Engen adds to accolades

Engen's GM for Corporate Planning, Dave Wright

This award recognises the energy group's SAP portfolio project management (PPM) implementation for the third time in as many months, after taking Gold in SAP's Quality Awards for the African Market Unit and winning South African publisher ITWeb's BI Excellence Award in March.

The EMEA and African SAP awards cited the quality of Engen's integration of various SAP modules into PPM, while ITWeb commended the "clear business impact" of Engen's PPM BI programme, which "went beyond traditional BI into predictive analytics and business innovation".

Capital project planning

Dave Wright, Engen's GM for Corporate Planning, explains the rationale behind the wide-ranging systems implementation, which started in 2007. "Behind every forecourt in South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa lies an exhaustive business planning process that assesses which capital projects should be undertaken to provide the facilities on offer. With finite capital available to us, we select only those that are in line with our strategic objectives," he says.

The complexity inherent in this process is evident from the group's wide geographic spread across 17 African countries (and growing), and in the large number and wide spectrum of projects put forward - some involving significant engineering resources, others not.

Integrated programmes

To cut through this complexity, Engen undertook an 'integrated PPM' programme. PPM envisaged a consistent, end-to-end approach to its capital projects, by establishing group-wide PPM processes, structures and support systems, integrated capital expenditure tracking, capacity planning at divisional level and an enterprise-wide view of projects for measurement against strategic objectives.

The CIO, Peter du Plooy, noting the trend of the need for an overall company-wide prioritised view of investment initiatives early on, was instrumental in initiating the programme based on the current ERP platform. The programme integrated a number of modules, including the system's Investment Management, Project Systems, Resource and Portfolio Management, Materials Management, Controlling, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Portal. The RPM was the key system at the core of the PPM implementation.

The programme further encompassed the entire organisation, taking 30 months from November 2007 for the phased rollout to be completed. Engen engaged IT and service company Collaborit to design the technology, managing the implementation itself, says Vaughan Cooksey, Engen's programme manager for PPM.

Quality Principles

• Thorough understanding of the energy company's business and technical objectives by involving business process owners;
  
• Different implementation phases were approved in accordance with a programme charter, divisional implementation projects and a high-level programme plan. Progress was monitored weekly and change management principles applied;
  
• Key stakeholders were engaged in accordance with a detailed communication plan. A working group of divisional business process owners met during the blueprinting process to achieve consistency. Key business users were involved in education workshops and user acceptance testing;
  
• Programme Roles and responsibilities were agreed upfront. Due to the scale and complexity of the programme, a detailed organisational structure was designed, including an executive steering committee and programme work streams (change management, rollout of seven projects, business process management and technology);
  
• Qualified people were appointed, based on the priority of the PPM project at the highest levels within Engen;
  
• Formal SAP methodologies were used from a programme and implementation perspective including blueprinting, testing, and formal infrastructure change management;
  
• Text-book approach to risk management was adopted;
  
• Quality plan was devised;
  
• Programme leveraged standard SAP best practices - as provided in RPM and all other modules;
  
• Attention was given to training, change management and operational readiness, using a maturity model at divisional level.