Project Systems

Nick Champion from AG Consultancy & Apps Ltd and Francesca Richards from British Gas will present, British Gas achieve a ‘Quick Win’ in Automating and driving Data Quality in the creation and maintenance of SAP PS ‘Project Master Data.

In a recent initiative, British Gas (part of Centrica Group Plc) sought to drive improvements in the end-to-end process for SAP Project/WBS Master Data creation and maintenance.

In partnership with AG Consultancy & Apps Ltd (AG) the existing business processes and tools have been refined and a Winshuttle based ‘Quick Win’ solution has been developed and embedded in the business within just a few weeks.

This solution clearly demonstrates significant improvements across all key target areas of:

Simplification > User friendly solution eliminating need for specialist support

Automation > eliminate delays and overhead costs

Controls > embed ownership of data at source & driving data quality

Efficiency > eliminate delays and overhead costs

…all with minimal business input or disruption

…and a direct tangible ROI within weeks/months

British Gas process for Creating & Maintaining Business & IS Projects in SAP requires input from various groups (e.g. PMO, Finance, etc) and until recently relied upon an off-shore data admin support team for processing new requests in SAP. Whilst retaining the integrity of the business process and minimising business change BG have been able to achieve improved business process controls (e.g. around key Project/WBS data selections) and to fully automate the processing of all new requests. The solution removes duplication of effort (and the associated overhead costs and inefficiencies) whilst facilitating real time updates in SAP without any specialist skills or training (e.g. directly via the established simple user friendly form) and eliminates risk of poor data quality (and the associated issue resolution measures required to remediate). In this session British Gas and AG will jointly present a detailed overview of the solution (including demo) and the benefits to the business as well the plans for building on the platform to support other initiatives within the group.

Finally AG will provide a brief overview of how they drive efficiencies in the ‘Solutioneering’ process itself which has proven to be highly successful in helping other clients such as BP and The Bodyshop achieve similar ‘Quick Wins’ by using a similar approach and how it is possible to drive improvements across a myriad of SAP related business processes.

Guy Spaven from SAP will present Project System Fiori Functionality. An overview of Fiori tiles available for Project System and other SAP project management tools.

Graeme McNaught our SIG Chair will deliver a Project System Update following recent meet with SAP developer lead.

Following a recent meeting with Mario Franz, the SAP lead for PS/PPM, Graeme will brief the meeting on the current direction of the project and portfolio offering from SAP. This session will also briefly cover Commercial Project Management.

We will be running an interactive Breakout Session. During this session attendees, will be invited to discuss several topics in an open forum, including:

1. The current PPM FIORI capability and the direction(s) we’d like to see it take as well as the wider PPM offering from SAP
2. Follow up on the last PS SIG output (scheduling tools & connection to SAP)
3. Topics for inclusion in future SIGs