Richard Taylor is Partner at The Birchman Group, a SAP Global Platinum Partner head-quartered in the UK. The company has a focus on digital and business transformation through the SAP Business Technology Platform and was a ramp-up partner for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and winner of the prestigious SAP Pinnacle Award for SAP HANA in 2018. They recently won the United VARs award for ‘Newcomer of the year – OnPrem’.
Richard Taylor lives in Newbury, a market town in the South of England, with his wife and three teenaged children. He is a keen tennis player and swimmer.
After completing a degree centred on mathematical problem-solving, Richard joined NatWest bank as a management consultant. Since then, he has been in various management and technology consulting roles. Richard joined the Birchman Group in 2004 and became a partner four years’ later.
Helping companies become more agile
The Birchman Group’s customers are from a range of sectors, mostly manufacturing, CPG, mining and fashion retail. Richard says, “Our purpose as an organization is to help companies become more agile through digital transformation. We are very customer-centric in our approach. For example, when we supported customers with their SAP S/4HANA implementation we also help to direct their wider digital transformation strategy, create a business case and present it to their board, and design and run their change management programme”.
“Business models are changing rapidly. They're struggling with the flexibility and agility to address current market challenges and to expand internationally. The Birchman Group helps them become more agile by working out the best approach to achieve the outcomes they want, enabled by technology and working as an extension of the customer’s team”.
Working as a collective with the United VARs global alliance
Birchman's ethos is to support international customers with local expertise in a more personalised and pragmatic way than the larger System Integrators (SIs).
Richard says of joining of the United VARs alliance, “The big attraction for us was United VARs operating with the principle we were trying to deliver, but with a much stronger membership of companies across all the major continents. The United VARs member companies all work as a collective on global implementations and on developing IP together using SAP technologies”.
“We’ve just finished an SAP S/4HANA implementation for a Birchman Group customer in four countries in North and South America with Illumiti and are currently working with them to implement SAP S/4HANA for one of their customers in Ireland”.
Helping customers to get continual value from SAP systems
Birchman sees digital transformation as a continuous process of business improvement. They go beyond the 24/7 technical and functional application support. Instead, they look at how organizations are using their SAP systems, what innovations are coming from SAP that they can use to improve the business processes and what they can see in terms of trends from the IT support tickets.
Richard explains, “We see reoccurring issues which quite often are linked to master data. In turn these are usually linked to a lack of understanding of how SAP systems can support the business processes. Getting these insights and backtracking them to the origin of the problem is a real benefit for our customers and helps them to continue to get value out of their technology investments”.
CFO or CEO sponsorship is essential for successful digital transformation
Digital transformation is a hot topic for most companies, but many organizations struggle to create a clear strategy and an effective roadmap to support it. Richard says the key to success is to have the right team leading the transformation, one that is aligned to the wider business strategy.
He says, “When companies have a highly engaged, high-level sponsor and drive it from within the business, they have significantly greater success. Without the CFO or CEO sponsorship, it becomes a project where the technology is essentially doing it to the business without the business buy-in and sponsorship”.
About Birchman
The Birchman Group is an SAP Platinum Partner and winner of the SAP Pinnacle Award for SAP S/4HANA. Birchman is a leading SAP Value Reseller in the UK with a focus on Business Change and Transformation, Implementation (including the SAP Qualified Partner-Packaged Solutions for S/4HANA Move), Digital Innovation and Continuous Business Improvement.
About United VARs
United VARs is a global alliance of SAP solution providers for the midmarket. With over 70 members in 100 countries, the alliance serves all types of SAP rollouts and integrations across the world.
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