Carter Holt Harvey(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 8

Senior IS executive: Jonathan Iles, CIO
Reports to: Pat O’Connell, CIO, Rank Group
Size of IS shop: 140

PCs: 4000
Mobile PCs: 1500
Terminals: 1000
Hand-held devices: 200
Total screens: 6700

Industry: Manufacturing
PC environment: Dell, IBM, Windows XP
Server environment: Sun; Dell; IBM; AIX; Windows 2003, 2008
DBMS: SQL, Oracle, MySQL, Informix
Address: 173 Captain Springs Road, Onehunga, Auckland
Website: www.chh.com
Key IS projects this year: Major SAP refresh building supplies group; core infrastructure maintenance programme; business intelligence development.


Carter Holt Harvey is owned by Rank Group NZ. CIO Jonathan Iles says key objectives in the current economic environment are to retain and grow market share and contain costs in a difficult market. ICT operational budgets are down slightly on 2008, though the expectation is to improve services with less. Project budgets have increased over 2008, though Iles says the main difference is in the type of projects being accepted.

“We are not seeing any more merger and acquisition related ICT projects at the moment. Instead ICT projects are geared around working on what we already have — to improve customer service along with system maintenance and IT service delivery improvements,” he says.

This year, Carter Holt Harvey will invest in SAP implementations and upgrades to ECC6 for part of the business, designed to improve customer service systems and processes, along with IT support improvements for Australian divisions and offices. Existing SAP application development will continue to be outsourced to the UXC-owned IT solutions provider Oxygen for Business, although bidding for future SAP work is now competitive.

CRM and supply chain improvements will be getting attention this year, says Iles, and the focus is in “getting the basics right — to reduce hassle to customers in every way that we can”.

Software and server virtualisation and network optimisation are also being implemented for the improvements in service delivery, whilst containing costs at the same time.

A focus on disruptive technologies and innovation and the re-writing of vendor contracts to allow multi-sourcing, are strategies being used to drive down commodity IT costs.