Gordon Dam, Tasmania
New Zealand-based Zag has overhauled Hydro Tasmania’s legacy SAP system, with the final project activities and the go-live delivered through remote implementation.
The project saw the SAP and cloud provider convert Hydro Tasmania's legacy SAP enterprise resource planning central component system over to S/4HANA and Fiori 3, the software vendor's latest iteration of its user interface for over 1,000 seats.
The move to update its SAP systems comes nearly a year after Data#3 originally refreshed the organisation's IT systems.
According to Zag CEO Nick Mulcahy, this project marks one of the first businesses in Australasia to deploy S/4HANA and Fiori 3.
With the new platform in place, the state government-owned organisation has seen faster response times, better system performance and higher availability.
While the project started in 2019 and spanned over 10 months, the March to June period saw the final project activities delivered remotely, including two "rehearsals" and the actual go-live.
Mulcahy said the team had worked closely with Hydro Tasmania prior to the COVID-19 pandemic so the switch over to remote implementation was not difficult.
“This meant that when we had to unexpectedly switch to remote collaboration, both teams were fully up to speed and were able to maintain good communication despite the challenges COVID-19 brought to the project,” he said.
The desire to move to S/4HANA came as Hydro Tasmania, which relies on its integrated SAP ecosystem, looked to update its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, the organisation’s CIO John Barriga said.
“It was integral for us to convert to SAP S/4HANA and continue building our capability for the future,” he stated.
The decision to go with Zag came down to the provider saying they would do the conversion with Hydro Tasmania, as opposed to other vendors saying "they would do the conversion to us", Barriga added.
The project’s go-live occurred very close to the end of the financial year, according to Tim Rockett, project manager at Hydro Tasmania, so making sure the project went right was important.
“Having a successful end of the financial year in a two-week-old ERP solution was not a given, there was some nervousness around that,” he said.
“Zag certainly helped make it happen by supporting the finance team before, during and after the go-live process, giving them confidence that the solution would do what they need and had the correct data in it, enabling them to create the reports and complete the tasks they needed to at the end of the financial year in the new system. This was crucial."
He added: “We’re audited all the time and we’ve got to report to the Australian Government so, if we were unable to do our end of financial year processing, it would have been a serious problem.”
