The organisation owns and operates the electricity network that distributes power to over 45,000 customers in one of NZ’s fastest growing regions. Similar to the other electricity distributors in NZ, they embrace technology as a strategic enabler to deliver a high quality, low-cost network. In 2020, they made the decision to implement a new Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) System to integrate with their financial system that would be upgraded at the same time.

The Challenge

Implementing new EAM and financial systems present significant risks to businesses. These risks can make or break the business and are most commonly due to the lack of people and process focus. As with any change initiative, if key stakeholders aren’t part of the journey, there won’t be any buy-in. Without proper focus on current-state processes and opportunities to remove non-value adding activities, there is a high chance of designing poor practices into new systems.

It is with these risks in mind, they made the bold decision to undertake a Lean approach by analysing current processes and pinpointing significant areas of “waste”. They needed a partner that would help them with aspects of the change journey from people and process challenges, through to technology implementation.

Key Outcomes

Rowan Teh helped them achieve the following:

1. United stakeholders across the business on a common vision and understanding of current-state processes with areas of improvements, ready for the new systems implementation
2. Identified value-add and non-value added activities across nearly 100 processes with measurable effort and cost
3. Accelerated business case benefits with the commencement of quick-wins from over 150 generated and trackable improvements
4. Developed staff in Lean to instil a culture of continuous improvement
5. Clearly defined end-to-end value streams across asset management, finance, procurement, and customer service
6. Independent project governance and QA to ensure value is realised during the system implementations.

Our Difference

The key differences in using Rowan included:

1. Delivered leading industry standard processes as a template
2. Provided Lean analysis of processes to measure waste as part of validating requirements
3. Surfaced key areas of inefficiencies to generate improvements based on process data
4. Enabled capturing both current-state and ideal-state process design to support change management initiatives with stakeholders
5. Proven methodology supported by deep knowledge and experience of processes and systems
6. Independent project governance and QA to ensure value is realised during the system implementation.

Conclusion

Rowan simply offered a uniquely different and data-driven way of understanding business requirements and generating an ideal-state for a digital transformation. Rowan provided an electricity benchmarked process structure template to align their processes with an industry standard taxonomy. This provided them with a guiding structure for capturing current-state processes as well as potentially value-adding processes universally accepted as industry standards. By following this structure, they could be easily translated into system requirements that many solutions align to.

If you’re looking for a trusted advisor for process excellence and project governance, with a difference, contact us.