Aging infrastructures and workforce, deployment of renewables, adaptation to liberalized energy market rules, and deployment of smart meters are challenges European and global utilities are facing while at the same time they need to contiously develop new markets and products to meet expectations of a new generation of digital consumers.
To achieve this goal leading utilities are forced to invest into the digital transformation of their business to combat new quickly emerging market entrants and to get prepare for totally new business models.
On this journey of digital transformation Utilities need to re-balance their portfolio of capital projects towards those investments which will help to repsond to these new challenges and trends. Investment areas which will play a more important role in the future are:
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- Deregulation: incumbent utilities need to invest into information systems due to legal requirements to split supply and distribution business.
- Digitization: leverage predictive maintenance to automatically create work orders or investment requests as a new channel for investment planning. New business models and new business processes emerging with the new technological capabilities require investments into IT projects.
- Decarbonization: requires investments into generation capabilities, either into fossil to achieve higher efficiency or in renewables. This results in more investment requests and repriorization of requests and ongoing projects. To provide full visibility and transparency to decision makers and project stakeholders a holistic view on the investment portfolio is required. Repriorization requires an integrated change management allowing for impact modeling and simulation.
- Decentralization: increasing feed-in of renewable energy into grids requires investments into infrastructure to transport energy from new locations (e.g. offshore) and grid connection of local renewable power plants to model the increasing number of renewable prosumers as “virtual power plants”
- Energy efficiency: investments into improved energy efficiency in generation, implement a innovation culture to identify ideas for new business models and turn them quickly into new products and services
SAP can play an important role in helping utilities to transform into a digital enterprise, stay competitive, and deliver against its business imperatives. SAP’s Solution for Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management enables a more effective management of the overall investment portfolio, as well as a more streamlined execution of capital projects, which will result in substantial cash flow increases in each business unit.
Please join us at the International SAP Conference for Utilities (11-13 April, 2016 – The Hague, The Netherlands) to learn more about SAP’s solution for Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management.
A half day pre conference workshop dedicated to this topic is scheduled for Thursday April 14, 2016 (09:00 - 12:30) . Please check this site for further details and registration -> Link