You cannot electrify a country on spreadsheets
New Zealand will electrify at the speed of its worst data.
By Gladstone Brohier, Product General Manager, TechnologyOne
Tonight, a new heat pump, a fast charger and an electrified dairy shed will draw power from the same feeder. None of them existed when that feeder was designed. Together they are exactly the future this country has committed to.
Almost none of it arrives with a warning. A large industrial conversion turns up as a connection application and can reach back into transmission. Everything else appears quietly behind connections that already exist, and the network finds out afterwards, from load shape, from voltage, from a transformer running warmer than it should. Industry forecasts point to a 60 to 80 percent increase in electricity demand by 2050. For consumer-driven load, the local network is where capacity runs out first.
The funding envelope for the next stage is already set. In November 2024 the Commerce Commission set expenditure allowances of $10.4 billion for the five years to March 2030 for distributors on the default price-quality path. That is 30 percent higher in real terms than the previous period, and $1.4 billion below the asset management plan forecasts those businesses submitted.
The gap is the part worth studying. Allowances begin with asset management plans, and those plans now face far closer examination, including whether the work programme inside them can realistically be delivered. Where forecasts could be substantiated, they were funded. Where they rested on assumption, they were trimmed.
So the constraint on electrification is no longer only copper, steel and crews. It is evidence.
THE RECORD OF THE PAST
Evidence is now infrastructure
For thirty years, enterprise software in this sector has been built to record what already happened. Finance closed the month. Operations closed the job. Planning assembled a document once a year from whatever could be exported in time. That model was adequate when demand was flat and networks changed slowly. It is failing now, quietly, in the space between what a business knows and what it can prove.
ONE PLATFORM
One asset, one record, across the whole business
Consider a single pole replacement. Someone raises the work. Materials leave the store. A crew records hours against it. A contractor invoice arrives against a commitment. Photographs, test results and a certificate are filed. The cost is capitalised, the old component is retired, depreciation restarts, and the whole event becomes a data point in the next renewal forecast.
In most organisations that one job crosses five systems, and the asset is described differently in each. Finance holds a version. The asset register holds another. Stores knows the part but not the structure it went into. Payroll knows the hours but not the job. Documents live somewhere else entirely. Every interface between them is a place where truth can fork, and every reconciliation is effort spent proving that two systems still agree.
When the asset register, the ledger, the supply chain, the workforce, the document store and the reporting layer are one environment, that work disappears. The asset is defined once and used everywhere. Procurement commitments, labour costs, stock movements and contractor spend attach to the asset as they occur, rather than being matched back to it at month end. Evidence stays with the record it belongs to. Reporting draws on one set of numbers, so the operational view and the regulatory disclosure cannot quietly diverge.
The gain is not tidier administration. It is the ability to answer expensive questions quickly. What has this asset class actually cost over ten years. What was deferred, and what did deferral cost. Which parts of the programme are constrained by crews rather than capital. Those answers exist only where activity, money and asset condition are already the same record.
Two further shifts follow. The asset management plan becomes a living output of daily work rather than a document assembled once a year, because every inspection, defect and job cost is already a statement about an asset’s future. And artificial intelligence moves from reporting to sequencing, testing what a programme can genuinely achieve against crews, materials, outage windows and consents, before that programme becomes a public commitment.
THE QUESTION
Worth asking early
So, five years ahead of the next reset: when the regulator, the board and the customer each ask why an asset decision was made, will the answer come from the system, or from somebody’s recollection of it?
If assembling that answer would take a fortnight and four spreadsheets, the conversation is worth having now.
TechnologyOne brings asset management, financials, supply chain, workforce, content and reporting together in one platform, so the plan, the work and the financial record remain the same version of the truth. Talk to us about what your next asset management plan would look like if the evidence behind it was already assembled.