Ry Crozier, Author at �鶹ԭ�� Australia & New Zealand News Center

BHP uses �鶹ԭ�� Ariba to drive deeper into its $20bn spend

Ry Crozier — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 02:17:18 +0000

BHP drives procurement overhaul using �鶹ԭ�� Ariba, giving it executive visibility and an elevated role in helping execute BHP’s business strategy.

BHP is looking deeper into its $20 billion annual procurement spend with the aid of �鶹ԭ�� Ariba software under an ongoing transformation that has run four years so far.

Centralising procurement

Group procurement officer Sundeep Singh told �鶹ԭ��’s procurement reimagined conference that the miner had centralised procurement, giving it executive visibility and an elevated role in helping execute BHP’s business strategy.

As a decentralised function, Singh said procurement was “layers down” in the organisation and found it difficult to demonstrate any aggregate value.

“Transforming and coming together as a global function really created a great opportunity to lay foundations for functional excellence directly to our frontline operations that not only reduced the bureaucracy and returned great cost-out by ensuring that we could supply a part to a maintainer to get the truck out of the pit on time, but it actually freed us up to connect to our organisation’s strategy,” Singh said.

“We really now have that capacity to expand our scope to execute BHP’s purpose, rather than just transacting on behalf of BHP.”

The global procurement function runs off a suite of �鶹ԭ�� Ariba modules.

This isn’t particularly surprising; BHP previously embarked on a that standardised many core processes and systems worldwide on �鶹ԭ��.

“Our solution footprint is wide and vast,” Singh said.

Ariba sourcing, guided buying, catalogue, invoicing, and network

“We’ve got Ariba sourcing, guided buying, catalogue, the Ariba network and contract invoicing, and with �鶹ԭ�� more broadly, we’ve got the cloud platform and �鶹ԭ�� cloud analytics as well.”

Singh said BHP is also making “advancements” around spend visibility and performance management, using Ariba spend analysis.

“We’re starting to see machine learning take us from that level 2 visibility now really into that level 4 visibility of our spend,” Singh said.

To read the full article, see the original piece on

To watch the Procurement Reimagined session with BHP’s Chief Procurement Officer, Sundeep Singh, you can .

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Woolworths Embraces �鶹ԭ�� Modernisation With Move Onto Azure

Ry Crozier — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 03:26:52 +0000

Creates long-term upgrade path to S/4 HANA.

Woolworths is the first company in Asia Pacific to avail itself of a program designed to help companies modernise their existing �鶹ԭ�� footprints.

The retailer will shift its current ECC 6.0 �鶹ԭ�� environment to run on Microsoft Azure, though details of exactly what the project entails are thin.

�鶹ԭ��’s A/NZ president and managing director Damien Bueno said in a statement that “Woolworths has one of the largest �鶹ԭ�� environments in the world, which supports business-critical processes, including retail operations and finance.”

“Migrating �鶹ԭ�� applications and platforms to Azure, including �鶹ԭ�� ERP and �鶹ԭ�� Cloud Platform, will enable this great business to innovate faster than ever,” he said.

“In time, this will also support Woolworths’ move to �鶹ԭ�� S/4 HANA.”

Woolworths started decommissioning its in-house IT infrastructure a few years ago, setting a .

It also consumes a .

Woolworths CIO John Hunt said Azure is continuing to support the retailer’s “ongoing digital transformation”.

“We are confident it will provide us with the performance and flexibility required to meet our ever evolving �鶹ԭ�� requirements in providing an exceptional customer experience,” Hunt said.

The project is taking place under the auspices of Embrace, a modernisation scheme run by �鶹ԭ�� and Microsoft that was launched late last year.

Woolworths is said to be the first company in the Asia Pacific Japan region, and one of the first in the world, to avail itself of Embrace.

Embrace is designed to simplify the move “from on-premise editions of �鶹ԭ�� ERP to �鶹ԭ�� S/4HANA for customers,” the two vendors said last year.

“Industry market bundles will create a road map to the cloud for customers in focused industries, with a singular reference architecture and path to streamline implementation,” they said.

The two vendors also offer combined support for the transition to occur.

It’s not clear when Woolworths might move up to S/4 HANA, but it’s an upgrade on the minds of most �鶹ԭ�� users.

Optus, for example, it is preparing its own move to S/4 HANA, though again the timeline is unclear.

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Australia Post Road Tests Its Transformation Scope With Staff First

Ry Crozier — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 02:25:58 +0000

Uses the same software to manage COVID-related fatigue.

Australia Post used �鶹ԭ�� Qualtrics to source ideas and scope internal sentiment towards its current business transformation.

Executive general manager for transformation and enablement, John Cox, told �鶹ԭ��’s HR Connect conference that AusPost is also using Qualtrics to manage employee fatigue after a challenging first half of the year.

Cox said AusPost is a “big user” of Qualtrics, which became part of �鶹ԭ�� in early 2019.

“It’s really important to understand the state that our teams are in [and] how they’re feeling,” he said.

Cox was recently , and said AusPost used Qualtrics to scope the extent of its transformation efforts as well as to measure internal attitudes towards change.

“I’ve recently just come into this role and one of the key things we did was understand how our people were feeling, how they felt about transforming the company, what their involvement would be, how much they were willing to change, and what they thought we should change,” he said.

“That’s been a really valuable set of insights that are helping guide us where we want to go.”

Outside of the transformation effort, Cox highlighted the pressure AusPost staff are under generally, handling huge increases in parcel volumes and service experience expectations of customers.

“I think a lot of people know that the volumes have just been insane in Australia Post, and that we were struggling,” he said.

“We put a lot of our mail and parcels onto airplanes – often on passenger airplanes – and with all of those [being cancelled] over the last month, we have seen some of the delays.”

Cox said parcel volumes on some days were up to 220 percent higher than pre-COVID.

He said that where AusPost might ordinarily have three days a year during the Christmas period where it delivered two million parcels, “we’ve now had over 20 of [those days] just during the COVID era.”

In addition to its customer-facing activities, AusPost saw substantial changes in the backend to enable the organisation to cope with sudden changes to its ways of working.

“We rolled out 16,000 WebEx clients in three days, something that we’d planned to do in six months, and it was a similar story with the number of VPN connections that we had to set up,” Cox said.

“There was so much done in such a short period of time.

“What was amazing was the response and that people were very buoyant, but I do worry as that euphoria drops off, you can already start to feel people are just fatigued.

“It’s actually exhausting trying to do so much so quickly, so being able to [use Qualtrics to] pulse the team and understand where they’re at is really important.”

Workforce verification built on �鶹ԭ��

Cox also revealed that a workforce background screening service called Workforce Verification that Australia Post launched in the middle of last year sits on an �鶹ԭ�� Successfactors backend.

The service “provides a thorough yet efficient way to conduct a range of screens, including identity, police and visa checks,” AusPost says in its documentation.

“And with real-time visibility of the status of all candidate and existing employee checks – it can help to streamline reporting and ongoing compliance.”

Cox said the service could be even more useful to employers post-COVID.

He also said that volumes were beginning to pick up at post offices for other services such as passport renewals.

“It’s been interesting over the last couple of weeks as people are starting to think about renewals,” he said.

“For a long time, with no international travel that softened, but it’s actually picking up again.”

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AGL Energy Predicts More Spend On Mobilising Its Workforce

Ry Crozier — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 01:57:59 +0000

Looks to Teams to handle rise in collaboration workload.

AGL Energy saw a marked rise in idea sharing and collaboration in the lockdown period, which it attributed to heightened demand among staff to connect with each other and to the company’s broad adoption of Microsoft Teams.

Head of Business Applications & PMO Rishi Dhillon told an �鶹ԭ�� virtual industry forum last week that AGL had also been well-placed technology-wise coming into COVID-19 lockdowns on the back of a in digital transformation.

“Our investment in our digital and mobile platforms over the past three years has been absolutely fantastic in servicing our customers,” Dhillon said.

“The investment in �鶹ԭ�� and also our network and capability in our infrastructure has been reaffirmed with this position that we’re in now.”

In the past couple of years, AGL has overhauled its �鶹ԭ�� core to S/4 HANA and to the way it augments the platform.

Stil, like other organisations, Dhillon said that AGL had faced some challenges in “mobilising an entire workforce” in a short period, and in keeping operations in India and the Philippines online.

“A lot of our corporate offices and our sales offices are in lockdown in different regions across Australia,” he said.

“We also have a lot of generation plants across a lot of geographical locations and they’re operating under their respective response plans.

“We also have partner services out of the Philippines and India that operate under different jurisdictions as well.

“So trying to mobilise an entire workforce in a situation that’s changing daily presented a lot of challenges along the way.”

Dhillon said AGL had worked with its service providers outside Australia and provided them with solutions “to be able to service our customers while they’re working from home as well.”

He said AGL had looked to Microsoft Teams to handle much of the collaboration needed during the lockdown.

“From an organisation perspective we’ve shifted a lot of our collaboration across to Microsoft Teams as our platform, and that’s working really really well,” he said.

The company is running most of its operations virtually, including “hackathons, planning/strategic days, and team days”, as well as company social events like virtual trivia and drinks.

This had “allowed people to stay connected and to share ideas,” Dhillon noted.

“What we’ve now discovered is the new way of collaborating has just accelerated,” he said.

“We’ve had a lot more people participate … wanting to make human connections has actually driven a higher rate of participation.

“Some of the health surveys we’ve done across the organisation prove that a lot of people are a lot more engaged in some of the initiatives we want to try and drive and deliver.”

As lockdowns eased, Dhillon said AGL would need to take stock of what arrangements it kept and accepted as a new way of work.

“For AGL, there will be a time where we do a stocktake with regards to what the experience has shown us and what we’ve learned from it,” he said.

Dhillon said that AGL would continue to invest in mobilising its workforce.

“The investment is going to continue,” he said.

“It’s really underway [already] with being cloud-first in everything we do at the moment, and it’s going to continue to grow.

“I think this is going to really show us a new way of how we come together as an organisation … and strike the right balance for a new breed of people and talent to be able to find a good work-life balance while they work for our organisation.”

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The Star uses �鶹ԭ�� and DocuSign to sign nearly 7000 staff up to JobKeeper

Ry Crozier — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 04:26:18 +0000

The Star Entertainment Group set up almost 7000 eligible employees on the government’s JobKeeper support scheme in less than a week using technology from �鶹ԭ�� and DocuSign.

Following government restrictions on March 22, the ASX-listed group – which owns and operates The Star Sydney, The Star Gold Coast and Treasury Brisbane – was forced to temporarily stand down over 90 percent of its workforce.

A week later, the government announced JobKeeper and said that employees would need to fill in and return forms by the end of April in order to be enrolled in the scheme.

JobKeeper is a federal government scheme that provides a fortnightly payment of $1500 per week to impacted individuals through their employer.

Help at speed

“The Star therefore needed to find a tool to facilitate its remote workforce to complete and submit the applications at scale and speed,” �鶹ԭ�� said in a statement.

The Star used �鶹ԭ�� Signature Management by DocuSign “so they could access, sign, and submit the forms digitally.”

�鶹ԭ�� Signature Management by DocuSign lets users electronically access, sign, and send documents anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

Employee impact

More than 2500 staff completed the form digitally in the first 24 hours, and over 90 percent of eligible staff within the week – in time to be eligible for the first two-week payment.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted everyone in the community and businesses across Australia, and The Star is no exception,” The Star Entertainment Group CIO Laurent Fresnel said in a statement.

“By working closely with �鶹ԭ�� and DocuSign, we rapidly delivered the necessary JobKeeper application paperwork to all staff in a matter of days, with staff able to sign and return the forms almost instantly.”

Fresnel also credited the internal work of the Group’s IT and People and Performance teams for quickly setting up the system.

Weather the storm

�鶹ԭ�� ANZ president and managing director Damien Bueno said it was never easy to stand down staff.

“We hope that moving so quickly will minimise the wait for these payments and help impacted individuals to weather the storm,” he said.

DocuSign’s GM and vice president Brad Newton said that “being able to make business critical processes like JobKeeper applications less of a burden is a great thing.”

“Seeing this in action with The Star shows that no matter the size of the company, digitising this process can get employees signed up and paid fast and efficiently,” Newton said.

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How NAB upskilled its staff through the COVID-19 lockdown

Ry Crozier — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 04:55:09 +0000

Records skills updated while on lockdown in SuccessFactors profile.

NAB placed extra emphasis on having its 40,000 staff develop their data and digital skills while on lockdown, converting thousands of training programs to run online in the process.

Chief people officer Susan Ferrier told �鶹ԭ��’s virtual Sapphire Now conference that the bank saw an opportunity for staff to “upskill and learn”, and for the bank to ultimately develop a more flexible workforce.

Staff were asked to review skills recorded against their staff profile held in �鶹ԭ�� SuccessFactors.

“We really pushed the skills inventory that sits in Successfactors and said, ‘Here’s an opportunity to brush up your internal CV,” Ferrier said.

“We asked everybody to also go in and review what they had in that tab in SuccessFactors and to update their skills.

“We’ve really been pushing things like skills and mental health [during lockdown], and [that] now’s the time for you to double down and think about the future, particularly on things like digital and data skills.”

At the same time, Ferrier said that NAB had digitised most of its existing training programs so they could be run remotely.

“We’ve definitely used [COVID-19] as an opportunity to push harder into ensuring that we’ve got a really strong and valuable digital learning footprint,” she said.

“We’ve pivoted a lot of our face-to-face training to now be delivered via Zoom or Teams.

“That actually in some cases is working better than it did before. In other cases, I think face-to-face learning is probably more impactful, but we’ve experienced significant take-up.

“I think we’ve changed something like 3000 of our courses from what they were before to digitise and reinvent them in a way in which they’d be able to be delivered remotely.”

NAB has several active streams of work underway to effectively redesign its operations for a post-COVID world.

Ferrier revealed last week that , with desks now only available via a booking app, presumably to provide some sort of traceability should it be required (rather than a full hotdesking environment, where it may be immediately unclear who was sat at what desk and when).

At Sapphire Now, Ferrier detailed at least three other work streams.

One of these focuses on making skills and teams more “fungible” – in other words, able to be shifted internally to fulfil resourcing requirements at short notice.

During COVID-19, the bank – like many other large organisations – retrained people from across the business to join its frontline and work through a spike in inbound enquiries from customers.

The effort involved about 800 NAB staff, and appears to have given the bank a taste of what it would be like to have a more flexible and re-assignable workforce.

“One of the things that we realised through this is that we can train people fast to go do other jobs that are different to the ones that they were doing up until COVID-19 hit,” Ferrier said.

“In the past we would have said,’Oh, it’s going to take us three weeks to repurpose these people to be able to go and do this job rather than that job’.

“But we’ve been able to move so rapidly, we’ve taken a three week training course and condensed it into two really intense days, with a lot of on-the-job coaching.”

Having staff from other parts of the business pitch in had been “very energising and engaging for our frontline”, as well as for NAB more broadly.

“I think that’s one thing that we really learned is that skills, in some cases, aren’t so particular to one job, and you can rapidly retrain and mobilise,” Ferrier said.

“That fungibility idea is going to be something we carry forward.”

Another work stream is focused on enabling “a truly flexible workforce, where people come in and out of our office buildings, work from home [or] work from wherever in a truly flexible way.”

“We’re rapidly looking at how we can hold onto the habits and practices that we’ve created in the last few months,” Ferrier said.

Yet more work is aimed at determining what the bank of the future will look like, particularly as a larger portion of customers gravitate to digital channels and shun physical branches.

“One of the things that we’ve noticed is our customer behaviour … and customer habits have changed,” Ferrier said.

“They’ve really mobilised much more rapidly to digital, online and on-demand or self service type platforms such as our app.

“Customers are moving away from needing to physically be in our branches. So we’re trying to work out what that means for the future of banking.”

Hear more of NAB’s story at Effect 2020. Join Susan Ferrier in discussion on 17th September.

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AGL Energy Predicts More Spend On Mobilising Its Workforce

Ry Crozier — Tue, 19 May 2020 04:47:48 +0000