APUG Conference - Wellington July 16-17, 2008 – This exciting two day event hosted by Meridian Energy, provided an opportunity for the utility managers and invited guests to meet face-to-face and exchange experience and knowledge on supply chain issues affecting their companies, as well as across the broader utility sector in the Asia Pacific region. The first day was open to utilities considering membership so that they could experience APUG activities first hand. This forum was certainly well received by the potential members and enabled them to table issues they saw prevalent to their companies’ strategic focus. Midway through the agenda provided an opportunity for Shayne Gray and his team from Meridian Energy to showcase their impressive new 5 star rated facilities on the water front with the tour that highlighted exactly how they achieved their 5 star status. All attendees were suitably impressed with both the facility and the content covered in the first day’s proceedings. The second day, which is only open to existing APUG members, saw a number of industry expert guest speakers invited to address the APUG members on issues such as Carbon Neutrality and Smart Metering systems. These presentations were extremely well received and provided a great deal of insight for the members to take back to their perspective peers. As well as this it gave the procurement specialists from each company time to tackle any issues and present findings that they had been collectively working on since the last meeting in Brisbane. Prior to meeting on the 16th, an invitation was extended to existing members of APUG to view the Transpower warehousing and logistics operations in Auckland. This provided other APUG members the opportunity to see first-hand the processes and procedures that Transpower have implemented. The feedback from the attendees was that the tour was extremely beneficial. All in all another very successful event and everyone is now looking forward to the next APUG meeting held in Hong Kong in November. Attended members - Meridian Energy: Shayne Gray - Procurement Manager (Host) and Catherine Heyrick - Sourcing Specialist ElectraNet: Sue Pirone - Senior Procurement Specialist Powerlink Queensland: Stewart Bell - Manager Procurement and Fred Stratford -Manager Project Materials SP AusNet: Owen Casey - Procurement Services Manager and Sue Bensted - Manager Tender Support Services Tarong Energy: Vince Aisthorpe - Supply Manager TransGrid: Kevin Dodds - Manager Supply Management Transpower: Roger Brady - Project Support Manager and Mike McAsey - Inventory & Procurement Manager Western Power: Andre Winarto - Manager Group Commercial and Brett Webster - Procurement Projects Manager CLP Power: SM Ho - Chief Procurement Officer and John Burchett - Manager Strategic Procurement *CESC: Santanu Bhattacharya - Executive Director *Mighty River Power - Craig Tomlinson - Project Manager *New members Visitors and Guest Speakers - Contact Energy: Jonathan Holmes Ministry of Economic Development (NZ): Babs Klyn Ministry of Economic Development (NZ): Phil Weir Landcare Research: Ann Smith & Mike Tournier ARC Innovations