Skip to content

Maextro

Optimising Work Breakdown Structures with Maextro

”Bluestonex were selected for Master Data Governance at the British Council using the Public Sector tendering and vendor selection process, with help from Gartner on detailed criteria to include and came out top on all factors in the selection process.
Working with them on the implementation of their Maextro product for Master Data Governance has been good. The workflow and UI of their product is very good. Their rigour in process design before getting into the software configuration worked well for us. Bluestonex don’t come with multiple layers of hierarchy (with extra costs due to them) in their implementation team, they just come as experts in their field.”

– Richard Symes – Head of SAP

Who are The British Council?

The British Council (BC) is the UK’s international cultural relations and educational opportunities organisation. They use project systems within SAP (ECC 6) to summarise their teaching and exam courses.

British Council went through a public tender to select an enterprise-scale MDM & Governance solution. After a thorough investigation of the available options, Maextro was selected to meet BC’s exacting standards. The initial phase covered the management of GL accounts and the replacement of their current arrangement for governing project systems (and Work Breakdown Structures) within SAP. Prior to the addition of project system templates via Maextro, the British Council were creating and managing them manually using Excel, SharePoint and email.

The Challenge

Previously, the British Council were using a combination of Excel, SharePoint and email to maintain their project systems. The end of this process relied on someone entering the data manually into SAP. To complicate matters, all staff involved with project systems were given composite roles. This meant around 7,000 users had authorisation to create and change project system data. This resulted in data being entered incorrectly or being duplicated. There was also a further issue impacting governance due to the lack of a central system for data collection. This resulted in difficulty tracking who and when someone added or changed data.

Solution Overview

The delivery of the project system templates began with a two day workshop at the British Council office in London. The workshop clarified the scope, incorporating existing business rules and adding new ones where necessary. Once the requirements were fully detailed, Bluestonex were able to identify quick win opportunities to improve data accuracy as well as making productivity savings with more efficient business processes.

Six templates were specified to be built within Maextro, focused on the approval of tasks. Each template has a set of business rules assigned to it and, depending on the project mask (H or M), an upload template used to populate the work breakdown structure line item data. Two of the templates are being used to create new project systems within SAP (one template for each project mask), two are being used to extend project systems to new WBS line items (again one for each mask) and the final two are being used to change data in existing project systems.

To improve user experience, Bluestonex incorporated the new slipstream UI5 to sit on top of SAP GUI. In addition to this, Bluestonex deployed its new Maextro UI5 apps which further enhanced user productivity.

product catalogue uploads

The Results

Now that the project systems templates have been deployed, the British Council have seen vast improvements through automation and the resulting efficiency savings. Instead of 7,000 users being able to create and change data, there are now around 100 users managing project systems. Not only have they reduced unnecessary access, giving them more control, the British Council have a clear audit trail with all creations and changes being documented.

How did we meet the Business Objectives?

Consolidate, Enrich and Reduce Data Input Source: All excel data input sources were replaced with consolidated data input views within Maextro. This was further enriched with business rules (default values and data conformity) to create a single source of true data.

Flexible solution to enforce Business Rules and Master Data Processes: Maextro provides comprehensive rule sets which cater for a wide variety of business rules. All Maextro rules can be configured via system configuration (IMG)with no programming or changes to the core system.

Introduce additional authorisation over and above standard SAP authorisation: Maextro workflow management and field control rules provide an additional layer of security to prevent unnecessary data updates to data views or fields. Again, these are simple rules which can be configured as required by business units.

Simple workflow management to capture and approve data: Maextro provides an integrated workflow engine which is directly configured in Maextro.

Scalable to other Master Data Objects: Maextro provides a comprehensive catalogue of additional objects to deliver an enterprise-wide MDM & Governance solution.

What’s Next?

The British Council intends to roll out additional Maextro templates for the remaining project masks in their system. As a result of the success of the GL accounts templates and the initial acceptance of the project systems templates, the British Council are planning the expansion of the master data objects Maextro manages. Business cases to add Customers, Vendors, Profit centres and Cost centres to the list of objects being governed by Maextro have been raised internally.

British Council also plans to deploy more Maextro objects over the coming months, as they look to extend and enhance their data strategy.