The Perfect Lap Issue no.3 | Page 19

can then go through the aligned ordering system for
production and delivery”
The benefits are too enticing to ignore. In his own
experience of using SAP systems, Birrell has already
found “huge differences”.
“I’m actually one of the biggest users of SAP currently in
McLaren,” he says, “so all of my IT projects, all of my IT
finances, all of my billing, all of my time sheeting, it’s all
run using SAP, hosted in the HANA Enterprise cloud.”
McLaren were one of the first SAP customers to go-live
on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and Birrell has no
doubts of the benefits, “Using SAP HANA Enterprise
Cloud we have standardized our IT and lifted the burden
of managing the IT environment ourselves. Now we can
quickly add new business units and processes without
increasing costs. It will help us fully benefit from SAP
Business Suite powered by SAP HANA across all our
core operations.”
“I can now see the full PNL. I now have visibility of my
projects up to date. I can report on where things are
from different projects, time sheeting, I can see where
every one of my team is, how much we are billing out and
so on. I’m seeing huge amounts of benefit just through
visibility and control over what is going on across a
multimillion budget that I control.”
And that transparent visibility is fundamental to
McLaren’s adoption of SAP systems, for seeing so much
data about how its businesses are currently running, will
allow a clearer vision as to their future.
“Unless you measure something you can’t improve
it,” Birrell notes, “and the whole goal behind data
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collection isn’t just for the sake of it, it’s to allow us to
be predictable. How do you predict the future? You need
vast amounts of data; you need to be correlating that
data; you need to marry it up with many other sources
of data to produce something that actually adds some
business value. And then you can make changes knowing
what the future will bring.
That really is the Holy Grail: being able to predict the
future from what has happened in the past.”