NZGP and the NZBN - transforming the way we work

New Zealand Government Procurement

One week to plan and less than two weeks to build and deploy – that was the experience of MBIE’s New Zealand Government Procurement (NZGP) when integrating the New Zealand Business Number (NZBN) with its Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool.

NZGP’s Contract Admin Team - Trevor Parry, Cory Mundell, Emma Pullen, Bryan Wieblitz and Alex Collie.
NZGP’s Contract Admin Team, from left, Trevor Parry, Cory Mundell, Emma Pullen, with Bryan Wieblitz and Alex Collie.

 

NZGP supports the public sector with their procurement needs, and sets the standard for good procurement practice across the sector.

While NZGP could see the potential of the NZBN, and its power to automatically connect NZGP’s CRM to validate business data using NZBN’s Application Programming Interface (API), they thought the integration would need to be run as a separate project. However, a change of plans left a window in their product enhancement programme, and the NZBN integration easily slotted in to business as usual.

The three week turnaround was also possible because:

  • NZGP uses Dynamics 365, a CRM common in the public sector.
  • Intergen had already created a white paper for a Dynamics 365 integration and the necessary open source code.
  • Datacom’s Microsoft Dynamics Team had the source code and provided design, development and consulting to develop this product for the NZBN.

At a very practical level, NZGP is now enjoying the same time saving and data accuracy the NZBN enhancement has given many Kiwi businesses. Their contract admin team used to have to manually enter new supplier details when on-boarding new vendors. Now the team just starts typing the business name and the core business information auto-populates (much like NZ Post’s Address and Postcode Finder).

NZGP’s Senior Business Systems Analyst Alex Collie says “the team loves using the NZBN, as it makes the process much easier for them and they can trust the data that’s going into their CRM and other systems.”

There’ll be future enhancements too, as NZGP identifies more ways to make use of the NZBN API. NZGP expects to soon have the NZBN fully integrated as a field on the Government Electronic Tender System (GETS).

“The simplicity of the CRM integration made us more confident about how we will integrate the NZBN into our other systems,” Alex says.

NZGP’s use of the NZBN is a great example of New Zealand government and businesses being digitally enabled and directly transacting with one another. As more government agencies and businesses embrace the NZBN, it will transform the way we work together.

Published 26 November 2019, updated 19 April 2023