TVNZ expects worthwhile savings from Oxygen

6 August, 2002

TVNZ expects worthwhile savings from Oxygen outsourcing contract

Television New Zealand has signed a two-year outsourcing contract with Oxygen Business Solutions covering the hosting and management of TVNZ’s SAP financials and resource planning and scheduling system, as well as a new i2 e-procurement system.

Neil Andrew, Head of Operations and Technology for TVNZ, says the outsourcing contract will result in worthwhile savings and improvement in TVNZ’s business continuity capability. Also important, he says is having access to a large pool of expertise to provide specialist service and support.

“We were looking at significant hardware upgrade costs as part of implementing our new i2 e-procurement system and refreshing the hardware running our SAP systems,” Andrew says.

“Outsourcing, in this case, is a neat solution which helps us to avoid the capital costs which would otherwise have been required to support both the SAP system and the e-procurement system.

“Also Outsourcing frees up our own people to focus on strategic projects such as the new server-based newsroom and station automation systems designed to give us a digital television capability, with video tapes replaced by digital storage and retrieval systems.

“The bottom line business case outcome is that we’ll reduce our total cost of ownership, complete implementation of our new e-procurement system, and at the same time improve overall quality and continuity of service. “

Both the SAP and the new i2 e-procurement systems are essential to TVNZ’s smooth operations, he says. SAP handles financial management and reporting for the whole organisation. SAP’s production and resource planning software is used to plan, schedule and manage day-to-day operations, including such details as studio availability, and allocation and scheduling of resources such as camera crews, editing suites and off site broadcast units.

The new e-procurement system, which is due to go live late September, will contain online catalogues of virtually every product and service TVNZ requires to enable staff to carry out ordering and purchasing online. Oxygen will complete the integration work required to take the system live.

Oxygen’s chief executive, Mike Smith, says the TVNZ contract is an important endorsement of Oxygen’s business strategy.

“Our competencies and experience are centred around SAP outsourcing and services, and in that way get maximum leverage from our position as the largest such specialist SAP outsourcing company in the New Zealand market,” he says.

“But we’re also not limiting ourselves to SAP when it comes to giving our customers the best possible business case outcomes. And that’s also a very important part of our strategy.

“The TVNZ contract is a good illustration of this. By having the capability to handle the e-procurement integration and implementation – as well as the SAP requirement – we’ve been able to construct the outsourcing contract that represented the best value for TVNZ.”

Ends.
About Oxygen
Oxygen Business Solutions is one of the largest specialist SAP outsourcing, hosting and consulting companies in the South Pacific Region. The company has 250 staff working from offices and data centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland. More than 3000 SAP users are supported at 180 client sites in four countries.
About TVNZ
Television New Zealand is the country’s largest broadcaster, employing 1500 people in the operation of TV broadcast channels TV ONE and TV2, the internet portal, nzoom.com, and transmission and broadcast companies. New Zealand’s 69th largest IT user (MIS Magazine, June 2002), TVNZ is a leader in the implementation of Digital Television technologies.

Released by Oxygen Business Solution.

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