Leading insurer Sanlam Corporate’s Business Transformation Office is moving to improve efficiencies and enhance governance by migrating to Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solutions implemented by Microsoft partner InfoVerge.
The programme, tasked with managing projects across the group’s long-term insurance, investment, financial planning and retirement portfolios, is migrating all strategic projects to Microsoft EPM to more efficiently manage projects end to end.
Skhumbuzo Mjoji, Chief Technology Officer at InfoVerge, explains that while Sanlam Corporate had clearly defined project management frameworks and processes in place, the organisation required standardised tools to support adherence. “We see this a great deal in South African organisations across sectors, from mining and finance through to the public sector,” he says. “However, it is difficult to adopt mature frameworks and processes without standardised tooling. Microsoft EPM offers the tools to support adherence, taking project management to the next level of maturity.”
After a thorough assessment and needs analysis, InfoVerge implemented a customised solution to support the division. The Microsoft EPM solution delivers a platform for standardised, shared project data and simplified management, tracking and reporting.
Langalethu Zulu, Business Transformation Lead Programme Coordinator at Sanlam Corporate, says: “Our office manages strategic projects from initiation and strategy through to execution, so we must have accuracy and remove duplication of effort. The PMO office is relatively new, so we also co-ordinate a number of legacy projects with external contractors. We are now merging legacy and external projects with new internal projects to standardise the view and improve efficiency and oversight.”
She adds: “Microsoft EPM is expected to support governance and administration, giving us new levels of accuracy and eliminating the need to pull information from a variety of sources. Our teams are currently migrating content and we hope to have completed the implementation in time for our Q2 reporting.”
Zandi Madikiza, Executive Head of the Business Transformation Office at Sanlam and a team lead working with the solution, says the move is expected to address a number of challenges. “In our business cluster, much of the portfolio management has been ‘semi manual’, with a plethora of tools in use. This complicates consolidation and management of projects, with challenges in version control, knowledge management, project efficiencies and health, as well as duplication of effort. InfoVerge’s Microsoft EPM solution was closest to what we required to manage projects end to end.”
Madikiza adds: “In addition to meeting our initial requirements, we are discovering there is so much more to this platform; for example, features to send reminders and for resource management. One of our challenges has been managing resourcing conflicts holistically – in the past, it was difficult to achieve an accurate view of where all resources are being allocated.”
InfoVerge is supporting Sanlam Corporate’s migration with customisations and assistance for project managers as they migrate project content to the new system.
Sanlam Corporate’s Microsoft EPM project will feature in the second of a new series of InfoVerge webinars, in which customer success stories and learnings will be highlighted. The event, to be staged on 18 September this year, will focus on how to advance strategic project management with digital automation, outlining how Sanlam Corporate’s Programme Office improved its project management capabilities by partnering with InfoVerge.
For more information and to register for this event, go to https://www.infoverge.co.za/advancing-strategic-project-management-with-digital-automation/.
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