SAP
Embracing the Digital Transformation

The market is changing at a very fast pace and the utility industry is in the fragile phase of adapting to this change and maintaining the balance between the efficient operations of the existing infrastructure. With this realization, Peter Maier, general manager, Energy and Natural Resources Industries, SAP, affirms SAP’s commitment towards an empowered industry that effectively sustains and grows customer relationships. “We aim to pave through this by enabling digital transformation to develop new business models and capture the emerging opportunities,” adds Maier.

Gartner positions SAP at the highest position among all vendors owing to its ability to execute. A vendor’s ability to execute is derived from factors like product functionality, architecture, and performance. These abilities are further enhanced by the ability to meet customer expectations in the delivery of a product and operations.

Unique Offerings

SAP delivers sustainable energy by making use of the latest innovations in utilities that efficiently handle the ebbs and flows in energy generation, transmission, distribution, and retail. With an aim to meet the changing regulatory, environmental, operational, customer, and technological needs the company digitizes energy management processes.

Energy consumption is a major concern within various operations of the utility industry and by deploying the right optimization techniques, the costs can be reduced with a hike in the efficiency. With SAP’s energy supply chain optimizations, the client can extract peak performance and make more informed decisions that are enforced by full transparency and controlled fuel processes and costs. 28 percent of the organizations use standardized templates to drive project management process maturity by leveraging SAP’s capital portfolio and project management, fuel management, and scheduling and load management.

SAP also delivers solutions for operational efficiency of plants and grids with the help of its collaborative processes. The performance of utility assets is enhanced with a minimized asset downtime and asset lifecycle costs by deploying a single, real-time view of the operations and business data of a client’s system. By enabling digital collaborations and combining it with powerful analytics, a client is able to efficiently manage their enterprise assets. With this solution, a 79 percent reduction was recorded in accident frequency with monitoring of strong safety measures for people as well as assets.

With SAP’s metering software, utility companies are able to manage their meter lifecycle management with streamlined and transparent processes which assure timely, reliable, and secure collection, validation, estimation, editing, and analysis of metered data. By leveraging this software, there was a 25 percent decrease in service costs due to regularly conducted cost and financial analyses. All processes fall flat if the revenue generation is not catered to efficiently. Apart from catering to the above processes of a utility sector industry, SAP also helps their clients become a full-service utilities provider with integrated billing, invoicing, and revenue management. This tool creates a streamlined bill-to-cash process for energy consumption. With SAP’s agile, extensible, and modular platform, clients are able to innovate and deploy new revenue models.

Lastly, bringing about efficacy in the utility industry is by taking into consideration the customer engagement as much as the other factors. SAP encourages a new level of customer engagement which is brought about by real-time engagements across multiple touch-points. This provides a 360-degree view of the customers which further help in delivering personalized offerings at every step of the decision-making process. With attention to detail in contextual marketing, customer service excellence, and smarter selling, clients have noticed an increase in the cross-sell rates bringing about a 24 percent increase in the overall revenue.

Now that utilities are digital businesses, the dependency on information about energy will increase making it the foundation of the digital utility business model. This new model will run local energy markets and operate networks, which is enabled by SAP through its SAP HANA platform. SAP provides its in-memory data platform to accelerate business processes, deliver business intelligence, and simplify the client’s IT environment. SAP HANA is deployable on-premise as well as cloud and removes the burden of maintaining separate legacy systems and siloed data which enhances the live running of a business and decision making in this digital economy.

SAP HANA transforms the database management by processing transactions and analytics on a single data copy which delivers real-time insights from the live data. This simplifies operations with modern tools that are in place to secure a rock-solid foundation for the clients.

A Humanitarian Approach to Future

With world leaders adopting sustainable development goals specified by the United Nations, With the ability to improve billions of lives around the world, there are 17 global goals that are aimed at sustainable prosperity for all in emerging and developed regions. These goals include the basic responsibilities of encouraging no poverty, zero hunger, quality education, gender equality, and proper health. They also add sanitation, affordability, economic growth, sustainable cities, and partnerships for goals. Maier adds, “We are committed to these goals, and we invite our clients – as a business person, an educator, or an everyday citizen.”

The company is steadily moving towards this goal with the help of its solutions that eradicate supply chains. Experts use SAP’s data visualization and analytics to help in promoting environmental awareness. With gender equality principles inculcated within the organizations and environment-friendly perspectives amalgamated with SAP’s energy efficient solutions, Maier aims to facilitate an improved quality of life everywhere and every sector they cater to.