This article was brought to you by ASUG and Rizing, a Wipro Company. For more insights from ASUG and Rizing, A Wipro Company, attend the SAP for Utilities conference this fall.
As organizations manage enterprise-wide field service and asset management operations, establishing effective, up-to-date employee end-user experiences (EX) is critical to the success of their businesses, particularly in asset-intensive industries such as energy, utilities, and manufacturing.
Enterprises in these spaces, overseeing maintenance for hundreds of assets and field workers, must govern and distribute the flow of critical data to ensure operational success. With different data points flowing into an organization’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from various sources, companies must take the necessary steps to get the right data into the hands of the right employee end-users at the right time.
Implementing updated, accurate employee user experience (UX) solutions is especially critical to facilitating timely, efficient operations while keeping key end-users informed and engaged. However, prioritizing employee experience is no easy feat in asset-intensive industries. According to research from Rizing, a Wipro Company, 75% of manufacturing workers report being either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from the IT solutions that support their work.
As an SAP Gold Partner that specializes in enterprise-asset-management (EAM) solutions used in conjunction with SAP products — like SAP Field Service Management (FSM), SAP S/4HANA Resourcing Scheduling for Maintenance (RSH), and SAP Asset Performance Management (APM) — Rizing, a Wipro Company, has unique visibility into the importance of aligning field workforce planning and asset maintenance planning.
In the SAP ecosystem, customers rely on solutions like SAP FSM and SAP RSH to facilitate data flows, ensuring that employee end-users receive the right information at the right time to complete work tasks effectively. These solutions, integrated with partner solutions, enable customers to gather and distribute vital field service and EAM data to end-users while scheduling work and maintenance requests and directing operations.
Overcoming EAM and FSM Data Challenges
Whether companies are overseeing large asset fleets, sizable groups of field workers, or both, such solutions can also help organizations to overcome obstacles to effective FSM and EAM data collection. Any utility company servicing electric grid assets must understand its field workers’ locations, specific areas of expertise, and schedules. Similarly, manufacturing companies regularly collect specific data on machine performance, which is critical for preventive maintenance.
Ensuring the success of FSM operations also means that companies must schedule field workers with the necessary expertise, experience, and certifications to tackle specific projects. “Field crews have very specific skill sets,” notes Jeff Plummer, Director of Professional Services at Rizing, a Wipro Company. “For example, a pole installation crew has a different skill set from a meter reader.”
Organizations must also consider the backlog of project requests and the location of their employees compared to the location of specific jobs. Regarding EAM, these same enterprises must schedule maintenance at specific times to mitigate production shortages and keep schedules on track.
According to Plummer, organizations can leverage SAP solutions—and SAP Partner solutions, such as those from Rizing, a Wipro Company—to engage employees and improve FSM and EAM operations. For asset-intensive industries, leveraging technology is the key to driving efficiency across field assignments, employee engagement initiatives, and asset management projects.
Keys to Enabling Employee End-Users
Enable Mobile Solutions
With SAP Fiori, an SAP design system that enables developers to create intelligent applications, asset-intensive organizations can now build their mobile applications for employee end users, providing them with vital data. “Mobile solutions make the data flow seamless and transparent for field workers,” Plummer explained.
Rizing’s Hydrogen mobile UX solution, for example, can help customers enhance asset management via flexible UX experiences, simplifying work orders, notifications, operator rounds, and material management. An SAP Fiori-based application, Hydrogen provides customers with a role-based SAP EAM user interface (UI) across the devices that field workers leverage to complete inspections, maintenance, and replacement projects.
One state-wide utility customer partnered with Rizing, a Wipro Company, to supplement its SAP technology stack with a mobile UX solution, augmenting its SAP ERP system as well as SAP Asset Management and SAP FSM in order to build out SAP Service and Asset Manager (SSAM) with enhancements for its end users. Now, once a customer contacts the utility with a project request, a work order is automatically created, with the FSM solution then scheduling the work and sending a push notification to the relevant crew via their mobile devices. While completing the work, that crew can also complete all necessary FSM forms, such as those related to safety checks and road control, in the application.
“The workers can do all this on a single application without digging through paper work orders,” Plummer explained.
Improve Scheduling Processes
Scheduling field projects and asset maintenance is time-consuming under even the best circumstances. Enterprises must balance crew expertise, location, timing, necessary and available materials, and other criteria to complete this work successfully. Automating parts of the scheduling process for both EAM and FSM projects can increase efficiency and end-user engagement.
For example, using a crew management scheduling application built in SAP Fiori, Rizing helped that state-wide utility customer automate part of its scheduling in SAP FSM. “SAP FSM is a potent tool,” Plummer said. “But the real power comes from automating business rules.”
These rules include important criteria such as a field crew’s technical capabilities and skill sets. Leveraging Rizing solutions, the utility automated its scheduling process and replaced 80% of its traditional manual processes. “By automating business rules, you take the burden of routine scheduling off your scheduler or dispatcher,” Plummer said.
Building Integrations
Organizations should also focus on building effective integrations between SAP solutions and solutions from other vendors. (This process remains a challenge for many ASUG Members, with 31% of respondents to the 2024 Pulse of the SAP Customer Research citing integration as a hurdle their organization currently faces.)
Rizing, A Wipro Company, supports asset-intensive industry customers who leverage geographic information system (GIS) tools and SSAM for work management. However, these tools often do not integrate seamlessly, complicating data flow. As such, many of these customers rely on Rizing’s Mercury solution, which provides real-time bi-directional synchronization between customers’ SAP and GIS solution environments, to bridge the gap.
Similarly, with EAM operations, Hydrogen can be leveraged for customers to observe data flowing through supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, which are often used to monitor high-performance assets. While these systems capture and report mountains of data, customers want to control the type and amount of data that flows into their SAP ERP environments.
One customer used Hydrogen alongside SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) to build a data workflow for its vibration monitoring system. Through this workflow, the SCADA system generated an exception message into SAP when vibration measurements crossed certain thresholds. That exception message then alerted technicians, who could investigate and address any potential issues.
Business Transformation and Continuous Innovation
Whether utilities or customers in other asset-intensive industries are managing meter-to-cash processes, overseeing supply operations, or working to deliver exceptional customer service, all manner of operational challenges require organizations to balance innovation and differentiation with adherence to SAP’s clean-core design principles.
Doing so necessitates a comprehensive understanding of their industry’s pain points and the development of effective strategies to address them. Rizing, a Wipro Company, can also assist companies in tackling industry challenges and enhancing operational efficiency through Wipro’s SAP-certified Rapid Deployment solutions for Utilities.
With SAP S/4HANA for Utilities and SAP Sales & Service Cloud gaining importance as key business systems due to their integrated intelligence and analytics features, SAP customers increasingly ask for reference systems to inform discovery and fit-to-standard workshops at their organizations. Deployable, preconfigured systems that can be further extended are also of interest to customers looking to expedite the process while giving business and project teams hands-on opportunities to gain familiarity with these systems also eases adoption.
Of course, more complex operational challenges require easy-to-adopt, tailor-made solutions, which is where Wipro SmartBiz comes in. A suite of industry cloud solutions built on SAP BTP, SmartBiz is designed to address specific challenges encountered by utility customers, such as consumer onboarding, carbon footprint calculations, cognitive customer service, sustainable trade effluent management, supply chain risk visibility, and automation. SmartBiz solutions offer agile, customized strategies for bridging SAP application gaps and bringing new value to operations across the business value chain while keeping the digital core free from added complexities.
Customers partnering with Rizing, a Wipro Company, as a systems integrator are already reaping the benefits of Wipro SmartBiz. Recently, Thames Water adopted Wipro SmartBiz bots alongside SAP Build Process Automation to standardize and automate core processes, ultimately improving operational efficiency and customer satisfaction by delivering essential services to customers more quickly.
Utilities, including those providing power services, also face challenges in finding the right balance between cost, demand fulfillment, and disruption minimization. With Wipro’s SAP-validated Smart Energy Procurement Advisor (SEPA), a generative AI-based solution on SAP BTP, procurement executives can be newly equipped with optimal, data-informed electricity procurement options for forecasted demand based on various types of events.
Find the Right Partners
As SAP customers work to keep their employee end-users engaged, they can supplement SAP investments with expertise-informed solutions from SAP partners such as Rizing, a Wipro Company. Dedicated to developing solutions to bolster SAP environments, it’s the only company qualified to supply solutions that natively integrate with SAP FSM.
“At Rizing, we like to say that our tools help make SAP environments even more powerful,” Plummer says.
Learn how Rizing, a Wipro Company, can help your organization today.