digitalisation Archives - 51��Australia & New Zealand News Center

How New Zealand’s Fastest-Growing City Is Building A Digitalised Future

51��News — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:47:54 +0000

Behind the bustling streets of Tauranga, New Zealand, a local authority responsible for everything from parks and roads, to water, libraries, and everything in between, has launched the foundation for the city’s digitalised future.

When Tauranga City Council members at the helm of this fastest growing city in New Zealand decided to modernize a 20-year old ERP system, they were fully aware of the challenges they faced in meeting the evolving needs of a burgeoning community. With a population of about 155,000 people and counting, Tauranga is the fifth largest city in the country.

“Tauranga is growing quickly and we need to think differently about how and where we live, and how we manage the existing and increased housing and infrastructure requirements of our growing city,” said Scott Oehm, head of digital delivery at Tauranga City Council. “Equally important is the need to increase community engagement, getting the community more involved in the decisions that affect their daily lives.”

Modular strategy makes digital journey easier

At the heart of Tauranga’s ambitious digital journey is , which has fostered greater collaboration, transparency, data reliability, and change management across administrative operations. As the local authority responsible for the administration of property rates − otherwise known as taxes − as well as charges for water use, along with managing recreational spaces, plus other license and regulations, the Council opted for a phased-in system update, beginning with .

“Having a modular strategy to upgrade our legacy ERP systems is making the transformation much more manageable,” said Oehm. “With this initial roll-out across finance, people in each business unit and the larger community we serve are receiving the benefits of greater collaboration and transparency.”

Measurable results prove value of digitalisation

Already the impact of the new system is palpable. People on the financial team have become more strategic working alongside other business units to improve budgeting, offer valuable financial insights, and increase internal collaboration.

Oehm said that with greater visibility into more reliable data from automated processes, the council can better meet community expectations for transparency and accountability from local authorities. What’s more, the financial team has significantly sped up monthly and year-end processes and project reporting. Automation reduced manual processing tasks for financial analysts by 25 percent, and time spent on capital project reporting by 30 percent.

Going digital also brought more rigor to processes like . Now people are required to obtain up front approval for any expenditures, simplifying procurement while meeting financial standards.

“This project has been very much business-driven, allowing managers and administrators to focus on and drive the results they want to achieve,” said Oehm. “Because the system touches nearly all business groups within the organization, everyone had some input. Working together, the team has realized huge efficiency gains.”

Digital sparks cross-team collaboration for continuous learning

In an unexpected bonus, the “champions”, subject matter experts, and user groups originally created as part of the 51��S/4HANA finance project have morphed into de facto change management teams. Some still meet regularly, not necessarily to talk about 51��solutions, but how they can help each other create further efficiencies.

“In sharing what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, people are continuously learning from each other,” said Oehm. “T��se aren’t just managers. We’ve empowered administrative staff to work together to find the best outcomes for the organization. People can problem-solve themselves, and also be a source of ideas for IT to make improvements over time.”

Connected ERP platform is strong foundation for growth

Oehm saw 51��S/4HANA as the foundation supporting the city’s growth beyond the finance team to include property ratings and community relations. He said that property ratings constituted the bulk of the city’s revenues, and community relations were integral to multi-cultural relationship building.

“We now have an iterative system to track solid financials and ensure good processes without overwhelming our people,” he said. “We can move at our own pace, evolving the system as city and organisational needs grow, supporting quality of life for an influx of people community-wide.”

Explore more real-life success stories from 51��ANZ customers that are digitally transforming their business.

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The Digitalisation Behind Australia’s $140B Critical Infrastructure Spend

51��News — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 04:37:13 +0000

Accelerated climate change, skyrocketing cybercrime incidents, and the global pandemic have not only exposed just how vulnerable we are, but also how we define essential services.

Like many countries worldwide, the Australian government has embarked on massive critical infrastructure reform, allocating upwards of to a range of projects. Make no mistake, this spend on the likes of renewable energy, advanced transportation and communications networks, that help keep people fed, connected, and safe represents the future of this country’s sustainable economy and society.

Digitalisation reduces project risk, increases cost-savings

This could be the next golden age for the engineering and construction industry, but only if public and private sector innovators also usher in the next phase of digitalisation. Enter digitised infrastructure, a vision that promises to foster groundbreaking collaboration across the lifetime of a project, from design and construction through operations, maintenance and beyond. It can help the entire infrastructure ecosystem – government agencies, private contractors, logistics and engineering firms, and other partners – sustainably complete major projects on time and within budget.

“This is much more than automating manual processes. A digitalised infrastructure platform fundamentally changes how people collaborate on large infrastructure projects,” said Chris Peck, executive general manager of public services at 51��ANZ. “Uniting individuals, teams, and organisations on a single platform with a common data environment that captures real-time data will support accurate decision-making across the full lifespan of the asset.”

Advanced digital twins see around corners

Digital twins are foundational to the digitised infrastructure vision. A digital twin centralises all the data involved in a project, allowing the asset owner, prime contractor and subcontractors, architects, engineers, council, regulatory bodies, and any other designated partner to effortlessly share information and move the project along in a timely manner. The digital twin integrates, and analyses information from all types of applications, including engineering and architecture CAD, spatial, SCADA, asset management, and ERP systems.

However, according to Greg Stone, head of corporate development at Arup, a 75-year old global design and engineering consultancy, these aren’t your typical digital twins.

“We’ve been working with three-dimensional representations for quite some time, but with digitisation, we can up-level to an industrial, enterprise-wide scale,” he said. “Now we can innovate to stress test an asset structurally against numerous real-world criteria to make modifications before something is built or retrofit an existing structure.”

Stone said that Arup is working with transport authorities in to create powerful agent-based models (ABM) for ‘what if’ planning purposes. Whether it’s a new transport system, existing building redesign, or other community infrastructure project, the model can analyse the potential impact of proposed changes, factoring in a wide range of issues, such as what planners should consider given the impact on the environment and society at-large.

Digital thread of information takes the long view

Connected data is particularly important when companies such as cloud services providers are designated as “critical asset owners” by the Australian government. As managers of information that’s required to operate infrastructure like renewable electricity plants, new hospitals and transportation hubs, these providers need to comply with certain regulations so they can deliver a trusted essential service.

“Organisations typically use different software programs, making approval processes unnecessarily cumbersome and often error-prone,” said Johnny Clemmons, global vice president and head of engineering, construction and operations. “Digitising the process breaks down silos between the construction, handover and maintenance phases, helping partners work more efficiently and accurately with full transparency into progress against expected milestones. For example, the foundation of end-to-end digitisation is the connected to the digital twin and intelligent networks.”

Large infrastructure projects are expensive and have decades-long lifespans. With data and visualisation connected in a digital twin, organisations can improve cost savings, better manage safety and risk, and develop services to meet evolving community and citizen needs.

“Digital engineering harnesses data to get better outcomes for the built environment,” said Stone. “Bringing together data from the business domain, technical engineering specialists, and enterprise-grade business process platforms unites every stage of a project in a much more streamlined and impactful way. This is especially important to help meet net zero targets.”

Arup created a that helps offshore wind farms more reliably monitor irreplaceable foundations, cost-effectively extending the structure’s operating life. By combining monitoring data with the wind farm’s asset management system, operators have greater insights into performance for risk-based inspection and maintenance.

Future-proofing digitalisation

Digitised infrastructure is much more than the next transient, shiny thing. It’s the thread that weaves together vast amounts of data to tell the full story of an asset to every partner working on a project. It can deliver much more than short-term efficiencies and cost-savings across major industries like public services, utilities, transportation, oil and gas, mining and healthcare. If we start now, community planners in 2051 will have the data to know exactly what went into a project completed in 2021, meaning fewer costly surprises and better long term results for the community. That’s the kind of innovation future generations are counting on from us.

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54% Of Workers Plan To Quit Without More Flexible Hours And Locations

51��News — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 00:29:31 +0000

On the cusp of economic growth fueled by a huge wave of digitalisation, organisations in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) are transforming talent management strategies to find the tech workers they need.

A recent EY found that nine out of ten respondents worldwide, including workers from ANZ, wanted flexibility in their working hours and location. Fifty-four percent of employees were prepared to quit if they weren’t offered some form of flexibility. According to Thomas Barlow, head of 51��Fieldglass Centre of Excellence, Australia and New Zealand, the talent challenge is acute when it comes to tech employees.

“Technology permeates every part of an organisation, requiring people with new skills in areas like data science, AI, machine learning, blockchain, robotics, and IoT. Organisations need to build a global workforce that meets digitalised business demands,” said Barlow. “Workers with specialised expertise typically operate in a highly flexible, agile way. They’re likelier to be more mobile, in charge of managing their own learning experiences and careers. They also may not be located nearby.”

Complete talent pool data creates business resilience

The latest data from the revealed how pandemic lockdowns have accelerated the skills shortage. reported one in four Australian businesses were struggling to find suitable staff to fill job vacancies. In a recent Covid Resilience Ranking from , Australia dropped 21 points compared to over 50 other major economies worldwide. To meet this workforce challenge, leaders are turning to connected data.

“As companies build more flexible, cross-border workforces, they need full transparency of all employees, including permanent and external workers,” said Barlow. “With complete workforce data, companies are better prepared to identify and deploy the right people with the right skills to support growth forecasts, or pivot quickly in case of unexpected disruptions like the pandemic.”

AI-based talent pools like have emerged to help organizations quickly match open positions with pre-qualified candidates from the global external labor pool. Integrated with and available on the , WillHire curates emerging talent who have the niche skills that support digital transformation.

Global people strategy is core to business execution

Historical talent strategies distinguished between permanent full-time employees and external workers who were typically hired to pitch in as a short-term business fix. With the advent of global marketplaces, talent strategies have transformed to flex with changing business demands.

“Companies need to embrace fluidity, looking at talent from the perspective of business results, as opposed to permanent versus contract workers,” said Marc Havercroft, global chief customer officer at . “For example, organizations using 51��SuccessFactors and 51��Fieldglass can easily see how many people work for the company irrespective of an end date on their contract. Data reveals where people are, what skills they have, and their work quality over time. Organisations can quickly identify gaps and find the additional specialists with the latest skills anywhere in the world.”

One 51��customer, an established ANZ-based financial services organization, needed to digitally transform to attract the next generation of customers. Using both 51��SuccessFactors and 51��Fieldglass, leaders sourced external tech experts to build digital services, pairing them with existing employees who shared their business knowledge while gaining new skills.

At the other end of the spectrum, a native digital banking start-up in ANZ relied on both 51��solutions to guide talent investments in business specialists with go-to-market and customer upselling and engagement capabilities. These experts rounded out the existing team’s tech-centric skills.

Employee experience attracts global talent pool

The same EY study found that worldwide, 72 percent of respondents believed remotely working would likely have a negative impact on their career opportunities. That percentage was higher (82 percent) among employees in Asia-Pacific. With greater visibility across the entire workforce, companies can create a strong employee experience in a hybrid ‘work from anywhere’ world.

“Full transparency into an organisation’s workforce capabilities and recruitment needs allows leaders to adopt a continuous learning culture with benefits to the business and employees,” said Havercroft. “People want to learn, making their work enjoyable and career secure. They want to be valued globally for their skills and knowledge, which is probably the biggest benefit of a global talent marketplace.”

Business resiliency demands new talent management strategies to match recruitment programs with forecasted growth opportunities, factoring in skills and roles that might not exist yet, but are surely on the horizon. For example, SAP’s recent acquisition of SwoopTalent’s IP, an AI-based talent data platform, will allow companies to explore ‘what if’ scenarios, combining real-world total workforce data to improve ROI on talent investments and other decisions as businesses evolve. Massive growth from digitalisation is all well and good. Just make sure you have the business and tech experts on hand to power it.

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Vital Truths About Business Digitalisation From High-Performers In ANZ

Susan Galer — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 04:24:26 +0000

Having experienced the equivalent of 10 years of digital change in the past 18 months or so, organisations are addressing the realities of transformation as digitalisation becomes the business norm.

Leaders from two high-performing organisations in ANZ recently shared their experiences with digitalisation during a hosted by Des Fisher, innovation principal at 51��ANZ. Here is a sampling of their far-ranging thoughts on the sustainable business realities behind innovating on cloud-based digital platforms.

Digitalisation is a mindset and tech transformation

For Australian-based Stockland, digitalisation involved transforming people’s mindsets along with systems company-wide. As one of the largest diversified real estate groups in Australia, the company owns, develops, and manages a large portfolio of retail town centres, workplace and logistics assets, residential communities, and retirement living villages. They’ve replaced over 100 disparate, legacy software systems with SAP’s integrated platform, including and , as well as embedded AI and robotics.

“We now have a single source of the truth,” said Tiernan O’Rourke, CFO at Stockland. “I’m absolutely convinced that in time we’ll look back and say that was one of the best things we did in the 70-year history of the company…our digitization journey shows that unless you’re on the journey you’re going to struggle in business, not only in Australia, but globally.”

Stockland began by defining digitalisation on the company’s own terms. The digital platform was designed to strike a balance between achieving three objectives: organisational risk, governance, and business growth.

“We first looked at what digitisation meant to us and came at it by putting the company on the core 51��platform,” said O’Rourke. “We’re a tactile industry of property, bricks, and mortar. Getting people’s minds away from physical to digital was…one of the biggest obstacles to overcome.”

Digital backbone drives innovation

Oil and gas provider OMV New Zealand recently won an 51��global Innovation Award for its groundbreaking digitalisation that included digital twins and augmented reality (AR) in onshore and offshore inspections. Replacing paper-heavy processes with digitalised and integrated workflows based on the latest mobile solutions and wearable technologies will help OMV improve decision-making, performance, and efficiencies in inspections and maintenance. Its integrated workflow management relies on 51��Plant Maintenance (51��S/4 HANA), , , and HoloLens 2.

“T�� use of automation and AI-driven technologies for creating intelligent digital twins is a key enabler for global scalability, and accelerates creating the digital backbone of the company during digital transformation. Enhancing this technology with an augmented reality experience including mark-up annotations, provides a solid basis for data insights, data-driven decision making, and performance optimization,” said Farid Akbari, functional lead for digital transformation at OMV New Zealand. “This innovation project will change the way we are working, and enables us to position ourselves among digital frontrunners within our industry.”

Digital platforms are core to supplier relationships

Acknowledging that no business does business alone, Tiernan said that Stockland’s deep supplier relationship management strategy is foundational to customer centricity.

“If you don’t partner with best-in-breed, like-minded companies to help deliver premium services to customers you won’t win,” he said. “We have 14 percent market share in residential business…because we evaluate every step of the customer journey, including supplier choice…you can’t know your suppliers unless you have deep relationships and are collaborating with them at a very granular level…Collaboration is an absolute threshold issue in business today.”

Close gap between DX and business realities

When asked about some of the biggest DX challenges, Akbari discussed the gap between innovation aspirations and reality. He pointed out that while everyone wants simplicity, getting there means answering difficult questions.

“We asked ourselves if we had the right organisation in place to achieve digital maturity,” he recalled. “Other questions were about managing resistance to change, and how to actively support the change management process with tools that were changing the way we work…We asked how to build and retain skills over time as innovations like blockchain, IoT, and cloud computing continue [to emerge].”

Akbari also warned organisations not to neglect core details such as infrastructure capabilities, technology integration, and resultant business process changes.

“Often the business comes up with a good idea, but we’re not ready yet,” he said. “For example, AR had to be integrated into the environment…You also have to consider operational maturity…As a global gas and oil company, we have different maturity levels of all assets, and have to map where we are for each asset, and how we will achieve that automation level. “

Sustainability is much more than climate change

While ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) demands tend to emphasize climate change, O’Rourke urged companies to consider all aspects of sustainability, including diversity.

“Everyone talks about climate change, but that’s just about the environment. To do business successfully…you’re going to have to be very balanced in the E, S, and G of ESG,” he said. “Everyone is focused on net zero carbon, and rightly so. But we can’t do that in isolation…We have to jump on [behaviour change] proactively to get suppliers to work with us in a way allows us to operate effectively. On the diversity side, business has been playing lip service for so long, and needs to get serious about focusing on this change.”

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ANZ Leaders That Invested Early In Digital Supply Chains Had Tremendous Results

Susan Galer — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 23:32:41 +0000

Growing impatient with the onslaught of undistinguishable post-pandemic supply chain disruption stories, I perked up after watching a replay from the recent broadcast that promised to reveal the “winning formula” for resilience and sustainability.

While these descriptors weren’t immediately unique, the conversation was. I caught up with one of the experts, Aidan Brecknell, who leads the digital supply chain team at 51��ANZ, for his thoughts on what leading organisations are experiencing right now.

Resilient supply chains pivot with incredible speed

Having worked closely with supply chain leaders in ANZ, Brecknell said that organisations were redefining supply chain resilience for sustainable business.

“T�� pandemic unleashed new challenges far beyond the capabilities of traditional lean supply chains that focused on executing repeatable processes at scale,” he said. “Leaders understand that they need to address a new set of challenges like being able to turn on a dime to find different sources for raw materials, or even design and produce entirely new products. These organizations are modeling different scenarios, building in contingency plans, and executing on those.”

During the broadcast, Brecknell and Martin Barkman, senior vice president and global head of digital supply chain marketing and solutions at SAP, shared the “winning formula” of modern supply chains. Unlike their lean predecessors, resilient supply chains are both customer and employee-centric, built on relationships with sustainable suppliers, and based on product sustainability across the entire lifecycle of an item.

Digitalisation transforms more than supply chains

The pandemic forced companies to understand and act on the difference between digitisation and digitalisation. Having data in digital form has long been the norm. Digitalisation means organizations can both capture intelligent data and change business processes including how supply chains operate. To be clear, this is not taking the same processes and making them digital. This is about creating completely new ways of managing supply chains by connecting information across applications company-wide and partners. During the broadcast, Brecknell summed it up like this:

“Supply chains have been pushed and tested to their limits, and they’ve become so reliant particularly locally on their ecosystem suppliers to access raw materials. It became evident quickly of the importance to digitalize processes within the supply chains, as well as the supply network itself,” he said. “In Australia and New Zealand, we saw some tremendous examples of where customers had invested ahead of the curve, and were able to transition quickly because of that agility in their supply chain.”

One global industrial materials manufacturer digitalised supply chain processes to centrally manage over 200 inventory processes across 60 sites. The objective was to improve forecast accuracy, for on-time delivery, and greater profitability. Another 51��customer, an energy and natural resources company, digitalised operations to better track freight emissions, providing real-time metrics for compliance with carbon neutral goals.

Interconnected data for supply chain resilience

Brecknell said there’s been significant customer uptake of SAP’s Business Network solution that brings together information from sourcing and production through finance, transportation logistics and delivery, including the entire product life cycle. With immediate, connected insights, companies can more profitably sense and respond to disruptions in a strategic, synchronised manner. Organisations can create more individualised, high-quality products in response to changing customer demands. They can prove their sustainability commitment as reflected in their choice of suppliers and operations. They can even attract and keep top talent who increasingly expect employer goals and actions to mirror personal sustainability values.

“T�� allows organisations to connect all of their business partners on one central platform,” said Brecknell. “With complete visibility into the entire supply chain, companies can collaborate with suppliers to source, track, and trace materials faster for shorter product delivery time frames as well.”

As Barkman said during the broadcast, “by capturing all the information about how the supply chain is operating, we preserve the digital thread of the supply chain. We have the information of how a product is being used, how assets are performing, and feed that back not just to the supply chain and manufacturing, but all the way to how products are designed.”

Making a business case for supply chain networks

The elephant in the room is that interconnected business networks aren’t the reality in most organisations. Brecknell agreed that while connecting all this data and changing mindsets about how business operates is a huge undertaking, it’s well worth it.

“Organisations are getting on board with supply chain resiliency and sustainability because it’s good for business. With an extended collaborative network, organisations can mitigate supply chain risk even in the face of unexpected disruption,” said Brecknell. “If an organisation really wants to build resiliency and sustainability into supply chain, they have to have the data, and that has to be aligned across the entire supply chain.”