James Brooks

Leading the Global Deployment for S4 template for international soft drinks manufacturer

Leading S4 Rise deployment to 14 countries, to Japanese market leading Musical Instrument manufacturer

Leading a Global SAP S4 RISE business transformation for International Chemicals Manufacturer

Managing a multi-plant SAP transformation for leading UK manufacturer

Integration Manager for SAP S4 Global Template build & deploy project

Leading Aero-Defence Manufacturer

Global Pharma SAP roll-out - deploying SAP to 53 countries

Europe’s largest Pharmaceutical Wholesaler, with also a Retail presence in a number countries. The ERP program has been initiated to standardise and harmonise all European businesses to run on a single SAP platform. The UK is a fast moving, low margin business with 100,000 order items and 300,000 delivery lines processed daily in the wholesale business where ECC, MDG, APO & BW were being rolled out. The Retail business will implement IS Retail & FnR.

One of the world’s largest fertiliser suppliers, based out of Israel serving primarily the agriculture, food and engineering market. It produces a third of the worlds Bromine, and is the 6th largest producer of potash. It is also a manufacturer of speciality fertilisers and speciality phosphates, flame retardants and water treatment solutions. The Harmonise program mandate was to build a global template, covering the full SAP scope of ECC, EWM, TM, S&OP, APO, Ariba and CRM (salesforce.com). Also a number of shared service centre functions were established in the Netherlands to manage procurement and finance operations. The role of integration manager on this project was to; ensure solution integrity across the piece in a very complex landscape, to support the drive to complete process and design specification completion, and to lead the test team in completing UT and integration testing. This was a complex process as the teams were split geographically between Israel, Germany and India. All design activities were completed on time to plan, as was the integration testing. The testing preparation activities and execution was particularly difficult, due to the huge scope and complex landscape. This required driving the business and consultants to deliver to the correct standard, and on time, which was managed via two test managers who reported to the integration manager, and was successfully delivered to plan.

Leading bearing and seal manufacturing company from Sweden; specialising in bearings, seals, lubrication and lubrication systems, maintenance products, mechatronics products, power transmission products, condition monitoring systems and related services globally. The organization has a particularly challenging business environment, which is highly federalised and disparate, built over time via acquisition. The company also has a very complex international supply chain with 17000 distributor locations, across 130 countries. The UNITE program was tasked with developing harmonised global processes based on standard SAP where possible, to build a global template to replace the dated mainframe system.

Managing the O2C Design & Delivery Team lead managing 78 resources split across the sub-teams of CMD/AR, Pricing & Billing, Sales Order Processing and CRM. The delivery team is responsible for the design and testing of Global SAP release 3.1, and to support the local teams for its deployment in the US Fuels business and Australia, the final countries to join the platform. The US is of particular importance as represents 40% of the downstream business revenues, and also very complex due to their tax environment and the fact that business largely automated so touchless technologies were a critical element to be deigned and deployed. This automation requirement has led to a large number of interfaces being developed that process huge numbers of transactions, thus requiring incredible precision in our design, testing and data management.

A large UK Pharmaceutical company based out of West London, and the 6th largest pharma company globally as of 2015. The CERPs (Commercial ERP) and MERPs (Manufacturing ERP) are two major SAP deployments to move the global business onto a single SAP instance and way of working for the commercial and manufacturing business units. The CERPs deployment was split between Commercial (non-pharma) and Pharmaceutical templates. As O2C functional team lead for Wave 5, responsibilities included management of the design, build, test and deploy for the Wave 5 CERPs solution. The Wave 5 scope includes the deployment of the Consumer template to Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Greece. Greece will also implement Pharmaceutical template at the same time. Based in London I managed these activities via the 7 local functional resources based out of the deploy locations.

Manager of the Central Deploy Team, covering the functional areas of Order to Cash, Distribution and Hydrocarbon Management, for the Global SAP roll-out. The team consisted of 38 functional consultants, with 18 based offshore. 2011-12 was a very busy 18 months for the program, with the CEE/Russia deployments (5 countries), International Aviation & Marine deployment (2 global businesses across 80 countries), India, Canada, UAE & Oman, and finally China and Spain for April 1st 2012.

The role was O2C Team Lead for the Local Turkey deploy, based out of Istanbul. The team consisted of 8 functional consultants, and a senior business leader from the team. This was a high profile deployment for the client, as based out of an important profitable emerging market where each global line of business had a presence; Commercial Fuels, Lubricants, Retail, Aviation, Marine, Supply and Bitumen. The team implemented the full template scope within O2C of CRM, Pricing & Billing, AR, SOP and their related interfaces. Turkey also has some local complexities to be managed, such as electronic invoicing, working with government organisations, partial direct debit and loyalty cards at the retail sites. The tax environment is also complex with a bespoke solution developed and deployed to manage local consumption tax, OTV.

This role on the Global Roll-out was to manage the customer master migration and support the CRM implementation for the local Benelux deployment out of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. This meant extracting, transforming and loading the data from three different country legacy systems. The role also included testing management and cutover coordination, working as an deputy for the overall team lead. The Benelux is a mature business for the client, and as their base location is the Netherlands, it was very high profile compared to other deployments on the roadmap. The team also implemented a Global Export Centre in Brussels to manage the lubricants business, and set up a shared service centre to manage call centre functions out of Cape Town where CRM was implemented, which required extensive travel. The accounts receivable function was also moved to Krakow and billing managed out of Manila. This was a very challenging roll, due to its high profile nature and complexity with many senior stakeholders to manage.

Solution delivery is the design team on the Global SAP program, based out of London. The functional area covered was Sales Order Processing, with a focus on related interfaces in particular the online sales order portal. Design specifications were written, for the offshore team to build. This came back onshore for UT and handover to local deploy teams.