Services Australia, AGL and OMV New Zealand win SAP global Innovation Awards.

The award recognises customers and partners who have driven a positive economic, environmental and social impact.

SAP ANZ today announced federal government agency, Services Australia, energy retailer, AGL, and integrated oil and gas provider OMV New Zealand, have won at SAP’s Innovation Awards 2021. The global awards recognise the achievements customers and partners have driven to solve complex business challenges that create a positive economic, environmental and social impact.

In this year’s awards, there were a record 376 submissions across 27 industries, from airlines to wholesalers– a 44 per cent increase over last year. 20 winners were selected from a list of 70 finalists representing seven categories: Social Catalyst, Industry Leader, Transformation Champion, Business Innovator, Cloud Genius, Adoption Superhero, and Partner Paragon.

With three out of 20 winners from Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), it is the most successful year for companies from ANZ since the awards began in 2016. Previous winners from the region include RuralCo NZ and Queensland’s Office for State Revenue in 2018; Newcrest Miningand Fonterra in 2019; and Taronga Zoo received an Honourable Mention in 2020.

AGL, OMV and Services Australia were selected for projects that included major overhauls to employee experience, inspection and maintenance activities, and streamlining welfare payments:

AGL

As one of Australia’s leading energy companies offering electricity, gas, solar and renewable energy services, AGL sought to provide its employees with the same user experience of its customers following consolidation of its back-end systems in 2018. Its objective was to digitally enable its employees and provide them with greater mobility and a faster mobile user experience for actioning Purchase Orders, reporting safety issues, completing workplace safety assessments, booking workspaces in the office and booking leave. Its aim was to increase employee satisfaction and engagement across the board by making employees’ work lives easier and more efficient. AGL partnered with Bourne Digital to create the world-first AGL One iOS app, which utilises SAP Integration Suite and SAP Extension Suite to bring together its employee network into a single digital experience. By using the app, the business now has one approvals aggregator to manage approvals from 50+ systems, one app to manage multiple applications system-wide and one login for app access. For more information, see here.

OMV New Zealand

OMV New Zealand is one of the largest liquid hydrocarbon and gas producers and is a major explorer in several offshore basins around New Zealand. Previously, the planning and execution of its onshore and offshore inspections was an intensely paper-heavy process using mark-ups, instructions, isometrics and piping and instrumentation drawings. This created significant data redundancy across multiple systems. In partnership with Evora IT solutions, it implemented an integrated workflow management using SAP Plant Maintenance, SAP Intelligent Asset Management Suite, SAP Asset Manager and HoloLens 2. This enabled staff to create a smart digital twin, using an interactive environment through augmented reality (AR+) to assist with planning and execution of inspection and maintenance activities. Since implementation, the business has reduced planning time and back-office work by 25 per cent, reduced costs by 10 per cent and reduced work execution time by using new technologies by 30 per cent. For more information, see here.

Services Australia

Services Australia is the federal government agency responsible for delivering support services and payments for health, social and welfare. While its previous payments platform, met the needs of the department, its staff needed a more modern, extensible and agile solution that would enable them to rapidly enact new policy proposals. To support its digital transformation, the agency embarked on a seven-year program designed to transform the delivery of its welfare payments and services called Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT) based on SAP Public Sector Collection and Disbursement (PSCD) on SAP S/4HANA. The platform, which leveraged machine learning and advanced and augmented analytics, has streamlined payments, standardised business processes and allowed for increased automation, enabling staff to improve how they process and distribute payments. Since implementation, staff have been able to disperse $3.5 billion in social benefits across 5.38 million payments. It is also enabling faster processing times with staff able to process half a million payments within five minutes.

Notably, at the height of COVID-19, staff distributed urgent relief payments worth more than $1 million within four days to 1,400 Victorians who required emergency support to isolate and quarantine. It also distributed more than $1.2 million in one-off stimulus payments to 5,000 people experiencing hardship in the Australian Capital Territory. For more information, see here.

Damien Bueno, President and Managing Director SAP ANZ says, “These awards recognise the remarkable achievements of our customers and partners who are solving complex business challenges to drive improved business outcomes and better experiences for employees and customers – a big congratulations to AGL, OMV NZ and Services Australia. The ingenuity, teamwork and innovation reflected by the winners of this year’s awards demonstrates the positive impact of technology in not only improving people’s lives but revolutionising how we work across many industries. We would like to thank all our customers who participated in this year’s competition”

“It’s fantastic to see so many organisations from our region represented in the global awards, which underlines that Australian and Kiwi companies punch above their weight when it comes to using innovative technologies to solve business problems.”

To see the full list of global winners, visit the SAP Innovation Awards homepage