A number of state owned agencies have turned their back on SAP's 10 year multi-million dollar whole of government deal in Queensland.

The move away from the agreement, SAP's 10 year, multi-million dollar IT stranglehold follow's the success of a massive IT overhaul of the state's energy sector.

The project, codenamed JET (Joint Enterprise Transformation), cast out SAP and Oracle from state owned energy suppliers Ergon Energy and Energex, and IT governing arm Sparq Solutions, to install a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution from a local vendor.

The success of the $35 million project has attracted interest from at least two other state government departments including the Queensland Department of Justice, according Ergon Energy ERP program director Daryl Scott.

Some 3000 Ergon Energy staff and an additional 1000 contractors are using the new Mincom system which covers HR and payroll, finance, logistics, asset management, and safety and environment.

The project, managed by SPARQ Solutions, integrates existing third party systems from Ergon Energy, Energex and external customers and providers, some of which required integration with SAP platforms.

Ergon Energy has $6.7 billion in assets and covers 97 percent of the state across regional areas with 150,000 kilometres of power lines and one million power poles.

The company was riddled with integration problems because it was formed by the amalgamation of six regional energy suppliers in 1999, which introduced a herd of siloed applications.

According to Scott, the company's biggest problems were in recruitment, staff payroll and asset management.

"We were faced with an aging workforce, a workload which had more than doubled over the last couple of years, and we had difficulties [inherent] in servicing regional areas," Scott said.

"Our old asset management system meant there were about 900,000 power poles which could not be located because they were not linked to addresses.

"Before we fixed our payroll system, staff pay could vary [on a] weekly [basis] because of problems with the PeopleSoft and Oracle Financial applications."

Ergon Energy, Energex and Sparq Solutions standardized on the Mincom Intelligent Workforce Deployment and the Mincom Ellipse Enterprise Asset Management application suite.

A ROI is expected within two to three years, with Ergon Energy receiving annual benefits of $40 million.

The 72 hypothesizes which framed the project's business case have been inked into a five year KPI list.

Future and current work is scheduled through the Ellipse platform which is also used to log staff training and certification.

Ergon's entire paper-based system previously in place has been scrapped with the exception of some ordering for construction work jobs which will go onto the system shortly.