Published on the 05/06/2024 | Written by Heather Wright
Follows Gentrack taking over billing…
Power company Mercury NZ is dropping SAP and joining forces with Workday for a new cloud-based finance system.
The move comes 18 months after Mercury announced it had chosen Gentrack, over Mercury’s existing SAP-based tech stack, for its billing platform after acquiring Trustpower’s retail business to accelerate its moves from being solely an energy retailer to a multi-product supplier.
“Our finance team will be freed from many manual tasks to focus on being trusted advisors.”
The ‘gentailer’ (generator and retailer) provides electricity, gas, broadband and mobile services to business and residential users, and maintains 20 power stations, employing 1,500 people.
Mercury CEO Vince Hawksworth says the business had three choices in that case: To use the SAP-based Mercury technology stack, to use the Trustpower tech stack, based on Gentrack, or to choose a new third way forward.
“It became clear to us that if we wanted to leverage multi-product bundle retail in New Zealand, the Gentrack stack was going to support us to achieve our long-term ambitions.”
Mercury says the Gentrack programme of work was completed in the last quarter of calendar 2023, with successfully transitioned to the platform, providing flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs and streamlining operations.
At its peak, more than 300 people worked on the Mercury-Trustpower integration, with Gentrack as the core technology partner on the retail integration programme.
The new Workday deal will see Mercury will replace its legacy SAP finance system with Workday Financials, which includes core finance, financial planning, projects and analytics applications.
No financial details on the deal were revealed.
The move will ‘more fully support commercial and strategic decision-making’.
William Meek, Mercury’s chief financial officer, says the Workday system will create more financial visibility for everyone at Mercury, enabling better informed financial and business decisions.
“Our finance team will be freed from many manual tasks to focus on being trusted advisors and all of our people will have access to a streamlined, natural user experience and embedded workflow management across functional areas,” he says.
Mercury aims to improve the finance experience across the business through the simplified new system, including streamlined processes and improved ways of working that enable it to continuously adapt and evolve.
Driving improved performance with meaningful data and insights ‘available at its fingertips’ was also cited as a key aim.
Mercury has been something of an SAP shop for a number of years.
In 2016 it launched a two year digital transformation programme moving its core platform and SAP landscape into the cloud with AWS. The project also included an SAP upgrade and rolling out the SAP Hana real-time data platform and Hybris for its contact centre.
In 2020 it won the CRM and customer experience category in the SAP Best Run Awards for Australia and New Zealand for its deployment of SAP C4C (Cloud for customers), which it adopted in 2015, and SAP Commerce Cloud. It was also a finalist in the data and analytics category that year.
Accenture NZ has been selected as the implementation partner for the delivery of the Workday system.
