Macquarie Bank
Scenario
Business transition programme for newly acquired gas distribution network.
Situation
In August 2004 the Macquarie European Infrastructure Fund-led consortium won the right to acquire the Wales and the West gas distribution network from National Grid Transco (NGT) for £1.2bn. The network runs to 34,000km and its catchment area has a population of 7.4m. The acquisition included approximately 1,200 staff and 500 contractors.
The consortium needed to create a new company to transition the business from NGT and operate the network in future.
The first phase of the Blackwater programme entailed building a Back Office with business processes, policies and ERP systems support, and recruiting a new executive team, managers and other staff as well as establishing both the new brand and a regulatory framework for the company. The key business functions to be realised in this first phase were finance, procurement and logistics, payroll and HR administration.
The second phase of the programme will establish Front Office operations for the management of assets, maintenance and emergency work and integrate these with the Back Office functions delivered by the first phase. This work will be completed by December 2006.
Charteris Role
After assisting the consortium during due diligence, Charteris was retained to manage the following areas of the programme:
- Back Office and Front Office creation including system and vendor selection, business process architecture and definition, system build, testing, training and implementation; the key vendors selected were SAP, Serco (ITNET) and Wipro.
- Data migration and data management.
- Acceptance, cutover and dress rehearsal.
- IT and overall programme offices.
Charteris has also provided programme management and support.
Solution
The sale was completed in June 2005 and the Back Office went live successfully with a SAP system (R/3 modules FI, CO, SD, MM and EBP) and a managed payroll service using data migrated from NGT. The IT solutions and vendors were only selected in October 2004. Many industry experts believed that it was not possible to implement SAP for finance, procurement and logistics in only 7 months. The breadth of management and business experience delivered by the Charteris team, alongside Macquarie’s world class infrastructure asset management specialists, were vital to this achievement.
Wayne Leamon, Macquarie’s Integration Director, commented: “Working with Macquarie European Infrastructure Fund, Charteris has played a pivotal role in successfully managing the delivery of new SAP Back Office systems and processes, including extensive data migration, in time for sale completion of NGT Transco’s Wales and West gas distribution network. Go live was achieved in the face of extremely demanding timescales and the systems and processes will be of lasting benefit to Wales and West Utilities Ltd“.