The Need for an Intelligent ERP System in the Utilities Industry

A radical change in the utility industry is occurring at a rapid pace. Changes in technologies, business models, standards, and the makeup of utility companies themselves require constant adaptation. Utilities must be able to respond to rapidly changing conditions, yet still comply with all standards. How does a digital core with a true single source of truth help?

Agility
A digital core is an IT architecture that offers stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes, yet also provides the flexibility to adapt quickly to new opportunities, challenges, and regulations. This solid foundation gives you a single source of truth, which in turn enables flexibility for innovation to accommodate things like new business models, new regulations, and business events, such as mergers or acquisitions.

Managing Big Data
Every utility company needs the computing capability to carry out complex algorithms with large data sets to support timely, real-time analysis. Everyone in the company must have access to data they need, whenever and wherever they need it. This is also true for the rest of the utility ecosystem so that suppliers can stay up to date with a company’s orders; customer service
agents can see customer history for billing, service, and consumption information; and maintenance teams can accurately monitor asset performance.

Innovation
Utilities must transform to grow profits and reduce costs by simplifying their operations. The value of the digital economy is based on how the consumer or “prosumer” (producer and consumer of energy) is served. Value creation often comes from edge solutions that are based on and coordinated by digital core solutions. It is the framework for innovation and business process optimization, connecting the workforce, suppliers, customers, assets, and the supply network.

Analysis
It is crucial to get the right information at the right time on the right device. Plant processes are supported or controlled by predictive and self-learning systems that interact with machines and business processes. Predictive analytics and machine learning (ML) accelerate the delegation of business processes and decisions from people to machines. People who need the knowledge have digital access on demand and in real time, regardless of whether they are part of the core or the extended workforce.

Stand apart in a world that never stands still – with SAP S/4HANA powered by Approyo
Your business isn't generic. Your ERP shouldn't be either. SAP S/4HANA powered by Approyo provides utility companies with industry best practices built from decades of experience – and allows them to bring cutting-edge innovation in the cloud to their core processes, be it customer engagement, predictive maintenance, or usage-based billing. So they can attain the operational excellence they need to deliver the ultimate customer experience.

• Industry Insight - A world of rapid technological change – distributed energy resources, microgeneration, batteries, microgrids, and electrical mobility – and social media adoption is forcing providers of electricity to rethink how they work, the services they provide, and their business models. The most successful companies will flexibly manage demand, enabled by insights garnered from smart technologies.
• Customer Success - SAP S/4HANA provides re-engineered and simplified business activities transforming the execution from multistep, batch-driven processes with latency in terms of key performance indicators to real-time processes with actionable insights to accelerate invoice processing, increase cash flow, and protect revenue assurance.
• Productivity Improvement - SAP S/4HANA empowers call-center agents and field workers with an end-user centric, consumer-grade experience because, for utilities, it's the call-center agents that add value to customer engagements and field workers who deliver operational excellence.
• Cost Savings - SAP S/4HANA powered by Approyo allows for real-time monitoring of asset health and can predict failure before it happens. Maintenance orders are triggered just in time, avoiding unnecessary inspections and decreasing the cost and risk of unplanned failure.

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Industry Capabilities with SAP S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA is an intelligent, integrated ERP system that runs on the in-memory database, SAP HANA. It can help you:

• Address industry-specific requirements with proven best practices for 26 verticals and enable new business models as your marketplace evolves
• Revolutionize business processes with intelligent automation — supported by artificial intelligence and robotic process automation
• Make better decisions faster with embedded analytics, a conversational interface, and digital assistants
• Meet your IT landscape goals with hybrid, cloud, and on-premise scenarios that share a consistent data model, code line, and user experience

Here are just a few capabilities that SAP S/4HANA provides across multiple industries:

• Simplify asset operations and maintenance - Maximize asset value, control risks, and help ensure safety with a holistic view of asset status to plan maintenance activities with the right person, tools, resources, and integrated documentation. 
• Manage environmental, health, and safety risks - Execute tasks in critical environments with a complete view of compliance and safety measures, so you can identify risks and regulations, define priorities, implement controls, and track incidents.
• Maintain service agreements - Provide a single contract for all outcome-based services and reduce administrative burden by consolidating and maintaining task lists, catalogues, maintenance plans, and warranty information.
• Provide customer-oriented services - Engage with customers across a multitude of channels to offer packaged service offerings; manage complaints, claims, returns, and refunds; and schedule and dispatch field services to fulfill service orders.
• Streamline service parts management - Optimize parts logistics and inventory processes with real-time visibility across all supply locations to source service parts globally and ensure their availability.
• Streamline Core HR and payroll processes - Integrate employee master data, organizational data, and cost-center-related information from the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution to speed reorganizations and other end-to-end processes.

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Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today...

Intelligent Finance with SAP S/4HANA 1809

SAP S/4HANA is the digital core – the nerve center – of your entire business. It consolidates internal and external elements into a single, living structure that goes beyond traditional ERP. In other words, it connects all of your processes, provides you with live information and insights, and seamlessly integrates your enterprise with the digital world at large.

Finance on SAP S/4HANA is a set of comprehensive solutions designed to help the office of the CFO meet the demands of a digital economy. It is part of the market-leading, best-in-class finance solution portfolio from SAP, built on a modern digital core that harnesses the benefits of the SAP HANA platform.

Increasing efficiency in operational finance with next generation automation scenarios
With the SAP S/4HANA 1809 release SAP has added multiple new highly automated scenarios lifting the level of automation to the next level:

• The goods and invoice receipt reconciliation process, not only all relevant information is brought together in just one screen, but by integrating our digital assistant into the process, users experience a much more fluent collaboration. All aimed at quicker and more efficient reconciled items. On top of that, we planned for October complementing machine learning capabilities to add pro-active recommendations to resolve specific issues.

• As part of the evolution towards a continuous close, the introduction of a new highly automated process supports us in making the accrual management process not only more efficient but more accurate as well.

With SAP S/4HANA 1809 release, further enhancements are added to enable a more complete real-time margin analysis, including predictions through:

SAP further improved our real-time margin analysis with integrating profitability information in the universal journal

The introduction of predictive accounting, which unlike mathematics-based predictions make use of the already available document flow to predict financial results of the future

To cope with a changing organizational view, responding to the need for better insights not only for entity but also at the business unit or group level in a more automated way, new key components are being introduced:

• Group reporting – The need to deliver accurate, up-to-date financial information continuously in a company’s consolidation process is not limited to the level of an individual entity. Therefore, SAP has introduced the SAP S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting solution which provides direct access to the underlying transactions and detail across the entire enterprise so that a company can confidently and efficiently consolidate their financial and managerial results required in their closing cycles. It enables organizations to extend this evolution towards a continuous financial close on group level. It provides unprecedented transparency by delivering a complete flow of collection, processing, analysis and publication of the information.
• Embedded analytics – Most finance professionals will agree that it is often cumbersome to get interesting information out of their ERP system. Additional capabilities have been added to support business users in getting insights more flexibly and efficiently, so they can concentrate on acting on the information, rather than investing time in number crunching.
• Tax service – Global tax regulations get more diverse, complicated and change more often than ever before. Keeping up with the pace of change, typically in multiple systems, is a challenge. SAP’s response is a central tax determination engine with rules and rates maintained by SAP or its partners. With the SAP S/4HANA 1809 release, emphasis has been placed on enabling self-service tax management, facilitating an organizations chosen approach to reduce the risks and costs of inaccurate calculations and liability from non-compliance.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today...