Published on the 25/01/2023 | Written by Heather Wright

Origin Energy has gone live with its new suite of SAP ERP offerings and HR modernisation as part of its digital first push, hailing ‘significant’ business and employee experience benefits from the upgrade.

Glenn Joseph, Origin Energy head of ERP, planning and reporting systems, says consolidating and upgrading the ERP system has provided the electricity generator and retailer with the ability to see ‘the complete picture, remove risk from our asset management practices and realise significant savings out to the end of FY24’.

“Consolidating and upgrading our ERP system to SAP means we’re now able to see the complete picture.” 

The two-stage project, the first stage of which went live in early 2021, has seen the integration of multiple SAP solutions including  SAP S/4HANA, Ariba, Concur, Asset Manager, Analytics Cloud, OpenText VIM and xECM. Non-SAP systems have also been integrated, though Origin Energy did not provide details.

The company completed an SAP ‘retail transformation program’, covering billing and customer systems, back in 2014.

In 2020 it revealed it was shifting its SAP customer management environment to run on AWS, in a move it said would halve its system operating costs.

The modernisation of the ‘people and culture’ systems, comes as part of the broader initiative to adopt a ‘digital first’ strategy. Origin began its digital transformation, including a big push to public cloud with AWS, back in 2016. By 2020 it was 60 percent of the way through a project to transition most of its workloads to public cloud – including part of its SAP environment – in what it called a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform’ the company and its security.

Executive general manager of retail, Jon Briskin, note in 2021 the importance of data to inform decisions and solutions, and the role of digital to enable those solutions being critical.

Origin says it has replaced its previous, unnamed, payroll platform with SAP Employee Central Payroll, with a new time management application introduced to automate complex award entitlements.

Pre-built SAP Cloud Platform Integrations were used to integrate core systems.

“There’s been high impact since implementation across the business, for example Origin can now plan maintenance activities more effectively because all our data is in one system, creating visibility across our entire Generation portfolio,” Joseph says.

“Increased speed and efficiency are pivotal to ensuring Origin has a greater focus on getting energy right for our customers.”

The company says 90 percent of employees are now paid fortnightly with standardised pay cycles and the number of reconciliations have been reduced by more than 90 percent.

The introduction of a customised self-serve HR portal, hosting all policies, procedures and employee-facing content has resulted in a more than 50 percent reduction in inbound employee tickets raised with HR.

Origin says since implementing the new People and Culture systems it has also streamlined its processes, with 90 percent of employees now paid fortnightly, with standardised pay cycles.

The company says a ‘huge’ culture shift has also taken place around how the team records time and applies employment rewards.

The company, along with DXC Technology as their implementation partner, won SAP’s Best Run SAP Intelligent ERP Enterprise award in the vendor’s A/NZ Best Run Awards last year.