Tim Lloyd of Ballance Agri-Nutrients
Farm nutrient supplier, Ballance Agri-Nutrients, is a New Zealand farmer-owned co-operative. Their agri-nutrient advice is complemented by award-winning web-based farm systems software, which enables farmers to capture and analyse a wealth of information, and so make the best management decisions for their business .
Tim Lloyd from Ballance Agri-Nutrients is among the early adopters, and has bundled his experiences to help you work your way through the complex, and exciting, S/4HANA planning phase as an initiative to support their digital transformation strategy. Here is what he had to say in his presentation at the 2019 Cloud and Technology Mastering SAP conference:
Important to take people along for the journey, get buy-in from the end users, the process owners, and most importantly the execs and the internal IS teams.
What worked really well for Ballance was that they managed to be nimble and flexible, largely due to the support of EPI-USE Labs. They required flexibility due to having a limited time frame, a limited capped budget and the need for a greater than 90% certainty on cost, impact and delivery time frames.
Ballance also recommends quality data through the process of data refreshes for ECC and BI as other systems which are attached or integrated. They highlighted areas such as number ranges that need to be consistent to truly test landscape integrations.
"To slice data quickly, ensure that you bring across only what you need. For example, it is not likely that you would need to bring transactional data from 18 years ago, but rather only the last four years. This will be largely determined by your data governance requirements, but if you have the choice, this could save you money on hardware and licences," says Tim Lloyd.
"Anyone can quickly determine that they need to upgrade different add-ins, or integrations, however until you start down a path, you won't know how to refine it and optimise your timelines and budget to get outcomes as quickly as possible".
"EPI-USE Labs enabled this, and without it, we would be many weeks behind. If you start adding up all the consultants, and business users on a project of this size, the cost savings become considerable."
Finally, Tim concluded that if you want to make it easy and you want to make it quick, use EPI-USE Labs.
Tim Lloyd | Ballance Agri-Nutrients Ltd | Operations and Commercial Manager
Tim has a background in infrastructure, security and operations management. He has led large teams in Europe, delivering operational excellence for both government and corporate business.
Tim joined Ballance Agri-Nutrients in 2012 to help establish new operational in-house capabilities and improve the performance of their outsourced vendors. His relationship with SAP extends more than 15 years, and he helped represent Ballance to accept the Global Best Run award last year.
Tim completed an MBA with distinction in 2017 to help showcase his skills and experience. More recently, Tim is leading Balance’s Cyber Security program to lift maturity and capability, along with Infrastructure to support their exciting S4 project.
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