Optimising Work Breakdown Structures with Maextro

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 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.

The British Council intends to role 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.