Port of Newcastle

Transitioning to SaaS in two months, Port of Newcastle has implemented additional product functionality and unlocked the benefits of Ci Anywhere

Case study highlights

  • Transitioned to SaaS in 2 months
  • Unlocked the multiple benefits of Ci Anywhere
  • Implemented Project Lifecycle Management

The Challenge

Port of Newcastle is Australia’s deep-water global gateway and the largest port on the nation’s East Coast. With trade worth approximately $37 billion to Australia’s annual economy, The Port enables businesses to successfully compete in international markets.

The Port’s journey with TechnologyOne began in 2012 with implementing the core enterprise suite in an on-premise environment. However, the complexity of managing an on-premise infrastructure presented a challenge.

Supporting TechnologyOne’s on-premise solution and infrastructure required the Port to engage multiple stakeholders and this process saw the Port face difficulties when it came to issue resolution.

The intermittent nature of some infrastructure issues and business as usual (BAU) time required to support and complete infrastructure tasks often took away opportunities to completely leverage TechnologyOne’s functionality. This resulted in some user frustration and sub-optimal use of the solution.

The Solution

Port of Newcastle transitioned to TechnologyOne’s Software as a Service (SaaS) platform in 2020 which removed the time, cost, risk, and complexity of managing software and infrastructure on-premise.

The Port also implemented TechnologyOne’s Project Lifecycle Management module to support its capital investment in multiple projects to align with its growth and diversification strategy.

With these changes the Port of Newcastle now has a solution that seamlessly integrates all financial, supply chain, asset management, property, and project management data, creating a single source of truth. The Port’s transition to SaaS was complete one month prior to the COVID-19 pandemic which positively impacted business productivity and enhanced the end-user experience.

By upgrading all modules to Ci Anywhere the Port has been able to feel confident they have all TechnologyOne’s core functionality, security, and provide users with a consistent intuitive interface.

“During the cloud transition process, it was very clear we were on a well-trodden path and that TechnologyOne had migrated hundreds of customers to SaaS before,” said John Bowron, Information Systems Manager, Port of Newcastle.

The Outcome

Since moving to our SaaS ERP solution, Port of Newcastle has streamlined processes and gained access to reliable, real-time data on any device, anywhere and at any time.

“Moving to SaaS removes the need for us to spend time and resources managing our own IT infrastructure, which means we can concentrate that time on developing the functionality and the capability of the system instead.

“New enterprise budgeting processes, integrated with TechnologyOne's property module, removed days of work in budget preparation enabling users to create these budgets with not much more than the click of a button,” said Bowron.

The Port are now able to build ETLs (Data Extraction, Transformation and Loading) to automate processes that were previously completed manually. This has improved the overall use of the Enterprise Budgeting module and positively impacted the business during the pandemic.

“We also automated key billing processes, which again saved days of work and enhanced our customer’s experience by streamlining the presentation of invoice data.

“The previous manual utilities billing process required key staff to manually calculate some billing data using spreadsheets and paper bills. Now we just import the data directly and have ETL processes and data warehouses set up that can generate those bills automatically,” Bowron added.

Information Systems Manager
Port of Newcastle

The transition was seamless and everyone in the project team worked really well together.

Port of Newcastle's perspective

Port of Newcastle transitioned to TechnologyOne’s SaaS platform in just two months, removing the internal responsibility of maintaining on-premise infrastructure and the requirement of ongoing engagement with multiple infrastructure support parties.

“We looked at other options but chose TechnologyOne because they had the product capability and took complete ownership.

“Developing our testing approach for the SaaS migration, we focused primarily on integration and critical business processes which enabled us to move quickly, as we weren't testing every component of functionality for the sake of it.

“The transition was seamless , and everyone in the project team worked really well together,” Bowron said.

After completing the SaaS migration and upgrading to Ci Anywhere, Port of Newcastle is now able to focus on building capability rather than supporting its infrastructure.

Implementing the Project Lifecycle Management module has also facilitated a consistent approach to the delivery of projects and significantly enhanced financial controls and reports.

Staff who were originally reluctant to buy into TechnologyOne solutions are now some of the greatest champions of its benefits, and the Port is finding a correlation between the increase in the development of TechnologyOne solutions and overall stakeholder engagement.

Using one system has clear benefits and there is no longer a need to transfer data to multiple systems, the Port can now access information real-time and has consistent user experience.

With the benefits of SaaS Port of Newcastle are now focusing on mobilising field workers to create a truly connected team, including the capture of on-site asset inspection data directly into the TechnologyOne solution.

“The alternative used to be completing paper-based inspections, returning to the office at the end of the day and having to re-key data back into the system.

“In addition to leveraging TechnologyOne’s ‘out-of-the-box' functionality, we’ve also delivered several other enterprise-wide improvements. The automation of manual processes has been streamlined by using forms, ETLs, business processes, data warehouse tables and dashboards. These digital automated solutions replace multiple paper-based processes,” added Bowron.

Spotlight on Project Lifecycle Management

With a multi-million-dollar capital investment program underway, the Port saw a need to upgrade its digital capability to improve and support existing and new business operations.

“We implemented Project Lifecycle Management to facilitate a consistent, systemised, stage-gate process.

“The spending on these projects is high profile so we needed to embed process controls and transparency. This enables Project Managers and other stakeholders to access the information they need to support successful project delivery and manage the strategic capital plan.

“When implementing Project Lifecycle Management, TechnologyOne hosted a series of workshops which were very useful. Part of this was finding ways in which we could leverage the software to improve financial controls. The TechnologyOne team then worked with us through the process of designing and building the solution,” Bowron said.

Port of Newcastle has successfully integrated TechnologyOne’s SaaS ERP solution into their processes and has unlocked multiple benefits, enabling the team to focus on continuous growth and improvement, rather than on-premise system management.

About Port of Newcastle

Port of Newcastle is Australia's deep-water global gateway, the largest on the nation's East Coast. With trade worth about $37 billion to the national economy each year, Port of Newcastle enables Australian businesses to successfully compete in international markets.

Port of Newcastle website

Publish date

11 Jul 2022

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