Digital Transformation presentation

The recordng and presentation slides from our second Ponder session are available. The presentation on Radical Digital Transformation took place on Thursday 24 June, from 09h00 with guest speaker Rob van den Wijngaard, Director of the  Leiden University Shared Services Centre in the Netherlands.

• Access the video:  Click on the video in the sidebar

• Get the presentation: Download the presentation (pdf, 5.8MB)

The presentation: Radical Digital Transformation

Many of our institutional systems include legacy technologies with cumbersome and paper based processes.

As our workforces become younger and our working environments rapidly embrace decentralisation, there is a need and opportunity to simplify and modernise our systems, with fewer legacy technologies and more innovative technologies.

In this Ponder session Rob argues for the phasing out of the dominant enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in favour of new best-of-breed solutions. The diffusion of functionality across applications lends itself to adding useful special-purpose applications, thereby making data more useful than before.

User-focused digital transformation marks a radical rethinking of how our institutions should be using technology, people and processes to fundamentally change the way we work.

Rob van den Wijngaard, Leiden University, Netherlands

Rob was responsible for building and implementing the Financial Shared Service Centre at Leiden University. With 38 staff the Centre supports one of Europe’s oldest and leading international research universities. University Leiden has a total of 24 500 students and 4 500 employees.

At the last PURCO SA Annual Conference in Johannesburg, Rob keynoted the vent. In the powerful presentation, as well as a detailed workshop, Rob shared how University Leiden transformed a decentralised, paper intensive administration to a fully digitised shared services centre that applies continuous financial data monitoring to avhieve continuous improvement. The transformation realised

• a 30% annual cost reduction,
• improved service quality and
• reduced operational risk.

Success was achieved through a focus on change management, the 'stacking up' of smaller bite-sized projects to create a multiplier effect, and by paying attention to the integral impact of each project on people, processes, IT and governance.

Rob's PURCO SA presentation was a catalyst for his appointment at the University of Cape Town to work on a 3-year project to develop the UCT Shared Service Centre, and assist in expanding the SSC concept across the HE landscape in South Africa. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic Rob is currently based back in the Netherlands.
 

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If you would like to take part in our Ponder presentation series email Ayabulela Mahleza (Social Media Coordinator at PURCO SA) on Ayabulela.Mahleza@purcosa.co.za or call 011 545 0940.