Profile
A very experienced SAP Programme/Project/Practice Manager with experience at the highest level in major consulting companies, including SAP. Marcus has a broad experience of industries, government, international work and SAP solutions Including:
• International Program Experience Saudi Arabia, Nordic Region, Far East
• International SAP template rollout experience
• Programme Management
• Project Management
• Consulting Practice Director
• SaaS ByDesign Delivery Experience
• SAP CRM Experience
• SAP HR/Payroll Implementation
• Government, Manufacturing, Local Council, Retail, wholesale,
• Food, media, health and beauty, and FMCG industry experience
• Prince2 practitioner
• ASAP qualified
Career Experience
June 07 – to date
Edson Consulting
Practice Leader
Business ByDesign Practice
November 2010
Marcus led the business set up for a new business unit focused on Cloud or SaaS based SAP solutions. The business unit having been established Marcus has undertake a number of non ByD assignments.
Facilitating ‘discovery’ workshops
Leading Electronics Distributor
April 2015 – June 2015
The assignment consisted of running a series of workshops including business representatives and S.I. subject matter experts in order to complete the definition of a replacement global scheduling tool. The solution was required to deal with 600,000 stock items available in 34 countries.
Interim Global SAP practice Manager / Back office competency centre manager
Leading Electronics Distributor
May 2014 – December 2014
Reporting to the Global Head Delivery.
The role had responsibility for leading and managing the SAP team, working closely with other Competency Centres and third parties to deliver multi-functional technical and business change to mission critical systems.
The role was accountable for the successful execution of SAP change and responsible for successful management of a team of consultants, team leaders and project managers ensuring that skilled resources were available and deployed appropriately.
The role was responsible for all aspects of the SAP Competency Centre including Line Management, SAP vendor management, project resourcing, staff augmentation via third parties, escalation processes, activity estimation, execution and tracking and making recommendations regarding technical roadmap. It was the single point of contact for all SAP related activities.
The role was extended to include other capabilities in the areas of global planning and compliance.
Major initiative delivered during this period was the implementation of a template solution to Japan including Finance/logistics/Warehousing/CRM/BI etc.
Project Manager – Scientific Research
June to November 2013
Management of a Finance, Procurement and H.R. implementation of SAP Business by Design for a public sector scientific research organisation. The assignment required the management of both client resources and the chosen system integrator.
The system was implemented within the project time scale of twelve weeks this included end user training of fifty client personnel.
Interim Portfolio Manager – Retailing
Managing a number of portfolios within the IS organisation of a leading UK retailer (Trading – Customer analytics – Supply chain – Performance reporting) with 80+ concurrent projects.
Duties include – Man managing six internal project managers plus a variable number of client partner resources both on shore and off. Representing IS on project boards. Progress reporting to various forums. Financial responsibility for the delivery function within the portfolio. The role included guidance and mentoring of internal project management resource. Review of proposed SAP re implementation approach and estimates.
Program Manager
Working to develop an SAP portal offering based on internally developed extensions. The resulting service offering to be taken to market and used as the basis for the creation of a coherent SAP practice.
Project Manager
Marcus assisted a sales and marketing organisation in recovering a problematic e business project, working with the delivery partners and client staff to deliver the work.
The client had fallen behind with their contractual deliverables and was in danger of incurring penalties. The assignment brief was to bring an existing e business initiative, based on SAP, back in line with plan and contract milestones.
The project was successfully brought back into line with plan.
Serco PLC, Birmingham
Contract Program Manager/Project Manager
December 2003 – May 2007
Marcus worked for three and a half years as a contract Project/Program Manager and Pre-sales Program Manager. Assignments undertaken included the following:
Project Management: Bedfordshire County Council HR/Payroll
Responsible for the planning and implementation of a SAP HR and Payroll project for an eighteen thousand employee workforce.The project completed its Business Blue Print phase successfully and on time.
Wales and West utilities Quality Assurance
Responsible for a team tasked with “QA’ing” the SAP solution being designed and implemented by another SAP partner – Wipro – plus third party system providers (telemetry/field force systems, etc.)
Bid/Pre Sales Program Management ESCC
Bid / Pre sales program management for an East Sussex County Council implementation and support. Responding to ITT, being part of the negotiation team defining requirements, proving capabilities, organising demonstrations, working with SAP and other third parties involved in the bid, submitting the final ‘BAFO’, acting as part of the contract negotiation team and marshalling technical, functional and business resources involved in designing the solution.
The initial contract was worth £8M over five years.
Project Management of Staffordshire County Council: Roll Out
Staffordshire County Council had implemented R\3
Finance/Logistics/Materials/Project system/HR/Payroll + BW/EBP/Portals.
Marcus managed for approximately 1 year the roll out of SAP functionality across multiple directorates within the council plus HR/Payroll across multiple groupings within the council’s 38,000 employees.
Project Management of CRM at SCC
SAP CRM was implemented as a separate initiative to support a newly established shared service centre.
QA Assignments
Marcus has undertaken a number of project assurance exercises both acting on Serco’s’ behalf and working in tandem with SAP UK.
SAP UK Limited, Feltham
Project/Program Manager
August 2001 – August 2002
Marcus undertook several program management and program director assignments during his time with SAP UK. These include the following;
Program Advisor Chubb Electronic Systems.
Advising on program structure, program resourcing, program governance, etc. Attending and participating in project board meetings in order to represent SAP UK. The project went live October 2001 to the client’s satisfaction.
Diagio- Guinness UDVT.
The assignment entailed the provision of a governance structure and program approach for the deployment of SAP across twenty-two countries. The report was used as the foundation for the organisational structure, which is now in place.
Yell
Representation of SAP UK’s interests on the Yell steering board.
Scottish Courage
Marcus took over the program management of this assignment at the critical Go Live stage and saw this very complex implementation through to stabilization. The client was very satisfied with SAP’s contribution to the success of the initiative and is continuing to work with them through a program of work, stretching over the next two years.
In addition to the above, Marcus was involved in various commercial activities associated with bid preparation, presentations to clients and so forth.
Arval PHH
In conjunction with both the client and partner, Marcus had defined a phased program of work, stretching over three years, deploying both current and future SAP solutions. Working closely with the SAP development organization, a continuum of implementation has been defined to take this organization to its final goal.
Orange UK
Acting as SAP’s delivery co-ordinator for the Orange UK organization where there were at the time five SAP initiatives under way with several more significant implementations in the planning stage. The role involves commercial negotiations, partner relationship management, co-coordinating customer activities, liaison with France Telecom (parent company), advice regarding best practice/best fit solutions and representing SAP’s delivery capability in numerous Orange forums.
Atos Origin UK, Cambridge/Cheshire
SAP Practice Director
June 1995 – 2001
Marcus joined Origin’s SAP practice as a Senior Project Manager and, during the first year, ran two very successful assignments. The first was an R/2 upgrade project for British Sugar (June 1995 – December 1995) and he second an R/3 implementation for an ICI subsidiary (January 1996 – August 1996).
Following his successful completion of the above engagements, Marcus was seconded to assist with the outsourcing of ICI Systems to Origin. His role was to ensure the smooth transition of some 50 SAP consultants into the Origin SAP practice. This was completed by the end of 1996.
Marcus was then offered and took the role of Delivery Manager for all ICI related projects. At the beginning of 1997 there were 7 R/3 implementations taking place in the north-east and north-west of England for which Marcus had both delivery and P&L responsibility.
During the latter part of 1997, Marcus took on responsibility for all of Origin’s SAP related projects and consultancy business taking a position on the Origin Enterprise Solutions’ management team. This was followed in late 1998 by the P&L responsibility for Enterprise Solutions in the Nordic region (SAP/BAAN/Mfg/ebusiness/ professional services).
Some highlights:
• Guiding the delivery of numerous UK and international assignments to a wide range of satisfied clients
• Founding of “OASG”, Origin’s accelerated solutions group, to develop and promote best practice and consistent quality of delivery by use of methodology and tools.
• Establishment of a SAP retail competence group
• Establishment of a SAP HR competence group
• Establishment of strong project management capability
• Won SAP partner excellence award
• Won Sap ASAP project of the year award
• Won SAP ASAP development partner award
• Grew SAP practice from 50 to 300
• Grew revenues over last three years by 25% year on year
• Exceeded profit targets of 25% margin by 16%
Dalah Al Baraka, Saudi Arabia
I.S. Director
October 1992 – June 1995
Marcus worked for Dalah Trading as I.S. Director based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Dalah Trading is a $400m subsidiary of a $5b corporation and is engaged in the FMCG retail market. The key assignment undertaken for Dalah was the selection and implementation of the first integrated back office system within the Dalah group.
The system was to incorporate client server architecture delivered over a wide area network covering all major cities within the country. Marcus was responsible for creating and managing a multi-national mutli-functional team to deliver application, infrastructure, training and post live support. The project was successfully implemented and used as a template for other group company implementations.
Unilever, High Wycombe/Europe
Systems Manager
March 1988 – April 1992
Marcus worked as a Corporate Business Systems Manager for Lever Industrial, an industrial hygiene company within the Unilever Group. Heading an internal I.T. Team, his key achievements within Lever Industrial were as follows:
! Integration of a major acquisition (Jeyes)
! Harmonisation of systems on a common (new) platform using the Tropos application on Digital hardware. Leading a six country European pilot project to implement a common “backbone” system intended to act as a catalyst to business harmonisation.
October 1984 – April 1988,
GUS, Manchester
Development Manager
Marcus started his term with Great Universal Stores Catalogue Order as a team leader in the warehousing systems group. He progressed during his time with GUS to finally manage all development of warehouse automation software.
October 1978 – May 1984
GEC, Manchester
Manager, Engineering Computer Department
During his time with GEC Engineering, Marcus progressed from Senior Systems Analyst to Manager of the Engineering Computer Department.
October 1974 – May 1978,
GKN, Devon
Systems Controller
Marcus held the position of systems controller for GKN Newton Transmissions. The core systems deployed at Newton Transmissions were PRINCE and COPICS, which were run using an IBM bureaux service.
Education
1968-1972: Keele University, Staffordshire
