In January 2021, Trustpower announced a strategic review of its retail business and subsequently confirmed the sale of its mass market gas, electricity, and telco customers to Mercury NZ. The sale was completed earlier this year for $467m.

Over the course of 18 months, while navigating Covid-19, Matt van Deventer and his Technology and Delivery (T&D) team drove an ambitious programme to separate people, processes and technology to enable both the retail and the residual generation/commercial and industrial business (Manawa Energy) to stand on their own feet. All of this was delivered during a period of significant uncertainty for the around 100 people in the T&D team.

The technology strategy of Project Timatanga (Te Reo for “new beginnings”) was to deliver to Mercury a functioning ecosystem of platforms and systems, and to stand up new infrastructure, environments, and platforms for GenCo, which became Manawa Energy. 

This benefited both sides of the transaction, according to van Deventer.  “The acquirer didn’t need to make immediate decisions on integration and Manawa Energy got to begin with a clean slate, and a solid foundation. This significantly reduced the risk around separating the parts of the business.”

 As part of this, van Deventer and his team:

• Built entirely new infrastructure and platforms to support Manawa Energy.
• Successfully migrated WAN network that connects to the organisation’s generation schemes.
• Migrated the C&I billing platform to AWS.
• Handed over operational responsibility of the retail T & D teams without disruption.
• Established a new Manawa Energy T & D structure.

Retail operations were in strong shape to hand over, says van Deventer, contributing operating earnings (EBITDAF) of $44.5 million, with key highlights including a five percent increase in customers with two or more services, and 93 percent increase in mobile connections over prior year. The mass market retail operation saw net customer number growth this year and maintained customer retention rates above market average.

Technology transformation is key to success

“The newly formed Manawa Energy’s core focus is growth through the development of new renewable generation assets – primarily wind and solar, as well as optimising and enhancing our existing generation assets. Technology is a core part of Manawa’s strategic plan,” says van Deventer.  

He adds that ensuring technology is part of the conversation is table stakes for any technology leader in 2022.
 
“Building relationships across different levels of the organisation is key here - not only with the board and other execs, but with people “at the coal-face”. Helping the board and executives to understand that every company is a tech company (whether they know it or not) is an integral part of my role, and one of the ways I do this is by demonstrating how other organisations (both in our sector and out) are transforming using technology. “

One overlooked facet to this is bringing senior people into modern, digital toolsets to fulfil their own roles, he adds.
 
“Often, leadership teams are still embedded in legacy ways of working (e.g. emails and attachments), rather than modern digital collaboration tools and workflows. This isn’t always easy, but it’s a powerful way to help them understand potential improvements and to demonstrate to the rest of the organisation that technology transformation is key to our ongoing success.”