Earlier this summer, Piedmont Natural Gas—a subsidiary of Duke Energy that serves approximately 1.2 million commercial and residential customers in North Carolina—went live with its new customer billing implementation, leveraging RISE with SAP.
The end result of about 20 months’ worth of work, the project impacted the way approximately 1,000 internal stakeholders conducted customer billing operations. Duke Energy previously investigated leveraging RISE with SAP as it migrated its SAP Electric and Midwest customer bases to private cloud platforms last year.
“However, due to the refresh deadlines, size, and the complexity of Duke Energy’s SAP footprint, we did not pursue RISE with SAP for that landscape,” Jennifer Blackman, Managing Director of Customer Connect, Innovation, AI and Enterprise Solutions at Duke Energy, recently told ASUG.
Yet, when requirements and regulatory demands necessitated that Duke Energy run a separate set of SAP applications for Piedmont Natural Gas, Duke Energy leveraged the research and evaluations it had conducted earlier to complete a fresh installation, enabling the team to “align with both Duke Energy and SAP’s strategic goals of utilizing software-as-a-service or vendor-hosted platforms for our business operations,” Blackman said.
Broadly speaking, the project enabled several improvements and innovations. Not only did Piedmont Natural Gas see increased value by migrating customer billing systems operations to SAP platforms, but the utility also was able to leverage these new tools to rapidly exceed customer expectations. By supporting regulatory and functional requirements to maintain the separation of Duke Energy and Piedmont Natural Gas data, the team was able to drive improved operational effectiveness to better support business performance.
Ahead of Duke Energy’s upcoming session at the 2024 SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG, we sat down with Blackman and Carey Smith, IT Director at Duke Energy, to discuss how the team oversaw this project, how it facilitated cross-organizational collaboration and change management strategies, and what advice they'd offer other utilities considering RISE with SAP.
The Case for RISE with SAP
RISE with SAP provided an ideal way to quickly separate data and customer billing operations at Piedmont Natural Gas from similar operations at Duke Energy. Additionally, RISE enabled the implementation to focus on specific project needs.
“RISE allowed us to focus more on the application development and delivery to meet our business,” Blackman said, further noting that the team was able to cede application setup and service maintenance to the RISE with SAP team, while also leveraging SAP best practices for application setup and installation. For example, Blackman underlined the inclusion of high availability and disaster recovery configurations as benefits of leveraging RISE with SAP.
Smith also noted that additional aspects of Duke Energy’s RISE contract—such as managed operations control center, performance optimization, and application operations—“provided additional value for the project by ensuring proactive monitoring of performance and system availability, the option to offload additional basis tasks to SAP during peak project activity, and interactive performance troubleshooting and recommendations during our performance testing.”
Obtaining Cross-Organizational Collaboration
One of the most complicated aspects of any IT transformation project is ensuring that all parts of the business are aligned on the specifics of a migration.
Given the complex nature of migrating to a new SAP platform for Piedmont Natural Gas’ data and customer billing systems, this part of implementation was all the more vital, and so team leaders took steps to ensure an open flow of information to stakeholders.
“Our project has a strong culture commitment to shared accountability and transparency of all core and extended team members and stakeholders,” Blackman said.
Over the course of the implementation, stakeholders were informed of project changes and advances via regular town halls, business stakeholder testing and review sessions, and frequent updates with teams directly involved or impacted by the project. Additionally, Smith discussed how the team developed agile working teams grouped by “major functional towers,” including service orders, device management, digital self service, billing, and payments.
“We created these towers to facilitate and structure sessions with the various internal and external vendors and teams that have business process linkage or integration to the legacy billing systems—and thus to the newly implemented SAP systems,” Smith said. “These teams met at least weekly—and at some points in the project daily—to remain aligned on priorities and work tasks.”
The team also developed a thorough governance model based on the Recommend, Agree, Perform, Inform, and Decide (RAPID) approach. With that in place, the team was able to accomplish four vital tasks:
- Ensure the governance model roles were clear, and responsibilities are executable.
- Empower concentrated decision making within the core project team. The vast majority of decisions were made within the core team.
- Elevate decisions outside of the core project team only when organizational structures, headcount changes, and other projects were materially impacted or when there were significant scope, budget, or timeline changes.
- Leverage process owners—encompassing both business and technology partners—for validation, support, insights, and guidance without transferring decision-making authority.
Blackman and Smith also noted that Duke Energy had recently converted four legacy mainframe billing systems to SAP platforms, which made the Piedmont Natural Gas implementation project easier.
“We had an opportunity to retain key resources and talent across our internal and vendor partner teams for Piedmont Natural Gas billing system replacement,” Blackman said. “We were able to leverage prior SAP system implementation code base and knowledge to accelerate SAP implementation timelines and reduce overall effort and costs.”
Facilitating Effective Change Management
Drawing from the previous SAP deployments at Duke Energy, the team developed a robust change management strategy for the Piedmont Natural Gas project. Blackman noted that this was an early priority for the team, which took several critical steps to ensure it effectively engaged end-users and facilitated an efficient post-go-live phase.
Steps the team took included developing dedicated organizational change management and training teams to train internal end users, over-staffing the internal user call center immediately before and after the go-live, undertaking targeted communications to make customers aware of coming changes, and a temporary webpage that outlined upcoming changes and impacts stemming from the system conversation and associated outages.
The team also implemented several tools to address any concerns from end users and assist with post-deployment improvements and innovations:
- An open functional mailbox where anyone can email any question and receive a response within three business days and has remained open post-deployment.
- A regularly updated SharePoint where users have been able to submit questions and suggestions for everything from a new glossary term to a new Job Aid and has remained post-deployment.
- A virtual floor support (VFS) model where end-users are receiving focused support post-deployment in the form of process alerts. These short alerts contain information about updates, defects, workarounds, resolutions.
Keys to Project Success
Blackman and Smith also outlined the processes that lead to a successful go-live. First, they highlighted the extensive cross-collaborative efforts the team undertook, sharing goals and priorities across different teams.
“While different teams have different focus areas and individual priorities, ensuring all teams understand the ‘big picture’ and how their pieces fit into the larger puzzle for overall success is critical to ensure teams are not disillusioned (either by discounting or over-inflating) their groups’ scope of work or contributions,” Blackman said.
Additionally, Smith highlighted the importance of celebrating project wins and successes. He encouraged other enterprises to “carve out time and agenda items in town halls and update sessions to point out meeting or exceeding goals.” He also noted the importance of celebrating the accomplishments of specific teams and individual team members.
The Piedmont Natural Gas project also underwent extensive testing, which Smith said included “multiple passes of conversion, functional, bill comparison, and performance testing to ensure the solution delivered operates as needed and expected for the end users.”
Finally, the organization’s training and change management efforts set the go-live up for success, as end-users had robust training and communications at their disposal.
Advice to Utilities Leveraging RISE with SAP
According to Blackman and Smith, planning and resource allocation were crucial to the success of the Piedmont Natural Gas project. Blackman encouraged other utilities to ensure they are “allocating enough planning and contract time to put into place a solid contract with all the terms and conditions needed, including incorporating all critical project milestones and associated RISE deliverables to support your project needs.”
Additionally, the two emphasized the importance of building a strong relationship between the project team and the RISE with SAP team, incorporating both teams into recurring calls, issues reports, and escalations.
Finally, the two encouraged other RISE with SAP teams to avoid micromanaging. Smith noted that asking questions about processes and setups and providing constructive feedback were critical to the success of the project.
To hear more insights from SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG read our recap of the conference’s topics.