What You Need to Know

• HEB Construction went live with a new ERP system four weeks early and under budget, but the bigger win is a cultural shift to data-led decision-making.
• The rollout was part of French parent Vinci’s global SAP program: HEB was the first English-speaking, non-European market to implement it.
• Rather than conform to a rigid global system, HEB built a federated model, retaining local systems and integrating with VINCI’s data lake via Boomi.
• The integration team trained up in-house coders, built a Boomi prototype, and delivered 50+ interfaces in three months.
• Data is now delivered daily, not weekly. Payroll hits mid-afternoon instead of late evening, and real-time time-capture has transformed workflows.
• Operational agility is the priority: Integrated pothole detection is already live; predictive maintenance is next, powered by 20 million rows of data.
• HEB didn’t force digital change on subcontractors, focusing instead on digitising “low-hanging fruit” while maintaining ease of engagement.
• By owning its integration layer, HEB can move fast locally while staying compliant globally, and is now positioned to innovate and potentially monetise services.
• The shift is as much cultural as technical: “from gut-feel to insight-led” is the new operating model.

HEB Construction claims to have rewired the nervous system of the business. From payroll to pothole repairs, data is now the driving force, not an afterthought. And that shift is reshaping how this tier-one New Zealand civil construction firm operates  – operationally, culturally, and commercially.

French construction giant, Vinci acquired New Zealand's HEB Construction 10 years ago from the Pullman family for €43 million, but it took almost a decade for a more complete integration to occur. Eventually, during 2023 that happened with the Kiwi firm moving to SAP.

HEB was on the roster for a full ERP overhaul as part of Vinci’s global rollout. "What they normally do go to a territory or a country, they put that system in place. It's a very slick operation. They do this as a repeatable one-year program,” said HEB’s solutions and architecture Manager, Mircel van de Walt. “They come in, they do pre-work, they run transformation programs."

What made this project different is that New Zealand was the first English-speaking country, and the first non-European one, to go through the program. That approach created the conditions for localisation headaches  – payroll quirks, health and safety regulations, and data privacy requirements far removed from European norms. 

Ultimately, the team settled on rolling out Boomi as an integration layer, alongside the mandated shift to SAP to create a single, coherent data environment that allows managers to see what’s happening across the business in near real-time

Building a parallel nervous system

Facing the risk of losing key capabilities to a one-size-fits-all global system, HEB pushed for a federated model: Integrate, don’t assimilate. “We realised early we had our own constellation of systems, and we’d have to integrate to the core," said van der Walt.

The solution HEB settled on was a hub-and-spoke integration layer to preserve local agility while still feeding Vinci’s data lake. The team settled on Boomi's integration platform, but even this represented a step away from Vinci's established process, which involved a different supplier. Van der Walt declined to name the incumbent integration platform provider for its European owner, however Mulesoft is utilised by Vinci Energies, according to a Capgemini press release.

“I’ve come across Boomi many times before. Every time I evaluated integration platforms, Boomi came out on top. When this came up, I had the answer. We chose Boomi because it would give us the local power to do whatever we need to do in our ecosystem,” van der Walt continued.

The HEB team built a prototype, trained up two coders as integrators, and had Boomi humming within six weeks. “The challenge for us in that process was very much that we were proving a new pattern. This has not been done before, not with this organisation, or either of the organisations. They've got a very large integration team, very mature using real grade one tools like SAP and Oracle and here's little New Zealand that comes along and says, well, we're not going to take some of these things," van de Walt said. 

"We've got our own stuff, but we'll play this integration game with you. So we had to show up in that conversation with a level of trust and  with a proof of capability.”

It worked, but not with the kind of operational pain common across international transformations. Integration with Paris meant 3am Zooms, philosophical clashes, and the bureaucratic overhead of double regulation, with HEB needing to comply with both New Zealand and EU data laws.

“Lucky us,” van der Walt joked. "It's not a bad problem to have, because it’s super secure."

But sometimes there's the occasional conflict or misunderstanding around those things. He acknowledged where things that matter to HEB might not matter as much to Vinci. "So we have to explain. Meeting in the middle was probably the hardest thing to establish."

Per van der Walt: "The good news is, we did a lot of work upfront. We knew this was going to be a problem. So when we started the initial conversations, we all realised – including our French partners – that we would need to do extra work to make that connection."

This was not something Vinci had to deal previously, since countries in Europe share similar languages and time zones, he said.

"For us, it couldn’t have been more different; we’re literally on the other side of the world. All those challenges together made it tough. It was a real slog. But building that mutual understanding, trust, and a strong working relationship was key. Without that, it could have been a major issue. Because we did it together, we actually achieved something great," said van der Walt.

The model held. The teams co-designed a data interface and set of standards that met both local and global needs. “Ground rules were established quite ear, and it was clear to the HEB team was less about the systems they used and more the need to implement the process and adopt a data standard, so we could feed that data back to them," said van der Walt. "At the end of the day, it was all about standardising the data being returned."

Once the agreement was in place and the reference architecture established, van de Walt said "that essentially became our ground rule moving forward. From there, the technical work was fairly straightforward because we were all working to that shared reference point. We had established the rules of the game."

The integration team delivered 50+ interfaces in three months. They hit go-live on January 1, 2024, four weeks early and under budget.

Data, delivered daily

HEB’s ambition wasn’t just compliance. It was data fluency. “We’re far more data-driven than ever,” said van der Walt. “We’ve decoupled time capture from payroll... We’re showing managers data daily – not at the end of the week, when it’s too late.”

That visibility is my measure of success is when the pay run actually hits the bank each week. We run on a weekly cycle. We used to be late evening, sometimes early evening. Now, we’re moving toward getting it done by two o’clock in the afternoon. The process is cleaner, there's more visibility on the data, and users can actually see it.”

Data is also fuelling proactive operations. A pothole detection system, once siloed, is now integrated through Boomi into Snowflake and a geographical information system. “We can now validate potholes from the office, generate work orders automatically, and start reinforcing our models.”

And with its data ducks lined up in a row HEB is now looking into predictive maintenance.

"We have a system that detects potholes, but originally, the data couldn’t be extracted from it. Now, we’ve got Boomi pulling that data out and loading it into Snowflake – 20 million rows," said van der Walt. "The next step is using those 20 million records with machine learning to predict where potholes will form."

Don’t fix what isn’t broken

Crucially, HEB didn’t try to boil the ocean. Subcontractors – often paper-based – weren’t forced to switch tools. “The trick is not to change them too much, too quickly,” according to van der Walt. “We’re digitising the low-hanging fruit first.”

The goal is to meet suppliers where they are. “If I just make it harder to work for us, that’s a bad outcome. They supply time and labour, but they’re also part of our people.”

HEB’s long game is agility and Boomi offers the ability to  move quickly in the New Zealand operation. "We still meet the data requirements for Paris, but we can innovate locally," said van de Walt.

That matters. Whether it's testing facial recognition on site or building APIs for joint ventures, HEB now has the plumbing to do it fast. “We’re building an API ring around the business. One day we might monetise services, but for now, it’s about enabling operations.”

As to the long term business impact, van der Walt told Mi3 Australia that process changes – despite the time and deliberate effort that goes into them – are never quite enough. The people side of change is still the most challenging part of any transformation.

"The technical is the easy part to solve. The business is a better running a business, we have more information. The challenge of adapting to some of the processes will remain for a long time, because we are all humans," he said. "We love a habit. Habits are hard to break. All the core ones have really moved on. That's great. It's these fringe ones that lurk in the background that will challenge us for some time."