Overview

FBTC’s Professional Services Division is formed out of a team committed to facilitating change and creating dramatic improvement in its customers’ business performance. They understand the challenges facing today’s CxO’s and work with them and their teams to design and deliver innovative solutions to these challenges. Our Professional Services team specializes in helping clients define more ambitious strategies, build more effective organizations and shape more exciting and successful futures. Working with our consultants, organizations have quickly realized significant business results.

Leading joint client-consultant teams, our business consultants utilize a unique, holistic approach to simultaneously address strategic, operational, information management and organization effectiveness requirements challenges. Their industry expertise is complemented by strong faculty affiliations, which provide our clients with worldwide access to leading edge business thinking.

Our approach to major change implementation is distinctive in a number of important ways based on the following factors:

• Stakeholder-driven. Change must satisfy all stakeholder needs
• Holistic process
• Partnership with its clients
• A vision to support self-managed change efforts
• Implementation-focused
• Results-driven. Continually monitoring the benefits of the change process and sharing the risks

Our Approach and Style

FBTC has an enviable record in the successful delivery of integrated business solutions, particularly in multi-business unit organizations that are seeking to standardize and centralize their business processes. These types of engagements place a much broader set of demands on the partner, far beyond traditional technical solutions delivery. Our methodology and tools have therefore been designed around a number of key concepts:

• The design and deployment of any large scale business system must support the operational business strategy of the client. As such all process design decisions, implementation and training plans must be developed with a full knowledge of the operational imperatives of the business function being impacted,
• Business change programs have defined business cases, programs only deliver their benefits cases when a fully integrated benefits tracking and realization methodology ties specific benefits to program deliverables and business personnel are made accountable for their delivery,
• The success of a major business initiative such as this is heavily dependent on the ability of the partner to take a broad business perspective rather than simply regarding it as a technical delivery exercise. This means that the selected implementation partner must carry credibility based on demonstrated, successful business change delivery as well as having a deep understanding of the project processes and technical landscape,
• A common understanding and shared vision of what is to be delivered and how it will be delivered needs to be rapidly generated from the outset of the project. Agreement and enthusiasm are not generally achieved by dictating answers but by including key project stakeholders in a process where alternatives are discussed and validated,
• The drivers of a solution’s overall Total Cost of Ownership are defined in the design phase.  Our approach seeks to incorporate these principles from the outset, leading to a significant reduction in the delivered Total Cost of Ownership when considered across the entire system lifecycle.

The following illustrates some of our key aspects of our approach:

• Project Team Experience – Our consultants are experienced business technologists who have not only the greatest SAP experience in the marketplace, but also have worked in business and understand how global processes need to work to support the needs of an organization. Our proposed team brings extensive SAP project experience from product manufacturing and marketing companies. All of our consultants have experience across a variety of SAP modules meaning that integration is designed in from the outset, and does not have to be added in as an afterthought. This greater experience of our teams means that expensive design errors are avoided, as the full implication of decisions is understood

• Business Transformation Approach – Many organizations design systems to replicate the functionality available within their legacy systems and to support their existing business processes. Through a process of mapping the strategy to a series of tangible operational imperatives, FBTC is able to ensure that the developed design is flexible to support not only the current operational needs, but also those of the future of an agile business,

• Benefits Realization – FBTC’s approach includes a fully integrated benefits tracking methodology, which ensures that benefits are identified, validated, enabled and ultimately delivered. At each stage in the process the full set of benefits are taken through a sign-off process by the relevant stakeholders to ensure that ownership of benefits remains the responsibility of a specific individual within the business

• Focused Knowledge Transfer - Our highly experienced team deliver focused knowledge transfer activities to ensure our clients are measurably self sufficient by the end of the project.  This reduces implementation costs as well as providing an agile, SAP accredited support organization that minimizes ongoing support and maintenance costs

• Quality Project Approach and Tools – We provide coaching in our pragmatic approach to SAP-specific Project Management. This management approach is underpinned by FBTC’s comprehensive SAP project documentation repository and will be tailored to meet project specific needs. Effective management of a complex business systems program requires a fully integrated documentation repository that enables the dependencies and links between the various deliverables within the program to be tracked and managed whilst at the same time providing the team with the latest version of the design.

FBTC’s project delivery methodology is summarized in the below diagram:

Our Team

We pride ourselves on our level of SAP expertise – with an average of 5 years implementation experience across both our implementation and managed services consultants. Typically consultants participating in Common Design phases have an average of 6 years experience. FBTC recruits only the very best individuals recommended by word of mouth and rigorous selection criteria.

It is only by having a pool of such staff available that economies of scale are enabled and our clients can be assured that problems associated with staff shortages, training needs, illness and specific SAP skills deficits are no longer a problem for our clients.

Our approach is facilitated through FBTC being focused on the following core principles:

• All FBTC consultants have significant experience before joining FBTC. They are normally recommended or approached FBTC from other consulting organizations where they were already recognized as ‘the best’,
• FBTC’s performance appraisal structure is driven by client facing performance on projects. It is a combination of attendance, value, performance and overall project success and customer satisfaction that drives a typical FBTC consultant’s performance. This provides additional incentive for our consultants remained focused on delivering excellent customer value.
• A significant proportion of revenues are re-invested in consultant development. This has been borne out by the fact that FBTC runs a significant number of training courses in key areas to ensure FBTC consultants continue to provide value to our client base. FBTC also invests in training courses provided by our software partner organizations
• Through working with our customers and understanding their future directions and plans, we can ensure that our training programs meet our customer demands as well as the individual development plans of our consultants. Each month we assess the developments plans and ensure that they are in line with our customer requirements
• We have a consultant mentoring and development program that marries client requirements to consultant training/development needs
• FBTC also ensures that learning from consultant experiences are captured and disseminated through the use of the FBTC knowledge portal, a knowledge repository for the development of information sharing and consultant learning within FBTC to support formal training and consultant development
• We target optimum capacity that provides agility and scalability for staffing client projects but also allows our consultants to participate in a number of other knowledge building and continuous improvement activities.
• We have one of the lowest turnover of consultants in the industry

Our Services

FBTC can provide all of the consulting support required to successfully deliver a complete global SAP implementation program. Furthermore, FBTC increasingly takes overall responsibility for even wider programs and so provides program wide direction and management of multi-technology, multi-partner technology enabled transformation initiatives.

The fact that from its conception, FBTC has been primarily focused on the needs of companies seeking to effect change through the application of SAP technologies has meant that our delivery tools are uniquely tailored to the their needs.  Implementation methodologies, approaches to support, business benefit assessments, training and change management tools, industry templates, etc – all have been developed based on the requirements of large organizations who have selected SAP.

The diagram on the right outlines the integrated SAP enabled business transformation service that we offer our clients.

The subsequent sections summaries the range services and competencies across our integrated service lines that will be relevant to SAGIA including:

1. Solution Implementation
2. Business Consulting
3. Program Management
4. Application Management

Solution Implementation

Developed over a decade of on-time, to budget solution-focused delivery, FBTC has created a unique approach to implementing SAP-based change which is hinged on two key principles:

• Delivery Driven around Benefits Realization: SAP programs are material investments that can and must deliver the business benefits against which they were approved,
• Implementation Based on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model: Recognizing and managing key long term cost drivers up-front can reduce a typical ten-year life cycle cost by a factor of two or three.