lydia maksoud

brovanture consultant

Who would have guessed on the day I started at Brovanture as a student intern I would be celebrating my six year anniversary as part of the Brovanture team?

There were signs on that first day which I can see now. The fact that right from day one I was treated as a fully-fledged member of the team. This, of course, included real responsibility and workload, but I was ready for that! There was also the work hard, play hard ethos but most importantly their real sense of care for every one of their staff and clients.

As I look back over the six years, I realise it has also been filled with the most amazing opportunities and experiences that I could never have foreseen on that day, as a student on placement from University, I walked into the Brovanture office. So, where do I start to explain why I am still here?

Let’s get down to it, I enjoy a good party and Brovanture has a great programme of staff social activities including office lunches, prosecco Fridays, a summer braai, theatre appreciation trips, a Christmas party and an annual dog walk and lunch!! But really, the key things that have kept me here are the excellent training and the amazing projects I have been privileged to work on:

Training

From day one Brovanture has significantly invested in training me in the products and services that I work with. Not only have I been trained but like everyone in implementations, consulting and support I was also expected to take the certification exams and pass. In fact, there are league tables on the wall in the office based on pass mark. Once I was top, but there are those who have joined after me who have beaten my score! So, I am certified in Oracle Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Enterprise Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (EPBCS), now called ‘Planning in the Oracle EPM Cloud’. It does not stop there, Brovanture will invest in relevant training for any of the staff and a number of my colleagues are well on their way to becoming qualified accountants having be sponsored to do so by Brovanture.

Projects

My favourite has to be going to Scotland to work on a planning and forecasting system for a major UK drinks wholesaler, Edrington-Beam Suntory! In fact, so far, I have worked with them over the past 3 plus years to implement 4 major projects around various aspects of their planning and forecasting. They have become one of our reference clients and have worked with us to produce a case study of the work we have done together which can be read HERE. It is really good to put something back into and industry that is so dear to my heart!!

The first project I worked on after my degree and joining Brovanture full time was with a major pharmaceutical company. Here we implemented a forecasting solutions for finance, sales and manufacturing that required me to deal with multicurrency and SKU level detail. I had lots to learn and I got to travel to the Netherlands to train the client.

For the last year I have been totally immersed in a major central government budget and forecasting project taking the lead on the data migration to this new Cloud solution and its integration with their ERP system. I also worked on the UAT, training, phase 1 roll out and I am now looking after the support.

Enough of work – this is the really good stuff!

In June 2019, I got to attend the ODTUG KScope Conference in Seattle, Washington, and presented alongside my colleague Guillaume Slee on “Integrating EPBCS with the Oracle Cloud: A Candid Account of One of the Largest Oracle Cloud Transformation Projects in the UK”. This was following on from the integration work for central government completed the previous year. We were named KScope EPM Data Integration Top Speakers for our presentation.

The Annual Conference of Excellence (ACE) is a personal target scheme at Brovanture, designed to both motivate and reward employees for their hard work during the year. I’ve been lucky enough to attend all three of the ACE trips so far; St Lucia, Cape Town and Las Vegas. I have qualified for the next one in Sun City, South Africa and I am working on getting to the 2020 trip to the luxury Verdura Resort in Sicily! Highlights – snorkelling in the warm Caribbean, whale watching off the South African coast and watching Cher live, enough said!

So, how do I finish my story? Well I guess looking forward to the next six years as a fully-fledged member of the Brovanture team. Maybe you will be joining us and I will be helping with your introduction to the company and training? See you soon.

Lydia