Today’s Challenges
To succeed in today’s market, utilities companies need to optimize and adapt their business processes to changing market conditions and meet new regulatory, environmental, operational and technical challenges. They need to innovate and sustain profitable growth while containing costs and maintaining compliance from customer and operational excellence to smart grid smart meters and IT-OT convergence. Even today, many companies are still challenged with the high cost of manual paper-based purchasing invoice systems that eat away at company margins.
New Technologies to Solve Today’s Challenges
SAP offers a range of innovations that help utilities companies simplify and standardize their business processes to innovate faster, operate more safely and
In- memory platform SAP HANA can help accelerate customer call center processing, integrate analytics in real time for smarter transaction processing and enable predictive capabilities for energy consumption profitably and better engage their customers, for example,
- Cloud solution offerings help simplify deployment of strategic solutions to better manage your workforce and your cost within supply chain operations
- Utilities specific solutions and pre-configured business processes help accelerate in standardized implementations
- The new SAP Fiori mobile app engage and empower employees like never before
SAP Innovations in Action
A major grid operator was grappling with an issue that is becoming widespread among utilities: unpredictable demand due to rapid changes in customers’ energy consumption behavior. Their future hinged on using real time data to make wha
t was once an unpredictable demand more predictable by analyzing the information that smart meter grid and enhance customer relationship management systems. They have adopted SAP's in-memory technology and have seen more accurate forecasting of energy demand greater efficiency by automating manual tasks, improved auditing and reduced energy costs for customers.
Another example is a large utility company that was challenged with poor customer service due to fragmented and manual processes .They used SAP customer relationship billing solution to reduce customer complaints by 40%, improve their billing accuracy and adapt to changing regulations.
A top natural gas company struggled with high costs due to manual invoice processing and poor procurement controls. Using Ariba solutions this company was able to reduce invoice processing costs by more than fifty percent and realized more than 330,000 US dollar savings per year in procurement and invoicing cost.
There are many more stories from our large customer base. In fact in the utilities industry 91% percent of utility companies in the Forbes Global 2000 run their businesses better with SAP solutions.
Watch Henry Bailey, Global Vice President of Utilities Business Unit talk more in detail about the challenges and opportunities utility companies face in today’s market.
You can find more about SAP innovation Solutions for Utilities at http://www.sap.com/utilities