Staff consulted on GIS partnership last year

Unions and staff were consulted on the option to outsource parts of Ausgrid's Geographical Information Systems function in early 2016, well before new ownership came into place in December.

It has been carefully planned and is part of a broader ongoing restructure within Ausgrid to make sure our workforce size and mix of skills is efficient, our network is safe and meets customers’ needs. These changes are within the NSW Parliament’s legislation.

Staff impacted by changes in the business are supported through programs to develop skills to cope with ongoing change, opportunities to transition to new roles both within and outside of Ausgrid, as well as generous voluntary redundancy packages.

We expect this change to the GIS team will impact about 35 full time roles, however a number of impacted employees have already left the business through our voluntary redundancy program or found other jobs within Ausgrid.

We know external suppliers can provide additional services safely, reliably and at a lower cost and this partnership represents a significant saving for Ausgrid.

Under this arrangement, TATA Consulting Services will help our staff to capture infrastructure data like locations of new underground cables or new substations in our online geographical information systems. They are used by a number of other network operators in Australia to provide the same types of services.

Ausgrid will still employ staff to get the data from the field, record it and complete spot checks of all information entered.

Every dollar Ausgrid spends comes from our customers.

Our customers and the Australian Energy Regulator expect our business to be run as efficiently as possible. We know customers are concerned about electricity prices.We are continuing to improve our efficiency after reducing our costs by more than $4.6 billion since 2012. These savings have meant the network component of household electricity bills has remained steady since 2012. This year, it fell for about 98% of our residential customers.

Our work to reduce costs needs to progress in a responsible way to keep prices as low as possible while we continue to provide a safe, secure, reliable and sustainable power supply for our customers.