Oxygen's business bubbling

By ADAM GIFFORD

SAP specialist Oxygen Business Solutions is seeking 59 staff to cope with demand from parent Carter Holt Harvey and other outsourcing customers.

Spokesman Stuart Dickinson said Oxygen took on 35 people last September, ending the year with more than 300 staff. But growth is again outstripping resources.

Many customers were becoming more comfortable with outsourcing and were asking Oxygen to take on more of their IT functions.

About 60 per cent of Oxygen's revenue still comes from its parent.

Carter Holt chief of information technology Pat O'Connell said the forest products giant planned to upgrade to the latest version, SAP 4.7 Enterprise software, this year.

"In conjunction with that we will be re-engineering business processes to standardise them and support improved supply chain capability and manufacturing excellence.

"It is not just SAP. There is other work we are doing around technologies like barcoding and possibly RFID [radio frequency identification].

"We have just implemented APO (SAP's Advanced Planning and Optimisation module) for the forests business.

"We put in CRM (customer management) for part of the tissues three months ago, and we are looking to extend that to other parts of the business."

He said when doing major IT projects, Carter Holt appoints a project manager and then gets Oxygen to do the work. If Carter Holt's tissue business is sold or spun off as planned, considerable IT work will be required to extract it from the main business.

O'Connell said a tissue business sale would free up some capacity on the main Sun E10,000 server.

The jobs Oxygen has on offer range from basic reception and support positions to specialists in the more arcane SAP modules and technologies.

Steve Cotton, the Auckland manager for recruitment firm Absolute IT, said the IT market was in a good state, so there were not as many SAP-trained people looking for jobs.

Oxygen will be competing with Fonterra, which has been soaking up much of the available SAP resource with its $120 million SAP roll out.