Published on the 23/08/2022 | Written by Heather Wright

Local customers running hard, winning big…

Australian energy retailer Origin and New Zealand dairy co-op Fonterra were among the winners at this year’s SAP Best Run Awards which also saw the likes of Lion, Woolworths Group, Mitre 10 NZ, and Sydney Water honoured for their SAP implementations. 

“We’ve seen significant uplift in our reputational engagement.”

The fourth annual awards, presented at an award ceremony in Sydney, covered 12 categories. 

Origin, with DXC Technology, claimed the Best Run Intelligent ERP Enterprise title for a consolidation project which saw it move off Ellipse and Oracle to a suite of SAP offerings, including S/4 HANA, Ariba, Concur, Analytics Cloud and SuccessFactors. Origin edged out Fiji Revenue and Customs Services and Frucor Suntory for the award.

Sharon Ridgeway, Origin executive general manager people and culture, says moving to a single integrated platform in SuccessFactors combined with other UX  improvements has delivered a step change in user satisfaction and reduced cost and cycle times while increasing self-service adoption. 

Fonterra’s win came in the SAP Intelligent ERP Cloud category, where it beat out Geographe and Integrated Control Technology to take the award. Its win comes for work the company’s chief technology officer, Scott Pyles, says has brought the IT team ‘a lot of credibility’ within the business.  

Project Phoenix focused on S/4 HANA Central Finance, Financial Supply Chain Management and Enterprise Warehouse Management System, and a migration to SAP Private Cloud Edition. Fonterra says the project has seen a performance improvement of CFIN consolidation of run time of 27 percent, with CFIN transactional top-down distributions performance improvements of 34 percent. 

“This project has not only given us a cloud-based foundation to build upon, but we’ve seen significant uplift in our reputational engagement,” Pyles says.

“We’ve proven we can handle challenging technology projects, which has brought us a lot of credibility within our business and has set the pace for another five to six years’ worth of journeys to the cloud.”

NSW Department of Customer Service, with PwC, claimed the Intelligent ERP Business Process Transformation award, beating out National Australia Bank for the gong, with Total Tools taking out the CRM and Customer Experience category. 

Mitre 10 New Zealand’s award came in the Experience Management section, while Sydney Water won Best Run SAP Data and Analytics for an Analytics Cloud project which Sydney Water says has put critical performance information into the hands of decision makers at all levels across the organisation. 

In a year when supply chain woes have dominated the news, Lion’s work to streamline end-to-end planning to create a more sustainable process from innovation ideation to inventory optimisation and improve its level of service by having the right stock in place at the right time, in the right quantity, saw it win the award for Best Run SAP Digital Supply Chain. 

It’s using SAP IBP and Supply Chain Control Tower and says after inventory optimisation was deployed as a pilot in January it saw a change in the mix and service across the pilot DC’s and materials, particularly in New Zealand. 

Taronga Zoo, meanwhile is taking data-driven action for wildlife and conservation, with its SAP cloud project providing critical metrics in ‘an intuitive, easy to consume format’ providing teams with the information they need for pivotal decision making. 

“We have moved from having a limited, but not fully integrated BI experience, to a state-of-the-art analytics and planning platform,” Narelle Beattie, Taronga Zoo divisional director, corporate services and governance says. 

The awards recognise the achievements of the top companies across Australia and New Zealand when it comes to using SAP products to turn insight into action, drive innovation and transform their businesses, SAP says. 

The full list of winners is:

Best Run SAP Intelligent ERP Enterprise 

Winner: Origin, with DXC Technology 

Best Run SAP Intelligent ERP – Cloud 

Winner: Fonterra 

Best Run SAP Intelligent ERP – Business Process Transformation 

Winner: NSW Department of Customer Service, with PwC  

Best Run SAP CRM & Customer Experience

Winners: Total Tools 

Best Run SAP Experience Management 

Winner: Mitre 10 New Zealand 

Best Run SAP Human Resources & People Management 

Winner: OK Tedi Mining, with Deloitte

Best Run SAP Data & Analytics

Winner: Sydney Water 

Best Run SAP Digital Supply Chain 

Winner: Lion 

Best Run SAP Network & Spend Management 

Winners: Woolworths Group 

Best Run SAP Next Gen Innovator

Winner: Orica 

Best Run SAP Industry Disruptor

Winner: TasNetworks, with Bourne Digital

The Chris O’Brien Award 

Winner: Taronga Zoo 

Honourable Mention

Winner: Dermalogica