Wesfarmers and Coronado enjoy a smooth demerger and IT transition

In this acquisition, Coronado purchased a fully operating business (the Curragh mine) from Wesfarmers Resources Limited (WRL). Included in the acquisition were ‘functional IT systems at the moment of handover’ – without any disruption to the running of the mine. The timeline from sale to transition was just 3 months.

Meanwhile, the small team that was staying with WRL (i.e. not part of the Coronado purchase) also needed new systems set up and ready to go. A time critical, double-pronged challenge for Codify. “The project team led by the Resources business needed to ensure an effective separation,” said Mike Dixon, CFO WRL. “We needed a setup that could work for the team staying with WRL and to ensure we handed over fully operational IT systems to the buyer (Coronado).”

“The critical thing was timing from a contractual point of view. We had a specific time period within which the transition had to happen. There could be no compromise on the outcomes due to the many obligations at play.”

~ Conrad Gagner, Technology Manager, Coronado Curragh (who was with WRL before the transition)

The WRL transition team selected Codify as the IT partner, based on both their pre-existing relationship and the experience Codify had with similar projects.

“We wanted to ensure that we employed someone that could deliver the outcomes we needed in the tight time frames,” said Mike Dixon, CFO of WRL (part of the transition team that stayed with WRL). “With these sorts of projects, you don’t have the opportunity to do it again. We had confidence that Codify could deliver the results.”

Codify completed two phases of works to support the sale of Curragh to Coronado. In Phase 1 they delivered a new cloud environment for WRL and helped to identify and migrate data to new Office 365 and Azure platforms. Phase 2 was the migration to a new Office 365 tenant for Curragh post sale. A critical success factor of both phases was that there be no outages.

“The implementation happened over a weekend,” said Rochelle Jones, Senior, Service Delivery at Curragh (part of the WRL transition team). “It was all hands on deck, trouble shooting and identifying any issues. This was done by our internal team and Codify and was a very smooth process.”

“One of the big risks was the potential loss of any Curragh data. Our own core team was busy with day-to-day operations. This all had to happen in addition to business-as-usual, so we needed a partner that could deliver this while minimising the reliance and impact on our day-to-day people.”

~ Conrad Gagner, Technology Manager, Coronado Curragh

The changeover was smooth from all perspectives. Mike Dixon was initially concerned that the new resources office for WRL wouldn’t be established
quickly enough, but this was happily not the case. The implementation resulted in a number of benefits including: 

• Smooth changeover: “It was all very uneventful which is what we wanted,” said Conrad Gagner. “There were no negative consequences which to us means success, as the risks were significant.”
• Process automation saves time: A key additional benefit was the automation of the set-up process, such as helping staff get up and running with new email addresses. “We didn’t have to do it manually which saved us so much time,” said Conrad Gagner. “Codify set up scripts which ran in the background to minimise the work required.”
• Cloud environment brings simplified IT structure: In helping to set up the new IT environment for the WRL team, all parties involved got an insight into the benefits of a cloud-based IT environment, including advanced features around reporting and security. “For our smaller team now, from the day-to-day perspective, the experience is better,” said Mike Dixon of WRL. “We now operate in a cloud environment and access all our applications that way. It is much simpler. We have no need for on-premises infrastructure.”
• Best practice model for future projects: The process has ‘demystified the cloud’ for the team at Curragh. “We learned a lot from the process,” observed Rochelle Jones. “We now have a vision of where we want to get to and have seen what it looks like. We aim to build on what Codify has created for us here at Curragh.”

“We wanted – and got – a fit for purpose solution. We wanted something that would work well and delivered a great experience to the team in a way that made sense for an organisation of our size. Codify delivered on this.”

~ Mike Dixon, CFO, Wesfarmers Resources Limited

“Select a good partner vendor if you have not done this before. Make sure you plan for the worst-case scenario and communicate to the business throughout the process, so you can manage problems as they come up. And prioritise your users and workflows to ensure that the critical elements are looked after first,” said Conrad Gagner.

While Mike Dixon added: “Plan early. Give yourselves as much time as possible to plan to tackle the problem and then resource accordingly.”