On 26th February Engie’s Newcastle SSC hosted the Shared Service Forum networking event for finance. This brought together finance teams from other shared service centres across the UK with the topic of the day being "What can go wrong with ERP implementations". Very relevant to us at Engie as we are about to embark on our own ERP migration!
The day began with a game of Play Your Cards right. This is a great way of getting the room engaged and talking to each other and we are pleased to get some more use out of our giant playing cards we bought last year! We then had an introduction to the Engie SSC from Dave Hughes, our Shared Services Director. This centred on employee engagement and how we have used the engagement of our staff to grow the SSC and deliver year on year savings. Everyone was given a tour of the office to see this in action and there was particular interest in our Behaviours League houses and employee engagement pods.
Our main morning session was a great chance to network, with the room being split into groups to discuss their ERP implementation experiences. It really does appear that whatever could go wrong has gone wrong with a lot of our members! Surprisingly a key theme from the session was about how important effective communication is and that processes and technology are second behind making sure the right stakeholders are being taken along on the journey.
Following a brief lunch, we embarked on our afternoon session on what are the key components of a high performing team. The slides we used were courtesy of the Change Maker Programme which the Engie SSC is currently putting all of its management on. We learnt about key personality types, how these interact with each other and in particular which are the types that you would like to see together in a large change programme such as an ERP implementation.
It was a great day and whilst it was quite a journey for a lot of the forum members to travel up to Newcastle, we think everyone took away some great ideas to take back to their organisation.
