Mr. Mike McCormick is Chief Information Officer at Vivo Energy PLC for about more than 8 plus years now. He has a total work experience of 23 years in varied industries consisting of Oil and energy, Banking, insurance and others. Currently as a CIO, he is responsible for technology strategy and delivery across multiple countries where in Vivo Energy is operational.

What are the challenges while developing technology strategies in your organization, as well as the challenges generally faced by the industry?

We have operations in 23 countries in Africa currently on what we describe as a federated model, wherein we are in touch with the center and responsibility for sales growth and customer satisfaction happens locally under the guidance of the local managing director. We find that in trying to deliver technologies which are appropriate to those very varied marketplaces is, we are able to find providers that are able to offer a one size fits all technology stack across the continent. It's difficult to gather and serve the requirements from 23 places, with a one size fits all solution. We sort of need a common backbone, whether that's an infrastructure or an application which can then be tailored to take into nuances of the local marketplaces, so that we end up with a common outcome that's able to address very unique and specific concerns in a local marketplace.

What are the recent developments you see in the ERP space, and how you implement SAP in your organization to drive organizational growth?

We have a standardized system template across the entire continent of Africa, so all of our companies are in there and we've managed to roll it out relatively quickly. It's a fairly comprehensive implementation containing both, IS (Industry Solution) oil as well as IS retail. It's gone quite well as It's very good product. Although going forward.  I have concerns with SAP in the ERP position, considering that they are moving fully into the cloud. So they're going cloud, whereas we've done an onsite implementation and the problem with that is, it changes the purchasing model. We as a company prefer CapEx rather than OpEx, which isn't usual standard in the industry, most people want to spend all their money on OpEx, but we don't. Therefore over extended periods of time, it's driving up costs. So we went with Microsoft office 365 though they're also now increasing licenses costs. So it's becoming more expensive to own what was in essence the same product and observing the same thing happening with SAP as well, as they are moving to cloud because it's what their number customer wants. We just see costs going up and up, and we're not getting really any additional benefit, just increasing cost. So it's a trend in the industry that concerns me currently.

What are some of the tools or methods you use to tackle the increase in costs happening right now?

To be honest, we are struggling. I have the benefit of local data center operations and as well as an African staffing base, my operational costs are relatively low compared to European or, other Western markets. So when people come to try and sell cloud services, they generally base that on a European cost base, and we don't have that problem. So it's hard to justify it from a cost basis. We cope wherever we can by going with services that we can run on premise rather than in the cloud. For us it's rather about relationships, and the ability to buy than it is about tools. We also look at how we can operate efficiently, and how we manage our licenses very carefully to ensure that we're not paying more than we need to and then obviously we negotiate as hard as we can, but that only has a limited outcome. So it's a battle, It's not that our costs are going down, our costs are going up, because of this move to the cloud.

Any recent ERP project that you have led in your organization, and what are the technological tools that you have implemented for its success?

Starting in 2017 and around into last year, we implemented S/4 HANA across the entire organization. During that time, we bought business in another eight countries, which were on ECC 6 and we also effectively did a Greenfield implementation for them as well. So I had like 23 operating countries in Africa on S/4 HANA, as well as all the central services. So in total it was about 27 countries and about 150 businesses running on ERP. In terms of tools, it was typical, we didn't buy anything special around it. Though we've supplemented it with things like for training, also we use a variety of different tools to migrate data, and then for working with a system integrate, but no special tools. We are about both, relationships and people with methodology rather than technology.

If you have any advice that would give your counterpart in the industry an idea on how they can improve the ERP systems and manage their workflows better?

We run the lean model, cause of the nature of the industry is so that the volume is high and margins are very thin. So we are very cost conscious, more so than other retail industries. Hence, rather than having a lot of staff, we have excellent staff. In my experience, and certainly being very proven in our operations, we observed that one excellent person will give you a better outcome than three mediocre people. We tend to hire just very strong staff with high expertise, right attitude and the right fit. With this approach, we find that we can do a lot more with those individuals than we can with a bigger team. So it's more efficient, more energetic and faster to develop solutions for maintaining the system. I also think it's super important to empower those individuals to take responsibility for the areas in which they are working, and that they make the best decisions to maintain those modules and to serve their relative customers. Instead of having a complicated management structure above them, which relies on micromanagement and lots of instructions being given. It also helps with that efficiency. if they do not accomplish job allocated, then they have to handle the consequence. You tend to find that taking greater responsibility through that empowerment, and then they do a better job in the first time, which lowers your down time, improves the quality of your deliverable, and allows you to do a lot more with a lot less people. Then on the aspect of looking at the activities that require skill and retain those yourself through that local expertise and those requirements that require less skills. So the routine activities, are the ones that you examine task sourcing, or outsourcing to third parties, because they're not contributing to your IP. They're not directly contributing to the advancement of your business. They're important jobs that require regular focus, but don't require high skilled individuals and just as they repeat, and if it can't be done through a third party, then look to things like RPA to automate those routine tasks that are essential to the stability of the system that don't require highly skilled individuals.  My view is that if you're doing a job more than three times, then it's a real strong candidate for process automation, that leaves you free to focus on development and criticality of the system.

What was your experience dealing with SAP, and how you have implemented it in your organization?

We went through a competitive process of determining what was the best PIP(Partner Interface Process), we were on an older ERP system and very end of life. It was green screen, we wanted to move away, we still had some flexibility. Before we lost the grip of process, so we scanned the marketplace and determined that probably SAP was the best product based on its fee set, based on what our industry tends to do normally. and then we built a very strong relationship with the sales team. Further to that, before we committed to buying the product was a couple of different things that we did. We built a direct relationship the higher level executives, so rather than it just being a normal sale, we had basically a CEO to CEO conversation about what mutual success and benefit looked like. Then again, before we committed to the purchase, we went through the process of selecting our systems integrator, our partner and with them ensured that we had selected the right modules to cover off the set requirements that we needed to conclude. Then in partnership with our SI, when we wrote the contract for acquiring the software, and then we bought current services as well with SAP, but throughout all of that, I personally maintained an extremely close relationship with our account executive at SAP. Through that relationship, we got a lot of attention from SAP. and that was very beneficial in our success. We had a tri-party relationship between SAP as the provider of the software, with our systems integrator, who were obviously a very close partner with that system is and, ourselves managing both of those relationships, as to make it successful.