Abano Healthcare Group’s vision is to be a leader in oral healthcare in Australasia, through its two dental networks – Lumino The Dentists in New Zealand and Maven Dental Group in Australia. Technology is playing a key role in helping Abano achieve this goal, aiding revenue growth and cost reduction and improving customer loyalty.

Abano partnered with Intergen to revolutionise dental care with a forward-thinking and unique solution: the Lumino Dental Plan (LDP), created using Microsoft technologies. The solution is creating digital disruption in the trans-Tasman dental industry. The initial release of the Dental Plan is just the beginning, with new and innovative products and services soon to be delivered using this digital platform.

Abano’s Chief Information Officer, Peter Radich, has led the technology-enabled transformation and here we take a closer look at the journey.

The situation
NZX-listed Abano Healthcare owns and operates one of the largest private dental groups in Australasia, with a network of more than 2,300 people working across 235+ practices in New Zealand and Australia.

Having grown through the amalgamation of hundreds of private practices across the two countries, Abano has emerged from a world where disconnected systems, manual processes and a disjointed view of the customer was the norm.

New Zealanders have some of the worst oral dental health in the developed world, with very little insurance or government support for adult dental healthcare. Often people leave issues too long and are not proactive in managing their oral health due to cost concerns. As a leader in the industry, Abano is continually looking for ways to improve access to quality dental care for all patients.

Abano saw an opportunity to do something positive to change this trend, while at the same time creating a revolutionary, integrated solution to help drive business growth, greater visibility and better customer engagement for the group.

The opportunity
With the customer in mind, the team at Abano conceived the Lumino Dental Plan, a ‘dentistry as a service’ concept providing a much more proactive and affordable offering. The company’s fail-fast philosophy for innovation projects enabled them to pilot the idea with a small group of practices.

In 2016, for less than a $1 a day, they started to offer patients a comprehensive dental consultation, including an exam, x-rays, two hygiene visits and 10% off any additional treatments, payable as a monthly subscription, or annually with discount of up to 30 percent off RRP.

The proof of concept proved to be hugely successful, with over 8,000 patients signing up for the LDP over a two-year period. Not only this, further analysis showed that customers once signed up to the plan were typically accepting further treatments, outside of the initial plan, having built up trust and an understanding of the benefit of treatment versus perception of high cost.

Abano validated the concept, proving much greater customer engagement and improved business benefits and forecasting. However, as the numbers grew the manual system was not scalable and there was no automated back-end financial systems integration to allow for the Dental Plan solution to be rolled out to all of its dental practices.

Wanting to expand the solution to Lumino’s 123 New Zealand practices and thousands of patients nationwide, Intergen was selected and engaged to create a scalable, integrated digital solution unique to Lumino.

The result
The solution delivers a rich customer experience: a patient can see all their details, including last visit, treatments already performed, treatments available and treatments done, as well as any financial transactions. Patients can also select and book treatments through their portal. Other features now available to the company include mass personalisation, simple sign-on and multi-device/channel access and integrated billing.

In due course, an AI-driven engine will recommend dental services appropriate to individual patients, such as straightening or whitening.

Patient feedback is very positive, citing the LDP as the vehicle that got them back into regular dental maintenance after a long period of absence from the dentist, and helping to buck the trend of New Zealand’s poor dental health.

CIO Peter Radich says Intergen has created a solution which uses best practice development lifecycle management, with automated deployment of software updates across the various environments. Utilising Microsoft tools for DevOps has two major benefits, enabling both rapid extension of the LDP solution to new dental practices and, when updates are made to the solution (including the future introductions of new subscriptions for additional products and services), it is a straightforward process.

Intergen has engineered the system with diagnostic capabilities and trained Lumino’s team on the Enterprise Service Bus to self-solve issues. Radich simply calls it ‘The Magic Bus’. Since the solution started its phased go-live in October 2018, a further 3,200 patients have signed up to the LDP, by word of mouth alone.

The future
Currently in its first iteration, the LDP platform is designed and built with extensibility in mind. Not only is it expected to be introduced into Abano’s Australian operations, but the LDP will make a significant contribution to the long-term growth of the Abano business, helping the company carve out a unique position in the delivery of quality oral care with real benefits for every patient.

“This is the biggest investment we’ve ever made outside of dental practices themselves. We don’t develop software but buy and customise it. In this case, it would not be possible to create LDP without Intergen and Microsoft technology, which now enables us to scale this solution across 123 sites in New Zealand, and into Australia in the future.”
Peter Radich CIO, Abano

The dental plan has been designed to be flexible so Lumino can offer additional products to LDP patients, for example, teeth whitening, corporate plans and other dental products, which can be made available as subscription purchases in the future. Immediate results have proven excellent, even before the commencement of any marketing or advertising initiatives. Technology has played a central role in achieving an outstandingly successful digital transformation.

The technology behind the solution
The solution was a clean slate .NET development by Intergen using agile development methodology and the latest technology. Abano moved to Microsoft Azure in 2017/18 and therefore this solution was designed to leverage as much Software as a Service (SaaS) as possible. Deployment in Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure is based on a state of the art serverless architecture.

ChristchurchNZ has established itself a resilient financial management platform after the successful installation of a new cloud-based ERP, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, helped by implementation partner Intergen.

ChristchurchNZ is the council agency that provides the vision and leadership to attract events, visitors, businesses, talent, students, investors and entrepreneurs to the city. It provides targeted initiatives to support innovation and business growth while also promoting the city nationally and internationally. Its goal is to grow the city’s reputation as a vibrant and exciting place where people experiment and test new ideas, and innovate in business, technology, and society.

Martin Brice, Business Systems Manager, ChristchurchNZ, said, “It was important to have a cloud-based solution for disaster recovery purposes. Since suffering a devastating earthquake in 2011, it was clear that business systems should be based in the cloud rather than on premises to avoid business continuity issues in the event of another major earthquake.”

Reliable solution with local support needed
Newly-formed from the amalgamation of two council-controlled organisations in 2017, the agency needed a core business system that would meet the complex needs of the new organisation.

ChristchurchNZ needed to automate its processes and put support for its financial management system on a better footing. Initially, the business had chosen a cloud-based solution that was supported by an Australian-based provider. Over time, that support proved inadequate and it became clear that it needed to work with a local provider who could guarantee improved uptime for the solution as well as work as a partner to help the business improve its financial analysis and accounting.

Cloud-based solution required for business continuity
With a clear, simple goal in mind, ChristchurchNZ engaged Intergen to help it determine the right solution for the business moving forward. The project was finance-led instead of technology-led, which meant Intergen was working directly with the solution’s end users from the start.

Intergen recommended Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, which is Microsoft’s first cloud-based financials solution aimed at small and medium businesses, and based on the popular Navision solution.

As it turned out, ChristchurchNZ was the first organisation in New Zealand to implement Business Central.

Being a recently refreshed built-for cloud solution also meant that Business Central would be relatively easy to implement. Deployment is based on a wizard-like process with very little development required. Intergen added significant value in its business consulting with advice around the functionality within Business Central that the business needed to deploy.

Martin Brice said, “Intergen had a small window for the implementation and the entire project was completed within three or four weeks. ChristchurchNZ was live in the new system at the beginning of October, which was good timing for us.

“The process was very straightforward and used the same architecture as our previous system, so it was a matter of extracting the data from the old system and loading it into Business Central. The hardest part was checking that the data was correct.”

“The system is more user-friendly and reliable now, as well as more flexible.”

Business Central is different to previous Microsoft financial solutions such as Dynamics NAV because its core remains stable and unchanged by customisations. To build enhancements, partners such as Intergen create them locally and layer them on top of the core architecture. This means they’re unaffected by upgrades, which are rolled out automatically by Microsoft.

Using this new approach, Intergen was able to create and deploy extensions in two days, proving that the implementation of even a very complex solution wouldn’t need to be lengthy or painful. Using the team’s extensive experience in financial management and accounting, Intergen was able to recommend improvements and different processes that would help streamline ChristchurchNZ’s operations without requiring bulky, burdensome customisations.

Control through automation
The agency has seen significant growth since it was set up, and the business operates with more complexity than before. The project-based nature of the work is well supported by Business Central.

Martin Brice said, “As the business has grown, it has been essential to gain more control over its finances. Previously, the business was small enough that every finance person knew where every dollar was. But now ChristchurchNZ is at a stage where the activity is too big for one person to manage so having controls in place is essential.”

Those controls have been achieved via automation of the purchase order creation and authorisation process, with further automation projects scheduled for the new year.

Future plans
ChristchurchNZ intends to investigate optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities to help with further automation of key processes. Furthermore, the business will likely look to integrate Business Central with its Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution to have a common platform, which will enable seamless integration in the future.

Working with Intergen
Martin Brice said, “The system is more user-friendly and reliable now, as well as more flexible. Importantly, Intergen is helping ChristchurchNZ think about how the system will work, which is something we don’t really have time to do. Intergen does the strategic thinking and offers us recommendations, which works well. The team is always helpful and we’ve made good progress with them. We’re entirely happy with Intergen and the ongoing support provided by the team.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen

When agricultural powerhouse Genetic Technologies needed an upgrade to an ageing enterprise resource planning solution, it looked to Intergen for answers. The subsequent introduction of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations not only delivered a modern, more integrated solution, it also marked the first New Zealand-led and deployed solution. At the same time, the company has rationalised a Salesforce.com deployment across two territories, introduced a financial planning solution and the Microsoft Power BI analytics suite. Today, the complete system is delivering advantages which include increased efficiency, dramatically improved inventory control and improved budgeting, forecasting and planning capabilities.

Genetic Technologies (GenTec) is a family-owned New Zealand business founded in 1986 by Philip Yates. The company is the sole distributor for the DuPont Pioneer range of agricultural seeds locally and in Australia. The company employs some 90 people across New Zealand and has, since 2010, run the Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP solution.

Situation
Genetic Technologies’ CFO Jason Morris says there were several drivers which led the business to seek an upgrade to its existing ERP system. “The first was, quite simply, that the Dynamics AX 2009 platform was showing its age. The second was that we’d acquired our sister company in Australia, where Pioneer had been operating a fully-owned subsidiary, and we wanted to bring that into a single, integrated solution. And finally, we; migrated to Salesforce CRM a few years ago and wanted to integrate that fully with an updated ERP.”

Morris says the Australian acquisition was running a similar setup to the Kiwi operations, also on Dynamics AX 2009 platform. That company, too, had a Salesforce system, but the configuration was quite different, with that entity using it as a marketing database where the local setup relied upon it for the CRM features. “With the two businesses coming together, we recognised the advantages in one common IT setup across all systems, servers, financials, CRM and so on.”

“They feel we have invested, listened to them, taken away pain points and made things efficient.”

There was a deadline of sorts, too – GenTec had agreements in place with Pioneer following the acquisition of the Australian subsidiary which allowed it to use the business systems for 18 months. This provided a useful window during which Intergen could implement the new Dynamics 365 solution with minimal disruption to daily operations.

Outside of the necessity for integrating the two separate entities, Morris says there were other issues which an upgraded system would address. “Pre-2010 we had a lot of database islands. We had a purpose-built CRM system, an old finance and accounting package, and a whole lot of spreadsheets which made for lots of little islands with remote kinds of information. When we put in AX 2009, we ran with its internal CRM, bringing those islands together. But when we migrated to Salesforce CRM, the islands started coming back.”

That’s an issue which is directly addressed by the introduction of the Dynamics 365 system: it is fully integrated with the Salesforce CRM package, providing the ‘single version of the truth’ so desirable to any organisation.

And finally, Morris says inventory management wasn’t as good as it could be with the existing ERP system. “In our production facilities in Gisborne and in Naramine, Australia where seed is produced, treated and bagged, visibility on inventory is crucial. AX 2009 wasn’t quite hitting the mark. We wanted to adopt process change; putting in a new system would mean we could refresh production hardware and our integrations with that.”

Doing so would provide the visibility GenTec desired.

Solution
Identifying the right solution for its business depended on first examining the available options in the market. Since it was already a ‘Microsoft shop’, it made sense to remain within the stack, Morris notes. “We did a very high-level review of the market which did include a quick look outside to check the lie of the land. Our external consultants pretty much confirmed the view of sticking with Microsoft, with a recommendation that the Dynamics 365 solution would meet requirements from both a functionality and cost point of view. That made it a no brainer, particularly as we were familiar with the older version.”

Morris explains the rigour which goes into the selection and execution of enterprise software systems; from starting the journey February 2017 to going live took a full year, with the project being completed in the same month in 2018. “We had to bring together two businesses that were similar in that both sell seed through a merchant network. But one was in New Zealand, the other in Australia and each had several different processes. In hindsight, we might have done more in the first six months; the process was intense, more so in the last six months with business as usual activities.”

Given the demands of running the business while also conducting a major systems deployment, Morris adds that GenTec beefed up the project team with a specialist third party project manager. “Ourselves, the project manager and Intergen worked well together; there was a further complicating factor of our Salesforce integration, handled by our partner from Salesforce, which added to the mix. And, additionally, we upgraded some aspects of our hardware at the same time, so, we had multiple parties executing various tasks – but they weren’t afraid to all get around the phone to get the solution in place.”

Results
Before getting into the benefits of the new Dynamics 365 system, one of the first measures for success of any enterprise software project is the time taken and the money spent on the deployment. In this regard, Morris is unequivocal about the success of the exercise: “It all worked out really well; Intergen delivered a very good project. They had the knowledge, regular connects and the net result is we delivered on time and within budget,” he relates.

The true scope of the project is clear when Morris points out that it was more than just Dynamics 365. “There was the Salesforce rationalisation from two organisations down to one, but at the same time, we launched a Microsoft Power BI suite and introduced Capion financial planning software for budgeting, replacing a whole lot of spreadsheets and a very, very cumbersome process. This was just an add-on to Dynamics 365 which has the benefit of also handling some of our financial reporting.”

It is, says Morris, early days yet, but GenTec is already seeing the benefits of an integrated, companywide system which spans operations on both sides of the Tasman. “We are starting to see our first revenue figures coming through and the integrations are starting to work. The interface between our production hardware has saved two labour resources – those on the factory floor are not ones to shout from the rooftops, but they are enjoying the new systems. They feel we have invested, listened to them, taken away pain points and made things efficient.”

From a ‘macro’ view, Morris says GenTec is now confident in the system supporting the company’s ability to meet growth targets with streamlined and efficient technology platforms. “This allows us to achieve our growth targets as we seek to grow the market, using our market intelligence through CRM and produce/dispatch records, while seamlessly invoicing the products within the ERP system,” he notes.

And, adds Morris, there are no longer any data islands. “We will just get better at using the information and either data source . That’s the key to getting the most out of this system.”

The future is bright for GenTec and its integrated business systems. “I’m really keen to develop a roadmap to ensure we continue to use the solution to its fullest going forward. It’s a bit like Excel . You only really touch 10-20 percent of the functionality of Excel each day, so I want to make sure we are aware of the functionality Microsoft is bringing down the pipe. We evaluate it, and if it’s got merits, we roll with it,” he concludes.

Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen

AsureQuality provides food safety and biosecurity services to the food and primary production sectors worldwide. With 1700 experts based in over 100 locations throughout Australasia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and China they assure the safety and quality of food being produced for millions of people. Placed in a very competitive industry AsureQuality need to stay ahead of the game and remain a strong competitor by increasing efficiency and driving costs down by 10-12 million dollars a year.

Facing the challenge of an aging intranet product which was end of life and difficult to use, AsureQuality was looking for a way to get the most out of their Office 365 investment and create greater collaboration and communication amongst their staff across different geographical locations.

The opportunity
AsureQuality faced a challenge of having very siloed teams and many silos of different knowledge meant that people within AsureQuality did not have visibility of what was happening in different parts of the organisation.

Darren Wilson, CIO at AsureQuality says, “This wasn’t really a technology project for us; it was a real people focused project”.

The intranet is dead: Long live the digital workplace
An out of date intranet which staff were not using, yet took dedicated people to keep functional, prompted AsureQuality to find a lighter, easily maintainable solution to run in conjunction with Office 365. Intergen proposed the use of their Office 365 accelerator, SNAP 365, which would enable AsureQuality to quickly and easily get a digital workplace portal up and running, allowing them to reap the benefits almost immediately.

Built on top of the array of capabilities provided by Office 365, SNAP 365 provides a single, unifying canvas – bringing contextualisation and personalisation to the Office 365 picture. Beginning with an extremely engaged stakeholder group at AsureQuality made it easy for Intergen to start a set of workshops introducing Office 365 and SharePoint and tailor these to their individual needs.

“Our people have a reason to go to OneAQ to get the latest news about our company. Our CEO is using Yammer for his weekly newsletter.”
Darren Wilson, CIO – AsureQuality

The result
Since go live, just 12 weeks after the first workshops were kicked off, AsureQuality has seen a spike in the usage of Yammer.

“Yammer has pretty much exploded over the last three months because it is a panel on the front page of SNAP 365 and it’s quite visible,” Darren says.

To aid in this spike their CEO has started real time, out in the field updates over Yammer and has also posted a video talking about the new digital workplace, OneAQ. Aptly named, OneAQ brings everyone together across AsureQuality, helping in their goals to make information more transparent throughout the business. Yammer has created a popular, informal channel for AsureQuality employees, filling a communication gap they had identified in their culture.

OneDrive and Office 365 Groups are being used more since the implementation and these tools have significantly increased collaboration online. Employees can co-author documents which saves time and negates the need to be bogged down by hundreds of attachments being sent over email. The search functionality in OneAQ is much faster and easier to use than the old intranet and documents are easy to get back to using the OneAQ homepage.

“It was a good kick start for actually driving the usage of Office 365 through the organisation. By bundling the release of the different Office 365 tools into the roll out of OneAQ, it has driven people to use more of the Office 365 tools we have invested in,” Darren says.

The future
AsureQuality is now rolling out Skype for Business, which will further increase collaboration across the organisation.

Next, they will be focusing on document management and their wider information management space and are currently in discussions with Intergen to complete these projects as well as migrate all documents off their file shares.

Since the implementation of SNAP 365, AsureQuality’s users now know they can use online tools and want to use more and more in their day to day lives.

Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen

Faced with the reality of a world where business is digital, but lumbered with obsolete legacy systems, Public Trust looked to Intergen for an enterprise-wide technology refresh built on the Microsoft solutions stack. The culmination of a demanding three-year project, the organisation is today fully equipped with a Microsoft Dynamics NAV platform and Cohesion ECM platform, enabling the organisation to perform to the highest expectations, and ready to tackle the future with confidence.

Public Trust is a Crown Entity, the independence of which is guaranteed under the Public Trust Act 2001. The Maori name, Te Tari Tiaki Iwi, translates as `the organisation that takes care of people’. Public Trust is the country’s largest and oldest trustee organisation, established in 1873 to provide a stable, independent and impartial trustee for the people of New Zealand. Public Trust manages fiduciary funds of some NZ$3.5 billion, has over 300 staff operating from 23 customer centres, and several part time offices looking after the interests of 240,000 New Zealanders.

The situation
Bob Smith, CEO, Public Trust says the main problem the organisation faced was that its technology systems belonged to another era. “We had IT platforms which were 25 years old and they were just not suitable to move our organisation forward in the digital age. They lacked integration and functionality, including around such important factors as business intelligence and client management.”

Adding further impetus, explains Smith, is the reality of a rapidly digitising environment in which customer expectations for service and access into any given organisation are changing. “We wanted to move the organisation into a modern architectural framework which would enable us to move forward and integrate digital strategies and initiatives into our core operating model. This was our primary objective, rather than any business case around efficiency or functionality.”

With such a sweeping project, Smith says there was a lot at stake, and hence the choice of technology and implementation partner was crucial to eventual success. “We’re a big little company; we have net revenues of around $55 million and a considerable amount of funds under management.”

In other words, the organisation’s technology requirements are complex and sophisticated. “On top of that, we wanted to select an architecture which, while immediately appropriate, would also provide for and enable growth.”

The solution
A ‘considerable amount of work’ went into identifying that Microsoft provided the breadth and depth of technology required to meet Public Trust’s needs.

Smith says that they went through the traditional RFI and RFP process to select a Microsoft systems integration partner, from which Intergen were selected. “We then worked with Intergen to determine if we would go with vanilla Dynamics NAV, or if we would put a specialist trustee package from Touchstone on top of NAV – ultimately, it was the latter option which was determined to be the best option.” Microsoft were actively involved with this decision-making process. In addition to the Microsoft/Touchstone stack he adds that Intergen’s own Cohesion Enterprise Content Management as a Service (ECMaaS) was selected.

The results
In the past doing business was too complex, said Smith. “So in parallel with the system implementation we simplified the organisational design of the business. This design underpinned by NavOne allows us now to scale the business.”

Notably, he says important aspects such as accuracy of information and the ability to access information and produce financial figures has become considerably easier.

“Along with NAV we now have an integrated business intelligence environment. While that is quite basic at this stage, there are no data integrity issues.”

Smith singles out the strength of NAV’s timesheeting module. “That’s been a real benefit. We make revenue from selling time, so strength in this area translates to business improvement for us.”

The amount of change implied in such a large scale systems implementation means we did take a dip in productivity in the first two to three months after go-live, but that has steadily improved. We are at higher levels and continue to see an increase as the system beds down and as our people become more familiar with it.” Smith adds that Public Trust is in ‘the relationships business’.

“So, while we now have a digital platform which does everything we had hoped it would do, I don’t see a big shift in amount of business that we can conclude online. What I do see is the digital tools and touchpoints facilitating the end-to-end process and integrating into our existing channels. That will make Public Trust far more accessible, easier for customers to interact with, and will augment our capability to deliver to customer expectations.”

The project, Smith says, is a definite success. “This exercise is crucial to Public Trust moving forward in the modern world, something we couldn’t do without this project. The architectural model we have selected will provide flexibility to adopt new technology as we go forward. We have the benefit of an integrated system for managing our revenue lifecycle and the processes around; this system will be a key facilitator for our growth aspirations; and it is essential for providing customer experiences which seamlessly move between the digital and physical worlds,” he concludes.

“Providing customer experiences which seamlessly move between the digital and physical worlds.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen

Faced with a situation where organisational information was being stored here, there and everywhere, Education New Zealand (ENZ) recognised the security and operational limitations of unstructured data retention. It looked to Intergen for a solution – and with the introduction of the Cohesion cloud enterprise content management (ECM) solution, the organisation has revolutionised not only information storage, but its use, too.

ENZ is New Zealand’s first government agency for international education, which is the country’s fourth largest export earner. Essentially an ‘umbrella marketing organisation’, ENZ provides a pivotal link between government and industry and is tasked with raising awareness of New Zealand as a study destination, supporting education providers and businesses to export their services and products.

Situation
ENZ is a knowledge organisation with a global remit with 90 staff members spread across 17 locations worldwide. As the ambassador for the promotion of New Zealand as a world-leading destination for education, achieving organisation-wide collaboration and information finding and sharing was an absolute imperative for ENZ.

ENZ IT Manager Mat Drake outlines the challenge it faced: “We had numerous shared drives that were named after most of the letters of the alphabet. The upshot of this was that people were doing their own thing. There were a lot of barriers to sharing and people working in silos. It was becoming impossible to find anything.”

Chief Financial Officer Matt Penney describes the opportunity this challenge presented: “We are a knowledge organisation with a strong customer focus. We needed to do more than just record and store our information. We needed a platform that would allow us to really use our information and get the most out of it.”

As a relatively new organisation, ENZ was in the fortunate position of starting with a clean sheet of paper. It saw the opportunity to quickly establish a strong, integrated enterprise content management platform for the future.

ENZ needed a solution that would:

• Work from anywhere and with external education partners
• Seamlessly integrate with its existing SharePoint intranet
• Provide a future-proof platform that would help get the most from functionality in Office 365 and Dynamics 365

Put quite simply, says Penney, the organisation wanted something which would “Allow people to find stuff – search was a really big one for us.”

Solution
The company found the ideal solution in Empired and Intergen’s Cohesion, a Microsoft-based, cloud-delivered ECM as a service offering, designed to help organisations communicate, collaborate and meet their records management requirements. Cohesion was originally created for New Zealand government agencies as one of three offerings available through the New Zealand all-of government enterprise content management services panel, established in November 2013.

Cohesion appealed to ENZ, Penney explains, but there were some initial reservations. “We really liked the idea of inter-agency collaboration and the ability for us to share workflows with other agencies using Cohesion. As a smaller agency one of our bigger concerns was that Cohesion wouldn’t be suitable for us. However, we worked with Intergen to tailor Cohesion to our needs as a smaller agency and it added up.”

Cohesion’s catalogue approach really appealed, Penney added, and helped get a right-sized solution. “It was a case of finding not just the right solution, but also the right partner.”

Working with Intergen to implement Cohesion, ENZ tackled the project with a series of well-structured sprints spanning a total of just four months to get the platform live and in use by its global team.

“As a smaller organisation that doesn’t have dedicated information or change management expertise in-house, we were also particularly pleased to be able to access these services from Intergen,” Penney adds.

He explains that strong change and information management took the complexity out of the project and ensured a best practice implementation. “It was the single biggest reason for the success of the project.”

Hand in hand with this, training was key. “One of the best things we did was create a project team of super users within ENZ, and then draw on Intergen’s change and information management expertise to make sure we had the right level of support along the way.

“Getting critical mass, getting people to spread the message, getting extra training has all helped us drive to the finish much more quickly than we would have been able to otherwise. It has saved us a huge amount of time and effort in the long run.”

Results
With Cohesion in place, ENZ is enjoying multiple business benefits. With a fully extensible, evergreen organisation-wide enterprise management platform that provides a robust, easy to use information backbone to enable ENZ to successfully market New Zealand education to the world, the organisation can share information and collaborate, internally and externally. Cohesion delivers a single source of truth, reducing silos and duplication of information, ensures ‘findability’ of information across the business, which contributes to improved productivity and performance.

Penney says the solution has also delivered time savings, using co-authoring capabilities and best practice, standardised templates and workflows as an example: “The ability to co-author and have watertight version control in Cohesion has been a massive win for us. It saves us a significant amount of time and effort and gives us unprecedented transparency and visibility across our processes and information,” he says.

A strong organisational commitment to change and information management ensured the swift, successful implementation and uptake of Cohesion, while Penney highlights the fast time to value achieved through catalogue approach, allowing ENZ to get a ‘right-sized’ solution and implement it quickly. He puts it colourfully: “The catalogue offered us a vanilla ice-cream approach and then we could choose a few chocolate sprinkles to ensure things moved along quickly.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen

It’s been barely a year since Microsoft announced its Dynamics 365 product and Intergen has landed a major deal on the combined CRM and ERP solution. The Empired Limited subsidiary said in a statement that it is to implement Dynamics 365 for the SkyCity Entertainment Group (SkyCity), a project which will see Microsoft’s cloud solution rolled out to support its 6,000 staff across Australia and New Zealand.

SkyCity is New Zealand’s largest tourism, leisure, and entertainment company and is publicly-listed on both sides of the Tasman. It has sites in Auckland, Hamilton and Queenstown; in Australia, the company operates in Adelaide and Darwin.

Dynamics 365 was announced by Microsoft in July 2016, made available on general release in November that year and is sold in two editions. The Business Edition is targeted at SMBs, with the Enterprise Edition for medium to large organisations (which is where the SkyCity deal is positioned).

That Enterprise Edition includes Dynamics CRM applications, Microsoft PowerApps for building custom applications, and the Dynamics 365 for Operations ERP component. To keep everyone on their toes, or in a state of slight but perpetual confusion, Microsoft has just ‘repackaged’ Dynamics 365 (as of July 1), renaming the CRM applications to the ‘Customer Engagement Plan’ and the ERP application to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

Intergen confirmed that its new contract includes implementation of Dynamics 365 for Operations with a focus on finance and supply chain. It said the solution will provide real-time numbers and analytics for SkyCity to deliver data-driven insights, while the client will standardise financial practices across its organisation using best practice guidelines included in Dynamics 365 for Operations.

Intergen CEO Simon Bright says it is bringing SkyCity into the modern world from an application perspective, “Providing a lot more benefits and tools for employees, and giving the organisation a complete technical refresh.”

The deal was won in a competitive tender; Bright said SkyCity made its selection in the basis of Intergen’s commitment to understanding the business, the relationship with the team, and the solution provider’s close working relationship with Microsoft. “This deal reinforces Intergen’s position in providing solutions that address the needs of the highest level of enterprise,” he added.

SkyCity deputy CFO Richard Smyth said the organisation sought a solution to help mitigate the risk of an existing setup. “Ease of use was also a critical factor because of the number of users across the business. SkyCity is confident in Intergen’s ability to implement a Dynamics 365 for Operations solution that will continue to evolve with our requirements now and into the future. As this is such an important business system, it was critical that we could trust our partner, and Intergen’s expertise, professionalism, and assurance gave us confidence that it was the right choice.”

Realising that accurate, up to date information is the key to success to optimise margins when managing large, complex and difficult projects involving multiple parties, Hawkins has implemented an analytics solution that provides rapid insights into key performance areas. With its investment in the Microsoft technology stack, the company has selected PowerBI, implemented by Intergen – and while it is early days for analytics at Hawkins, the company expects a substantial return on investment.

Founded in 1947 by Hamilton builder and entrepreneur Fred Hawkins, construction company Hawkins has earned a reputation for being ‘big enough to tackle anything, but small enough to be agile’. The company specialises in the delivery of transformational projects across New Zealand, including stadiums, hospitals, event centres, art galleries and more.

On 1 April of this year, Hawkins was acquired by the Downer Group, an ASX-listed provider of services to customers in markets including: Transport Services, Technology and Communications Services, Utilities Services Engineering, Construction and Maintenance, Mining and Rail.

The situation
Large-scale construction projects constitute the biggest part of Hawkins’ business and in this line of work, margins have to be managed expertly and with a keen eye for detail, explains Hannes van Zyl, Hawkins CIO.

With all reporting done manually, it took a lot of time and effort to produce insights that would give managers the ability to know how projects were performing on the ground. “Effectively, we’d spend a large portion of the month getting the reports done; by the time that exercise was finished, the information was outdated and there was no time for in-depth analysis,” says van Zyl.

The solution
Initially, the business came across a market solution that, while capable, was expensive and not an ideal fit for Hawkins. Van Zyl explains that this solution, while targeted specifically at the construction industry, was too narrow in focus and did not fit with the Hawkins IT strategy. But it did help to demonstrate the value of BI. “As an all-Microsoft shop, we’ve done a lot of work focusing on one vendor for ease of integration and interfaces,” he confirms.

After conducting a five-year Total Cost of Ownership study on several products which fit well within the Microsoft stack (all of which were on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI vendors), van Zyl says it was a no brainer to go with Power BI. “That was not only the most affordable, owing to existing investments in Microsoft technology, but also the most capable of meeting our needs.”

A similar assessment of implementation partners saw Intergen ‘come out tops’. “We wanted a complete cloud service across the Microsoft board; not just the BI platform, but the whole information flow.”

The results
With the project recently completed, the immediate results show that reporting is far better for Hawkins than it has ever been: accurate, insightful and delivered on-time.

The potential performance improvements and business benefits are substantial. “We’ve only just signed it off, so right now I can only speculate, but I believe the return on investment will be substantial,” says van Zyl.

He explains that this will be due to improved and standardised reporting, underpinned by consistent data and definitions. “In the construction industry, the risk of getting things wrong is high – that will now diminish as we will have near-real time information, presented in a format that everyone from an executive, to a manager, to a quantity surveyor can understand.”

In the construction industry, the risk of getting things wrong is high – that will now diminish as we will have near-real time information, presented in a format that everyone from an executive, to a manager, to a quantity surveyor can understand.
Hannes Van Zyl, CIO, Hawkins

With information available immediately, and in some cases now updated as often as three times per day, anomalies or issues immediately stand out and can be actioned. “The project managers can’t ignore it, as the system makes sure it stands out. The user can drilldown and find out exactly what the issue is – whether it be a supplier who hasn’t delivered materials, or a subcontractor who is falling behind. Issues can be identified by region, or by project, and in a matter of four or five clicks, the problem can be pinpointed.” This defuses the risks of large, complex and difficult projects involving multiple parties.

This is a competitive differentiator for Hawkins; Van Zyl adds that future plans for its analytics could include predictive analysis. “In time to come, yes, we could have the ability to move towards predictive analytics to assess project costs based on successes of similar ones in the past,” he concludes.

Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen

Long-time Microsoft Dynamics NAV user Abano Healthcare Group required an upgrade of its core business systems from an outdated version to the latest available. But this was no ordinary project: because the system was working so well for its Lumino the Dentists, Maven Dental Group and Bay Audiology, three full versions were skipped since the original implementation of NAV 2009.

Thus, bringing the three businesses owned by Abano Healthcare Group up to the most recent version presented a less than usual challenge.

Abano Healthcare Group is a New Zealand owned company listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange. It is an active investor in and operator of healthcare and medical services businesses located in New Zealand and Australia.

The business was established in its current form in 1999 and its current investment focus is the $11-billion revenue trans-Tasman dental market and the Auckland radiology market.

The opportunity
Peter Radich, Abano Group CIO, explains that Dynamic NAV has been used by the company for some time. “Initially Abano’s audiology businesses used NAV. It made sense to put Dynamics NAV into the dental businesses, Lumino and Maven, to make the software pretty much standard across the group.”

Radich adds that with standardisation, there is the further advantage that technical expertise can be easily shared across the businesses, while, from a group standpoint, financial and other information can be readily reported.

The goal of the original deployments of Dynamics NAV in each of the Abano companies to create ‘as vanilla as possible’ an implementation, Radich explains; the quality of these implementations was such that there wasn’t any pressing need to upgrade – the system was doing what it needed to do – but time doesn’t stand still.

“Upgrading began to be a pressing issue for ‘hygiene’ reasons. Microsoft was dropping support for NAV 2009, which presents risk to the business. And, while the system was working pretty well, advancements in business requirements as well as new developments of features in the more recent versions of NAV were attractive, particularly in terms of being web-based for a potential future shift to the cloud, and for better reporting features,” Radich says.

The technology and the vision
Being a ‘triple’ upgrade meant Intergen had to take each company from Dynamics NAV 2009, to 2013, and finally to the 2015 version. Radich describes it as ‘the big bang of upgrades’. “This was like a 100,000km car service. Being such a chunky upgrade, it required a bit more management; that’s three versions for three businesses in one project,” he says.

“Being such a chunky upgrade, it required a bit more management; that’s three versions for three businesses in one project.”

The first cab off the rank was Lumino, notes its CFO Allan Wong Kam. “We were the crash test dummy, in that we were going to probably experience any potholes with implementation and understand why and how to avoid them before we rolled out the upgrade to the other businesses.”

The group looked to Intergen for the necessary expertise, support and project management. “Having a really well-engaged team was necessary for the success of the initiative. That makes a big difference; you have to think about what could go wrong and you need a bit of flexibility, because being an enterprise software project, there are always going to be challenges and surprises,” Wong Kam notes.

He says it is valuable to be selective in the way things are timed when executing a complex project of this nature, while allowing business units to continue with their operations uninterrupted.

From Radich’s perspective, getting it right at Lumino was important as it set a precedent for the subsequent upgrades at the other two businesses. “You need to be iterative in approach and we made a point of learning from the Lumino implementation so we didn’t need to worry about making the same mistakes with the other two business units. A lot of that is thanks to strong project management from Intergen; across the six months that this took, the same project team was running all three upgrades,” he points out.

Keeping the team together, Radich says, played a key role in the success of the initiative. “The intellectual property and experience was consistent with the same project manager; the biggest part of the effort, outside of the planning and management, was handling the technical data in jumping through the three versions. That necessitated multiple dummy runs to make sure everything was working properly and that the integration with the data warehouse was sound.”

The result
With careful planning and considered execution, Intergen delivered the upgrade within budget and on schedule, allowing the three companies to get on with business as usual.

As a company determined to continue its steep growth trajectory, Lumino the Dentists – and the other business units within Abano Group – is positioned with a modern system capable of rapidly rolling out to additional locations. “With the number of practices in the Lumino network well over 100 nationwide, we also have a system which is better able to scale to meet our continued growth,” Wong Kam confirms.

Thanks to the successful execution of this unusually demanding upgrade project, Wong Kam says the major advantage for Lumino is a fully supported, current version of their enterprise software. “We depend on Dynamics NAV to run our businesses and it does a good job of it. Now we have the surety of a stable platform, risk is mitigated and we enjoy the benefits that come with the most recent software.”

Those benefits extend to other companies within the group, confirms Radich. “The insistence in not customising the company’s finance system has delivered a notable advantage in the upgrade, as it makes the project something of a ‘technical lift, shift, train and familiarise’ exercise. However, it did involve other parties, notably the data warehouse guys with schema changes. We got them involved early and that, too, has helped this project go well.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen

As it looked to modernise operations, a business which works in the regulation-heavy aviation industry looked for a trusted partner to help navigate the path as its cloud-first approach continued to take off. And, with its choice of Intergen to provide the necessary expertise, applications and services, Airways has seen incremental advantages from shifting more elements of its business systems into the cloud in a carefully managed process.

Airways provides air traffic control and infrastructure to keep New Zealand’s skies safe. Responsible for controlling all air movements across 30 million square kilometres of airspace in New Zealand and over the Pacific, the company handles over 1 million air traffic movements a year. With safety as its top priority, Airways is also an innovative business making a real difference on the global stage. It partners with airlines, airports, governments, and other air navigation service providers developing future ready innovative procedures and technology to reduce the environmental footprint of the aviation industry.

Situation
Like many other organisations which have been in operation over the course of several decades, Airways had tried and trusted business systems in place. But changes in the way necessary IT services can be delivered were increasingly coming to the company’s attention.

Sean Kennedy, Manager Enterprise Business Systems at Airways, says among the key attractions in considering a move to the cloud for its Microsoft productivity and collaboration solutions was improved cost structures where application licensing was concerned, as well as resilience and business continuity aspects. “Before the move, we had services spread across three data centres with Microsoft Exchange servers in each of them; we were also serving up Microsoft Office from these locations.”

The structure of its workforce makes software assurance somewhat challenging, adds Kennedy. “We’ve got an interesting workforce of around 800 users, but of those, perhaps 300 log in every day while a further 500 are shift workers who may or may not log in every day.”

As a result, keeping track of licensing agreements across these centres, and managing costs across employees, was proving onerous. Moreover, says Kennedy, the Christchurch, Seddon and, more recently, Kaikoura earthquakes had reinforced the importance of business continuity and disaster recovery. “Those quakes highlighted the potential disadvantages of our Christchurch and Wellington data centres, so we were looking for more certainty for the future. And if we could do that while also benefiting from software assurance, so much the better.”

Solution
As an organisation which has safety as an absolute priority, and which depends on its business systems to execute operations effectively daily, Kennedy says it sought a partner which ‘had been on the journey before’. “We have worked with Microsoft before, so there was a well-trodden track there, but we tested the market for a partner to assist in the migration of our applications to the cloud. Intergen were the winners on that day.”

Kennedy says the implementation process has several aspects, key among which were the establishment of secure cloud identity management and the implementation of Microsoft Office 365 itself. “That aspect is quite straightforward, with just a little training required as Word is still Word and Excel is still Excel apart from gaining a few additional features,” he notes. “The big one, however, was moving Exchange to the cloud and introducing Mobile Device Management. We saw a need to introduce that to improve security and further delineate between personal and work data on personal devices.”

Migrating Exchange, continues Kennedy, was the most challenging aspect, as Airways was some versions behind, which required a ‘stepped’ approach to bring its systems up to date before migrating into the cloud one. “That required a lot of scripting and this is where Intergen’s experience really proved invaluable, along with advice and guidance for the process.”

Like all enterprise projects, Kennedy acknowledges that ‘it didn’t always go smoothly’; again, he stresses the value of a proven partner. “Intergen were always quick to sort out challenges and crack on again. Problems are to be expected, but getting it right is what counts.”

The process of moving productivity and collaboration applications into the cloud, he notes, was completed over a period of several months.

Results
The most obvious benefit of the shift into the cloud are simply that Airways now has an optimised environment, where licensing costs are accurately matched to business requirements. A perhaps less obvious, but important benefit is that the successful move of common, but mission-critical, business services is reinforcing the value and benefit of a ‘cloud first’ approach. Confidence is building, in other words; meanwhile, hard-hitting upgrades, which would cause interruptions and angst, are a thing of the past.

“With the cloud, the reliability is up there. Availability from anywhere is another key factor which our people appreciate; where previously we had Outlook web access and a VPN, it was reliant on the internal network. Now it works all the time and as a company which has people all around the world, being able to connect straight into the data centre in Australia is great,” says Kennedy.

He adds that, using ExpressRoute, the performance of those connections is as good as access over a Local Area Network. “It isn’t impacted by distance.”

Expenditure on IT services, he continues, has improved not only on the bottom line, but in terms of visibility of costs against licensing. “That means we can budget better, know what the costs are and what we’re getting for the money.”

The biggest eye-opener, however, is the advantage of improved reliability and resilience. “This project has shown that, for example in the wake of the Kaikoura quake, our people can simply log in from home if they have a connection, and do their work. It’s shown that the more we put in the cloud, the better it will be.”

He says the success of moving Microsoft productivity and collaboration to the cloud has provided impetus to move other applications where possible, in line with Airways’ intention to do so. “This is the first steps into the cloud. There are next steps to come, such as potentially the financial systems; that said, there will always be some on premise systems such as our operational ones. But for now, the cloud has proven that for some systems, it delivers the promised benefits.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen