Meridian picks HP for latest systems upgrade

Tuesday 5th October 2010

State-owned electricity generator and retailer Meridian Energy is taking a second shot at upgrading its customer and other enterprise systems, after writing off $18.3 million on two such failed projects in the last financial year.

This time, Meridian has chosen Hewlett Packard as its partner, after halting a $20 million project last November that was to use Oracle software to replace its billing and Customer Relationship Management systems.

Meridian announced in April that it was returning to its current billing provider, Gentrack, for upgrades.

A statement from HP today says it has signed a “multi-million dollar application services agreement” with Meridian, to “develop and manage Meridian’s core applications that support, retail, wholesale and business systems”.

The HP solution appears to be an “enterprise system”, similar to a project that Contact Energy is implementing to upgrade and integrate business information systems across its whole portfolio of electricity generation, wholesale market trading, and customer information systems.

“The new environment will help Meridian improve front-line customer services, including service desk support, as well as drive cost savings across its business systems.”

In its annual report, tabled in Parliament last week, Meridian says maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction will be a challenge while it’s rebalancing its customer loads between the North and South Islands in response to electricity reforms that should improve retail competition.

The end this month to a year-long price freeze will make it no easier, because it will mean “higher prices for our customers”.

Meridian has yet to announce a general tariff increase.

The customer rebalancing exercise will be “crucial to the success of our retail business in the coming years and will be a continuing focus for the foreseeable future,” Meridian says.

“Lack of liquidity in the wholesale market and transmission constraints add to the urgency of this task and the need to ‘get the balance right’,” as the government’s electricity reforms push SOE generator-retailers to spread their customer bases more evenly across the country.

While they came close to target, customer satisfaction was not as strong as intended in the year to June, reflecting an industry-wide deterioration in public sentiment.

Businesswire.co.nz

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