Ahead of SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG (September 9–11, 2024, Fontainebleau Miami Beach; register now!), gain insights from Dave Khoung, Associate Vice President,, SAP Practice Lead for Utilities at HCLTech.
Is it finally time for IS-U customers to embrace SAP S/4HANA?
25 years ago, SAP introduced SAP Industry Solution for Utilities (IS-U) for Customer Relationship and Billing Management.
Since then, many organizations of varying sizes and with various levels of complexity, operating in both competitive and non-competitive utility markets, have deployed the solution. Capable of providing metering, billing, customer accounting, and front office operations for utilities, and offering single service as well as complex multi-service lines, the solution now has a large user group community in North America.
However, the future of SAP IS-U was transformed when SAP launched SAP S/4HANA. While existing IS-U customers on the SAP ECC platform would still be supported—at least in the short to medium term—the long-term product roadmap made it clear that SAP S/4HANA was the future. This means that, by the end of ECC support in 2027, all IS-U customers will need to decide what to do about their legacy solution.
For most utilities, replacing a CIS system requires careful consideration of investment justification, risk and effort. To date, industry adoption and the move to SAP S/4HANA has been relatively slow. To be sure, the extended support window SAP offered for the SAP ECC environments lowered the urgency to upgrade, and the investment justification in the original IS-U implementations still had a number of years to run based on product life expectancies and the original ROI calculations.
But with the 2027 end-of-support deadline nearly upon us, the needle has shifted from "staying on IS-U" to "time to move to SAP S/4HANA." But how should utilities address the real costs – and risks – involved in the move?
Start with understanding your current system's "baggage"
Moving to SAP S/4HANA has been described as moving from a three-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment. This move, when taken all at once, can be overwhelming. The good news is that there are sensible preparation activities you can start prior to a move that will improve current system performance and lessen the burden on your business once the SAP S/4HANA program is underway.
To ease your future journey, some optimization needs to be done upfront in order not to end up merely "paving over the cow path" with little value realization.
Are your databases optimized?
Since deploying SAP IS-U, databases have grown sizeable, thanks to large volumes of historical and transactional information. Other than specifically mandated retention of certain data elements, not all data is regarded as equal. Indeed, data has varying levels of value as it relates to the analysis of customer consumption, spending patterns and reliability, and service data for technical infrastructure.
While some entities have deployed archiving solutions, many have not. This means that for most utilities planning a move to SAP S/4HANA, a key preparation task must be reducing these sizeable databases. Doing so will not only speed up current processing times but also make your new system more efficient with storage and data and more cost-effective from a cost-of-retention perspective.
What to do with all your legacy custom code?
Custom code lines and enhancements did not stop after most IS-U go-lives. There is some justification for this: user requirements kept expanding as SAP's integrated environment offered the business new opportunities to improve service levels, and new processes to help automate and deal with high transaction volumes.
Most organizations moving to SAP S/4HANA now have a desire to simplify the core, clean out the components no longer used, and evaluate those still being used to determine which would require adjustment to keep functioning in an SAP S/4HANA environment. Unfortunately, it is easier to add custom development than to determine which code snippets are still used, and which could be retired in favor of a more mature solution. This task can seem overwhelming, as thousands of objects and lines of code need to be evaluated – a task that cannot realistically be done manually in any reasonable timeframe.
This is why we've established a framework for Utilities that we call the "low-friction" move. Centered on intelligent automation, it aims to de-risk core activities such as data cleansing and migration, custom code remediation and conversion. Our best-practice project accelerators help take the pressure off business teams, minimizing business disruption and keeping the focus on true business differentiators.
The result is a cost-optimized, lower-risk move to SAP S/4HANA, one that allows you to transform at your own pace and sets the foundation for agile system evolution.
Your low-friction move starts with a single step.
Few entities have the appetite or desire to relive the challenges of a re-implementation on the scale and impact originally encountered. Be assured that valuable lessons have been learned about the journey – from early preparation activities to post-implementation support and optimization. In other words, your path to SAP S/4HANA and beyond can – and will – be different than your original SAP implementation.
At HCLTech, we have helped numerous clients embark on this journey and successfully navigate the complexities involved with migrating from SAP ECC environments to SAP S/4HANA. This experience has allowed us to refine and develop both in-house developed and partner-provided tools that can accelerate both assessments and deployments, reduce risk and provide our clients with a structured way forward. Importantly, these activities can be executed in digestible chunks.
Having a clear vision of your starting point on this journey – and what it will take to get to the end destination – is a core component of reducing risk and lowering the impact of unplanned or unexpected disruptions on the business.
Tools and service offerings that enable our low friction move
Our specialized low-friction move rests on our established automated tools, end-to-end services and offerings – executed by a team of specialist consultants.
Elevate Vision-to-Value Framework for SAP
Our modular assessment and roadmap offering allows you to tailor the assessment based on your desired business and IT outcomes. Elevate defines a roadmap from your current state to what's possible, defining the topics and activities that should drive your organizational decisions. We identify opportunities for operating model optimization, innovation and cost savings around infrastructure, licensing and IT operations.
Our framework is supported by tools and accelerators that provide data-driven recommendations. This includes assessments for organizational change management (OCM) and high-level strategy, Business Architecture, SAP S/4HANA Functional and Fiori, Infrastructure, Add-on Components, Custom Code, Conversion, Security, Data Quality and Data Migration.
Data Rightsizing and Archiving for SAP S/4HANA
This offering provides an assessment and analysis of current data and helps to identify which components can be archived based on frequency of access while also accounting for any mandated regulatory requirements as it relates to data retention. Our rightsizing assessment provides a roadmap to reduce database size, which can be executed through archiving.
Mosaic license analyzer and predictability tool for RISE
If you are considering RISE, our proprietary Mosaic tool analyzes your current SAP usage and automatically translates perpetual licenses into RISE with SAP full usage equivalent (FUE) so you can predict your TCO under RISE.
Once live on RISE, Mosaic can monitor consumption and forecast demand.
Data Migration with HCLTech's DataSure for Utilities
HCLTech has partnered with Syniti to provide HCLTech DataSure for Utilities. This offering assesses data quality in the legacy environment, leveraging Syniti's toolset and the ability to execute data cleansing and enrichment to address data issues. We follow a proven, established methodology to migrate data into a greenfield SAP S/4HANA system aligned to our core Activate+ delivery methodology.
HCLTech Readiness Assessment and HANASmart Custom Code assessment
The Readiness assessment leverages SAP-provided tooling to perform an initial assessment of custom objects within the SAP ECC environment and an assessment of incompatible objects. HCLTech's HANASmart Custom Code assessment, together with our partner smartShift, provides custom code remediation for custom objects within the environment to make the components compliant with SAP S/4HANA standards.
SAP S/4HANA Brownfield Conversion using HCLTech's Migration+ Studio Services
Our industrialized SAP S/4HANA Conversion offering brings together methodologies, assets, templates, specialists and tools to accelerate and de-risk the conversion and migration process, including the move to RISE with SAP. HCLTech's Migrate+ model for SAP S/4HANA accelerates migrations using our industrialized model, proprietary toolsets and a standardized methodology supported by highly qualified resources who engage when needed.
Migrate+ gives you access to a pool of specialized delivery resources with a defined governance model, roles and responsibilities. Our Delivery+ Factory Services uses a Core-Flex model, which provides a positive trade-off between knowledge continuity and cost optimization.
Migrate+ toolset
HCLTech's Migrate+ toolset is a combination of proprietary tools (known collectively as Bridges4HANA) and standard SAP tools that accelerate the conversion assessment and automate – and de-risks – the actual technical conversion.
HCLTech’s BRIDGES/4HANA toolset includes:
- HCLTech HANASmart™ for custom code analysis and disposition
- HCLTech Conversion Cockpit, a Fiori-based application, which provides a single, central cockpit to perform the conversion
- Factory Management Tools – Factory Operations Control Center, Progress Monitoring and Workforce Management using Jira
HCLTech Base90 for Utilities
HCLTech's Base90 accelerator is a comprehensive solution for customer relationship and meter-to-cash processes based on SAP best practices and HCLTech's extensive experience implementing SAP for Utilities.
The industry has gained much knowledge over the past quarter of a century deploying SAP in utilities – and every organization has business processes that they feel could have been done better. We've distilled our knowledge and experience into our Base90 deployment accelerator, a white-label, ground-up design of the core business processes as we see them in the meter-to-cash cycle for customer billing systems. This has been designed on SAP S/4HANA, leveraging the newest offerings from SAP and considering SAP's product roadmap.
Although primarily intended as a deployment accelerator for greenfield implementations, HCLTech's Base90 reference model is also leveraged during discovery to provide a tangible reference model for our clients to familiarize themselves with changes and new functionality in SAP S/4HANA.
Base90 for Utilities is meant to provide utilities with a firm, best-practice foundation. We recognize that localization requirements will always exist, and we have a PUC in every state that has specific requirements that make it unique. Base90 does not aim to meet the requirements of each PUC, but having this environment in place allows more time to focus on what makes each entity different by not having to redo what is expected.
Delivery+ Factory Services for SAP
Our agile-based, industrialized delivery model scales the delivery of traditional SAP services. Leveraging intelligent tooling, DevSecOps, and a ready-to-deploy resource pool, we develop cost-optimized solutions for SAP transformation programs. Services include:
Integration-as-a-Service
A fully managed service offering delivering integration through an industrialized execution model: Consult, discover, build and run at scale across all integration platforms. Also helps migrations from PI to BTP Integration Suite.
SAP Development Studio
Offers development skills across SAP BTP, NW, HANA, ABAP, Fiori and Mobile Apps. Availability of a large pool of resources from shared services, delivered through a Core-Flex model leveraging DevSecOps.
Architecture and GRC Services
Centre of Excellence for Technical Architecture, Administration, Cyber Security, GRC and Release Management. Services include assessment, design, execute and run of your SAP environment.
Data Management and Migration
Our integrated solutions address the full data journey tailored to your requirements. We have capability across leading data solutions, including SNP, Panaya, smartShift, Syniti, Natuvion, etc.
Global Template Rollouts
An industrialized way to roll out your templates globally at scale and speed with an optimized blend of local and offshore resources, leveraging our Activate+ methodology and delivery framework.
HCLTech’s ideaX virtual innovation lab for SAP
For teams new to SAP BTP—or those looking for help harnessing its intelligent technologies—we offer a virtual innovation lab that drives value across the product chain, from ideation to co-innovation and development of purpose-driven solutions. HCLTech’s ideaX lets you design solutions remotely in a week and deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with a POC in a month to deliver fast and tangible outcomes while keeping your core clean.
Ready to learn more about how we can help you achieve a low-friction move? Email us at sap@hcltech.com.
Dave Khuong is AVP – SAP Practice Lead – Utilities at HCLTech. Don't forget to register for SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG (September 9–11, 2024, Fontainebleau Miami Beach), and join HCLTech at Booth #216 to experience our latest demos and discover how we enable a low-friction move to RISE.