An odd title for a tech­nol­o­gy arti­cle — con­text is every­thing, almost. 

In today’s world, aka ​“the present,” we are bom­bard­ed from all sides with the lat­est and great­est tech­nol­o­gy ​“solu­tions,” from AI (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence – with delib­er­ate empha­sis) to AR (aug­ment­ed real­i­ty) and ML (machine learn­ing), to men­tion but a few. All of these are solu­tions pitched as panacea to our woes, with the sales pitch­es com­ing from those who know very lit­tle about our busi­ness­es and our prob­lems (which they euphemisti­cal­ly describe as chal­lenges and opportunities).

The UGI Util­i­ties con­text and its jour­ney began with our real­iza­tion of the need for busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion. The real­iza­tion was that most of our busi­ness improve­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties were severe­ly con­strained by the aging tech­nol­o­gy in place, as rep­re­sent­ed by our two, decades-old, main­frame-based Cus­tomer Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems (CIS), as well as a mis­aligned finan­cial sys­tem and aged work and asset man­age­ment systems.

Our trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney was, and is, intend­ed to bring us into the 21^st cen­tu­ry – we will wor­ry about the third decade of our busi­ness once we reach the present-day. In phase one of our mul­ti-year pro­gram, SAP Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship and Billing (CR&B, Suite on HANA) was select­ed and imple­ment­ed on Labor Day in 2017. For Phase two, S/4 ERP was select­ed and imple­ment­ed in July of 2019 and drove sig­nif­i­cant change, not least of which was mov­ing us from a FERC-based chart of accounts. In addi­tion, we imple­ment­ed SAP Field­glass to man­age all aspects of work between our busi­ness and our con­struc­tion companies.

Phase three of our pro­gram is under­way, with Cap­i­tal Plan­ning and Bud­get­ing being imple­ment­ed in Octo­ber of 2020, our first project deliv­ered in this new, remote work­ing world. Our sec­ond project focus­es on the dig­i­ti­za­tion of our mul­ti­tude of paper forms used in the field. Our Elec­tric divi­sion was trans­formed last June, with Gas planned in a month’s time. Next up will be func­tion­al­i­ty for our Field Sched­ul­ing and Dis­patch and Field Tech­ni­cians, for which we will be imple­ment­ing SAP’s Field Ser­vice Man­age­ment (FSM) and Ser­vice and Asset Man­ag­er (SSAM) solutions.

Our over­ar­ch­ing phi­los­o­phy has been to deploy the func­tion­al­i­ty as close to ​“out-of-the-box” as pos­si­ble, align­ing our busi­ness exe­cu­tion — aka trans­form­ing — to fit, and allow­ing time before mak­ing changes to the func­tion­al­i­ty as designed and deployed — always ensur­ing we are lever­ag­ing the solu­tion we purchased.

A huge, fun­da­men­tal change we made was estab­lish­ing an Enter­prise Busi­ness Trans­for­ma­tion (EBT) team, which is sep­a­rate and dis­tinct from the pro­gram. The EBT team is charged with two pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ties: 1) main­tain knowl­edge of how the solu­tions are used on a day-to-day basis by the var­i­ous busi­ness func­tions, and 2) extract addi­tion­al val­ue from the investments.

As we jour­ney for­ward, we appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­ni­ty to col­lab­o­rate with all of you on your jour­ney, and through our shared learn­ing we reduce risk, low­er costs, and gain more val­ue from changes we imple­ment along the way.

Thomas Lord is VP, CIO at UGI Util­i­ties, Inc. For more from ASUG Util­i­ties, attend the SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG con­fer­ence in October.