Endeavour Energy has kicked off a transformation of its procurement function codenamed Zodiac that aims to drive enhanced visibility into its enterprise-wide spending.
Endeavour Energy’s Nicole Croak speaks at the SAP NOW conference.
Procurement and supply chain manager Nicole Croak told the SAP NOW conference that the utility is also looking to deploy SAP Ariba to aid contract management, sourcing and supplier lifecycle management.
The focus of Zodiac, she said, would cover Endeavour Energy’s operating model, as well as works management and asset management, to aid demand planning and to understand its spending.
Croak said the company had already achieved efficiency gains around demand-planning over the past three years.
“We’re not doing that in-system [in SAP] at the moment – we’re using all of the data out of the system and out of works management to really help us with our major projects,” she said.
“Western Sydney is growing exponentially – the airport’s coming in, and that’s our growth area, as well as some of southern Sydney and the south coast.”
Croak said the current demand planning focused on understanding the need for equipment such as poles and wires.
“We need to know what we’re buying, when we need it, and who we’re buying it from,” she said.
“That’s [an] efficiency that we’ve gained, but now we just have to improve on it.”
Endeavour Energy spent the years between 2018 and 2021 implementing an SAP S/4HANA enterprise resource planning system, covering “asset management, works management, finance, HR, payroll, procurement, warehousing and distribution.”
It has since also adopted SAP Business Technology Platform or BTP, the name given to a suite of “data and analytics, artificial intelligence, application development, automation, and integration” tools the vendor makes.
As far as spend management is concerned, not everything runs directly in SAP. Instead, it interfaces with some specific line-of-business systems that are used, for example to manage financial aspects of electricity infrastructure deployed in new housing developments.
Croak said that artificial intelligence promised to create efficiency gains in procurement and spend management, noting that a recent internal workshop had led to promising use cases.
She noted that Endeavour Energy had already created its “own version of ChatGPT” internally, which had ingested policies, procedures, and work method statements to help corporate and field workers answer questions they had.
Croak said she wanted to explore roles for it around spend management and procurement.
“If I want to spend $10 million, how can I do my risk assessment? How can I know that it’s going to be low risk? Have we got a relationship [with the proposed supplier]? Are they a good performer? Imagine being able to ask that of a system and it being able to give [the proposal] a once-over,” she said.
“That’s, I think, really exciting from a procurement perspective – not to replace people, but to start that conversation.”