Element Six, which is part of the De Beers family of companies, is a global leader and innovator in supermaterials with a history spanning more than 50 years. Its products are used across a wide range of industries. Element Six's activities are organized into four distinct areas – Advanced Materials, Hard Materials, Oil & Gas and Technologies plus a venture capital fund to invest in innovative activities related to its businesses.
The company has production sites in China, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands, Ukraine, Germany, Ireland and the UK with a global sales organisation, research, technical support and service network.
• Documented the IT and management information requirements of managers across all four business divisions and group functions.
• Surveyed and assessed the existing Element Six IT Landscape.
• Based on this, created a future state Enterprise Architecture, identified gaps and obtained Executive sign-off for a 4-year programme to address these.
• Established an inventory of all IT projects, prioritised by business benefit and used this to implement an IT Governance process and increase IT / business alignment.
• Created a new IT Development competency centre in London, with associated resources in the Irish Republic, South Africa and Finland and supplemented by external organisations.
• Established new procedures for IT project management and both authored and implemented a Group-wide Systems Development Life Cycle.
• Pioneered the concept of a new Element Six Enterprise Data Warehouse, EIGER.
• Designed and implemented the technical infrastructure that will underpin EIGER.
• Established an EIGER Extended Business Team of 30 managers and captured their requirements for the high-level structure of EIGER and its general functionality.
• Developed and implemented an interim Data Warehouse for a business division.
• Established a plan for the global roll out of salesforce.com across all four business units.
• Built and deployed a number of small systems including ones supporting: travel booking, capital budget approval, group cash position analysis and sales forecast analysis.
• Outsourced support of Domino-based applications.