which the Snell Consultancy programme managed for a global oil & gas company headquartered in London, UK, has been selected as a Finalist in the BCS & Computing UK IT Industry Awards 2012 – Project Excellence Section. We are delighted for our client and for SAP that this programme has been selected as one of the finalists out of the 476 entries to this year’s Awards and proud to have taken such a leading role in its successful delivery.
It represents an extremely well deserved accolade for all three organisations. In the words of Stuart Sumner, Editor of Computing: “The UK IT Industry Awards are rigorously judged and to be announced as a finalist is a great achievement.”
David Clarke MBE, Chief Executive Officer, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, said: “Congratulations to the finalists; they can be proud of their achievements in reaching this stage of our prestigious Awards. Through the Awards we aim to demonstrate not only the innovation and professionalism of those working in IT but also the importance of IT in delivering business and social benefit.”
The BCS & Computing UK IT Industry Awards are a platform for the entire profession to celebrate best practice, innovation and excellence.
Read more about the SAP BPC project
Read more about the Snell Consultancy
Read more about SAP Business Planning Consolidation for NetWeaver
Global Energy Market Leader – Global SAP Business Objects Planning & Consolidation (BPC) Implementation, Finance Organisation
June 19, 2012 by Ivan Snell
Snell Consultancy is pleased to announce the live implementation of a business transformation programme for one of its global clients. The programme, delivers the next generation planning and forecasting solution for a global energy market leader. The solution took twelve months in total to design, build and deploy and is enabled by SAP® BPC™ 7.5 for NetWeaver, (a part of SAP’s Enterprise Performance Management, EPM, portfolio). BPC™ is now in live use by the global energy market leader’s community of finance planning and cost centre managers across five continents in over 25 countries. BPC will enable the organisation to accurately and effectively aggregate bottom up financial planning and forecasting data into a single version of the truth to inform corporate strategy and investor communications.
Snell Consultancy Director Ivan Snell managed the programme delivery involving a team of over fifty SAP specialist consultants responsible for the BPC™ solution build and integration, client and contract staff. He said: “this has been a remarkable achievement for everyone including our Blue Chip British client, a world leader in natural gas, SAP (UK) and the Snell Consultancy. At this time it is the largest SAP® BPC™ deployment in the world delivered with SAP as the integration partner. BPC replaces our client’s legacy solution with improved reporting capabilities and the benefits of a unified, predictive performance platform that delivers core business forecasting and planning process functionality and features from a single enterprise-scale application and database.”
Such large scale global programmes are highly complex and carry substantial levels of risk to the businesses that undertake them. Snell Consultancy’s provision of interim capability addressed the complexity and mitigated the risks through effective engagement with all impacted stakeholders, forming a strong integrated winning team, setting up an effective programme organisation governance structure and tightly managing the integration partner’s delivery against its’ contractual obligations.
Read more about the SAP BPC project
Read more about the Snell Consultancy
Read more about SAP Business Planning Consolidation for NetWeaver
Ivan Snell’s Training Pays Off with a PB Time at Eton Super Sprint Triathlon, 19th May 2012, and Over £1,000 Raised for Sparks
May 22, 2012 by Ivan Snell
In only his second triathlon ever Snell Consultancy director, Ivan Snell, beat his previous
triathlon `super sprint’ time by over ten minutes. The race took place on Saturday 19th May at the fantastic Dorney Lake, which will be one of the venues for the 2012 Olympics.
Speaking about the race and his first open water swim in a lake Ivan said: “despite the new experience of swimming in the cold, twelve degree, water of Dorney Lake compared to the twenty-eight degrees of Hampton pool for my first tri, with no visibility and having to navigate my way amongst eight-four other competitors in my wave, I was out of the water quicker than my first race”. Ivan continued: “there were times, though, at the start of the swim, that the thought of quitting did cross my mind. I am glad I didn’t though as I finished in a much quicker time overall than my last warm up race and I knew I could not let down everyone who has sponsored me so far’.
|
Race |
Finish |
Swim |
Cycle |
Run |
Overall Pos’ |
Cat’ Pos’ |
| 09-Apr-12 Thames Turbo Sprint Race #1 |
01:26:55 |
00:11:07 |
00:45:31 |
00:24:04 |
302 / 506 |
50 / 92 |
| 19-May-12 Eton Super Sprint |
01:16:27 |
00:08:49 |
00:40:14 |
00:22:15 |
338 / 766 |
67 / 168 |
Ivan Snell is raising money for the Sparks for children’s health charity by racing in the Virgin Active Olympic distance (1,500 swim/40k cycle/10k run) London triathlon on 23rd September 2012. He is racing in a number of shorter distance `super sprint’ triathlons this summer as training for the big event. For more information on Snell Consultancy charity fund raising please go here. For the opportunity to sponsor Ivan please visit his Sparks charity fund raising page here.
Snell Consultancy Sponsors Entry to AAM Cowes Week 2011
May 17, 2011 by Ivan Snell
Snell Consultancy is proud to announce that it will be supporting the entry of a J109 into this year’s Aberdeen Asset Managment Cowes Week between the 6th and the 12th of August.
TeamSnell participates in a number of regattas and competes in events over the course of a year on various yachts but this will be the first time that it has supported an entry into the Aberdeen Asset Management Cowes Week as it is now known. Ivan Snell, one of the founding directors of The Snell Consultancy said: “given the competitive nature of the J109 one design fleet in the UK and the new phase of the regatta with Aberdeen Asset Management onboard for the first time, this will really be a great event this year”.
There is the opportunity to join Snell directors, our key partners, customers and suppliers in sampling the traditions, charm and unique atmosphere of the World’s oldest, largest, most famous and most fun annual yachting regatta.
Social Computing Value Case
June 2, 2010 by Ivan Snell
Social Computing is firmly on the CIO radar but CIO’s are asking `Where is the Value?’
No one could argue that Social Computing is still a nascent technical or social phenomenon. Its evolution can, after all, be traced back the creation of bulletin boards. According to a recent research report, The Value of Social Media Report, published by Econsultancy, 81 per cent of the companies it surveyed expect their social media budgets to increase over 2010. Services such as Twitter and LinkedIn have become important platforms for businesses to build relationship with customers, generate feedback and market products.
The major technology providers all have established offerings now such as, for example: Microsoft’s newly launched Sharepoint 2010 which has a major investment in social computing; IBM’s Lotus connections integrated into multiple points of the IBM stack; and, Opentext with its acquisition of the Vignette Collaboration platform release 7.0. There are a host of specialist vendors out there too such as Jive, Telligent, Atlassian and Google.
The functional areas that Social Computing is comprised of can broadly be described as being the following:
- Blogs – associated with corporate communications
- WiKis – often used at project, department and divisional levels to build up information
- Social Media – allowing end users to upload valuable lessons learnt
- Forums / Discussion – enabling informal ways to build up self-help
Despite the seemingly numerous applications that Social Computing has in a corporate environment senior IT executives, continually under cost pressures, want to know what the return on investment is. As Stef Shoffren, of Avanade UK, commented during his presentation on `Social Computing in the Enterprise Comes of Age’ at the British Computer Society (BSC) that CIOs “want to know where is the true value?” He added: “to say, if you don’t start implementing [social media applications] you will not attract a new workforce into the company is not really a very compelling revenue case”.
The Social Computing Value Case
Borrowing from Stef Shoffren’s categorisation it seems sensible to assess the Social Computing value case from both the inside and the outside of the organisation’s firewall. i.e. supporting inward facing business processes and supporting outward facing business processes.
On the inside of the firewall the benefits of Social Computing can be attributed to the value of social community, ratings and commentary, and social unified communications.
The value of social community – relates to the knowledge locked up inside people’s heads. Providing the ability for people to describe their skills can help build a profile which is easily searchable. This enables the organisation to build more dynamic connections so its staff can easily find experts in the organisation.
Ratings and Commentary – such as tagging helps people find content and social bookmarking allows users to share, organise, search and manage resources.
Social & Unified Communications – feeds provide a way to deal with social overloads and provide up-to-second information on whom in a particular community, such as an on-line subject matter expert network, is immediately available on-line.
On the outside of the firewall it is easier to think about the use of social computing in the context of enabling new product development and design processes, customer service and customer fulfilment processes and those associated with the tactical marketing mix. The still emerging benefits of Social Computing centre on crowdsourcing and brand enhancement.
Crowdsourcing – the term crowdsourcing, coined by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, describes the web-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals through what amounts to an open call for proposals. The value to an organisation is immediately obvious. Some often cited benefits include, for example:
- An organisation can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organisation
- Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost, and often very quickly
- By listening to the crowd, organizations gain first-hand insight on their customers’ desires
- The community may feel a brand-building kinship with the crowdsourcing organisation, which is the result of an earned sense of ownership through contribution and collaboration.
Brand Value Creation and Customer Acquisition – conversations are already taking place about an organisation’s corporate, product, service brands and if it can participate it can shape the outcomes. Above brand enhancement, social media provides a low cost, transparent and immediate way for organisations to reach their target markets. The question, as Steve Latham, of Spur Interactive, has pointed out is how an organisation sees the engagement process (visit, registration, participation, content creation and informing others) in terms of translating intent at each stage into a monetary value. He provides an extremely compelling case study of Sage Stores 500% ROI on its `back-to-school’ social networking site aimed at the underserved female teens markets.
Driving out the Organisation’s Social Media Strategy
Stef Shoffren, of Avanade UK, concluded his presentation by suggesting that “not a lot of Blue Chips had implemented social computing for a ROI – more for experimentation”. It would be extremely interesting to know on what grounds this conclusion is based on. Maybe the initial intent for the early adopter organisations is `experimentation’ not business case driven ROI which can be extremely hard to formalise for any emerging new technological innovation. Asking what the value of social computing is may not be the best question a CIO could ask. A better question might be; `given our organisations social media strategy, how can the IT function deliver the services to support it in the most cost effective way optimising existing platforms and new market offerings?’