The sale of Vodafone New Zealand from Vodafone Group to joint venture equity investors Brookfield and Infratil has prompted a huge body of work for Chief Information Officer Andrew Haddad and his team to separate systems from the telco’s previous owners.

While Vodafone NZ retains the benefits of being part of the broader group, such as international roaming, they needed to separate from Vodafone Group’s IT systems and ran two streams of work, ERP and Office IT and Security to achieve the separation.

For the ERP stream, the team had a clear vision to simplify support functions and systems whilst minimising risk to the business and locked in key principles such as ‘using standard processes’ to ‘simplify our ways of working’, according to Haddad.

“We set an incredibly ambitious target of achieving this ERP implementation within nine months, and started by defining the target operating model, as well as the core processes that were changing. We went through the process of selecting SAP as the technology solution and partnered with EY and Infosys to help us deliver,” he adds.

The program delivered:

• Insourcing of all Finance, HR and Procurement transaction services previously carried out by Group
• Documenting and simplifying, all end-to-end business processes
• Documenting business standard operating procedures
• Designing and implementing a best practice control environment
• Training and enhancement of the capabilities of all impacted staff
• The transformation, conversion, and migration of all required data
• Data cleansing for core master data objects
• Implementation of a DevOps model for ongoing enhancements and support
• Finance, supply chain and inventory management using S4Hana 
• Document management using OpenText
• HCM using SAP Success Factors
• Reporting using SAP Analytics Cloud
• Contingent workforce management using SAP Fieldglass
• Expense management using SAP Concur
• Sourcing, Procurement and Supplier Management using SAP Ariba
• Contract life cycle management using iCertis
• Balance sheet and supplier reconciliations using OneStream
• Guided training using SAP EnableNow 
• Integration and B2B using SAP CPI

“When considered in totality, the program has been incredibly successful for us having successfully delivered a major ERP implementation in just nine months - almost unheard of,” says Haddad.

Some of the benefits the ERP program delivered, according to Haddad, are financial benefits by improving the operational run cost and control over Vodafone NZ’s own destiny and solution set, enabling ongoing streamlining of processes and system simplifications.

In addition to ERP, the team ran a parallel stream of work to completely replace the company’s Office IT and Security tools, allowing them to separate from Vodafone Group systems.

This stream of work ran for 18 months and delivered:

• 2500 new laptop devices rolled out to replace VF Group assets
• 600 applications migrated to local New Zealand domain (inc. Cloud)
• 4000 Virtual Desktops rolled out across our front-line retail and care staff
• 6000 Office365 users migrated to local New Zealand instance
• 4000 Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites migrated
• New security and environments to support .nz domain 
• Multifactor authentication for all users
• A new Service portal and Hub, new onboarding, and request processes for all IT services

“One of the biggest challenges with replacing the entire organisation’s productivity tools including their emails and laptops, with the communications and change management associated with the program, especially during lockdown and everyone working from home. We needed to cater for a variety of locations and situations and solve the logistical challenges in a safe and efficient way,” says Haddad.

“Our Office IT programme was all about taking more control of the employee experience, with end user and productivity tools supported on modern hardware.  This underpins our employee value proposition, giving Vodafoners the ability to work whenever and wherever they want, critical with post-Covid hybrid work scenarios,” he adds.

“When considering the elements of time, cost, and scope, we had the beautiful constraint of time which helped drive many decisions and proved to be highly effective,” says Haddad. “There were things to tidy-up after the implementation, but the Executive team and Board were highly satisfied with our ability to deliver our transformation within the extremely tight deadline. Our third-party partners are now using us as a reference case study for delivery excellence.”