Case Study Electra

Electra owns and operates the electricity network in the Kāpiti and Horowhenua regions on the west coast of the lower North Island, New Zealand. It distributes power to over 45,000 customers in one of NZ’s fastest growing regions, 9th largest in NZ. Similar to the other electricity distributors in NZ, Electra embraces technology as a strategic enabler to deliver a high quality, low-cost network. In 2020, Electra made the decision to implement a new Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) System to integrate with their financial system that would be upgraded at the same time.

The Challenge

Implementing new EAM and financial systems present significant risks to businesses. These risks can make or break the business and are most commonly due to the lack of people and process focus. As with any change initiative, if key stakeholders aren’t part of the journey, there won’t be any buy-in. Without proper focus on current-state processes and opportunities to remove non-value adding activities, there is a high chance of designing poor practices into new systems. It is with these risks in mind, Electra made the bold decision to undertake a Lean approach by analysing current processes and pinpointing significant areas of “waste”. Electra needed a partner that would help them with aspects of the change journey from people and process challenges, through to technology implementation.

Key Outcomes

Boxfish helped Electra achieve the following:

• United stakeholders across the business on a common vision and understanding of current-state processes with areas of improvements, ready for the new systems implementation.
• Identified value-add and non-value added activities across nearly 100 processes with measurable effort and cost.
• Accelerated business case benefits with the commencement of quick-wins from over 150 generated and trackable improvements.
• Developed staff in Lean to instil a culture of continuous improvement.
• Clearly defined end-to-end value streams across asset management, finance, procurement, and customer service.

The Boxfish Difference

Boxfish is a digital solution and services provider that provides an accelerated approach to gaining process data insights and analytics. The Boxfish platform is becoming the preferred choice to design efficient processes in organisations.

“Boxfish was a key innovation for understanding and analysing our processes as part of our wider finance and asset management system implementation . Their approach of applying utilities-industry expertise and Lean thinking provided us with focus and clarity on what and how to optimise our processes.”

David Toon (Chief Financial Officer, Electra Limited)

Conclusion

To de-risk digital transformations, organisations need to focus on people and processes. This requires an approach that doesn’t just start with system design, but understanding where inefficiencies and pain reside in current processes.

Adopting the Boxfish platform and approach has enabled many organisations to accelerate benefits realisation by ensuring non-value-add areas of their processes are front of mind to be addressed and tracked. If you’re wanting a uniquely different option that unites, not divides your business, contact us.