Paul Stead

The SAP programme governed multiple projects in parallel for small to medium businesses. The challenge common to each was a lack of client budget in the areas of risk management and change management further constrained by the consultancy’s fixed price / low margin approach to bidding for projects. The Telesoft project challenge was overcoming the perception of the project as “just an IT activity” and engaging the business to commit resources to the quality assurance plan. The British Pepper and Spice cha

RMC lacked a business intelligence strategy and IT resources were unable to deliver the capability required by the business. Paul created a central data analysis shared service centre and grew an SAP Business Warehouse development team from individuals within the business to provide the capability. The challenges were overcoming fundamental SAP limitations and controlling the impact of changes made by other development teams.

RMC’s finance shared service centre was underperforming and it blamed the SAP system. Paul conducted an improvement project and found functions where there were 100 variations of a single process due to staff turnover and a lack of process control. Paul transformed the service centre by standardising working methods, redefining controls, enhancing the user interface and providing a reporting capability to monitor compliance. RMC’s international head office departments were running on unsupported legacy sys

The programme transforms working practices into the new corporate standards in accordance with an SAP global template. The scope of change includes regionalising four disparate organisations across Eastern Europe including integrating the recent acquisition of BOC. The challenges are language barriers, motivation of the work force in the face of a reorganisation, cultural differences and generating acceptance to change where it is difficult to demonstrate localised value. The programme has a budget of £12,5

Cemex had recently acquired RMC and sought to integrate the two companies by creating a new standard of working practices to be delivered with SAP. Paul’s responsibility was to create the blue print for the business intelligence solution that would sustain the company in the future. The challenge was managing a virtual team dispersed across Europe which Paul did by designing a governance approach to mitigate the degeneration in communications.