Oxygen signs TVNZ outsourcing contract

By ADAM GIFFORD

Carter Holt Harvey subsidiary Oxygen Business Solutions has won its first major customer outside the International Paper group, signing a two-year outsourcing contract with Television New Zealand.

Oxygen will host and manage TVNZ's SAP financials, resource planning and scheduling system. It will also host and complete the launch of a new i2 electronic procurement system.

TVNZ operations and technology head Neil Andrew said the company was looking for savings and reduced risk to business continuity.

"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 said.

TVNZ had run SAP on leased IBM RS6000 servers housed in its own premises, with application support from Deloitte Consulting.

Andrew said the lease term was about to expire. "Outsourcing also 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."

TVNZ uses SAP's production and resource planning software to plan, schedule and manage day-to-day operations.

TVNZ has worked with IBM to install i2 e-procurement, but an initial go live target of April has slipped to September. When complete, the system should contain online catalogues of almost every product and service TVNZ requires.

Oxygen chief executive Mike Smith said the outsourcing contract was worth "seven figures" and could be extended.

Oxygen sells itself as a specialist in SAP outsourcing and services, but its 250 staff can handle a wider range of technologies.

Its formation was part of a drive by Carter Holt Harvey to extract value from assets and intellectual property within the giant forests products group.

Oxygen