SAP Commits to Major Investments in Its Utilities Cloud Solution Portfolio
Author: Stefan Engelhardt — SAP Utilities Business Unit
The global trend to consume software solutions as a service has also reached the utilities industry. The reasons for this change are easy to explain: public cloud offerings combine the advantages of highly standardized solutions with immediate and ongoing access to technical and process innovations at lowest operational costs.
Modern SaaS-solutions are built on modular architectures using microservices to allow utmost flexible consumption models. This enables fast implementation times and the quick adoption of new business processes wherever required.
Those paradigms suite cloud solutions perfectly to catalyze the fundamental transformation of the traditional utilities market model from a meter-focused commodity business to a digital, customer-focused multi-service industry. So, it’s no surprise that many utilities companies have already decided to leverage the advantages of cloud products for their digital transformation and are currently investigating the best market options for their IT strategies.
Consequently, SAP has been consistently investing in its cloud solution portfolio for several years and in 2018 announced the development of a next generation Public Cloud Portfolio for the utilities industry: The SAP Cloud for Utilities (C4U) focuses holistically on the integrated lead-to-cash process for multi-service-oriented utilities companies in all markets and provides seamlessly integrated end-to-end processes on a flexible, modular solution architecture.
SAP Cloud for Utilities — High Level Architecture
The design principle of SAP C4U is characterized by:
• A strong functional focus on utilities as agile, customer-centric Multi-Service Providers (energy/water and any kind of non-commodity services)
• Industry-specific extensions of SAP’s generic Cloud Portfolio, leveraging best business practices from other industries such as Retail, Telecommunication, etc.
• A modern software architecture including comprehensive standard integration content to S/4HANA Utilities on premise or other solutions, allowing the modular deployment of single components
• The Mix & Match principle: SAP on-premise customers should be able to transform their IT step-by-step into the public cloud depending on their individual business priorities, without losing the advantages of integrated end-to-end processes
• Simple licensing model with flexible pay-per-use logic, scaling to business success
The C4U suite is built to consume harmonized end-to-end processes across the different individual solution components, but the modular architecture with open APIs allows the usage of single cloud products in combination with already existing on-premise or cloud solutions of SAP or other vendors.
SAP works currently with high pressure on the completion of the industry-specific enhancements and introduced 2018/2019 already first versions of several C4U components:
- The SAP Marketing Cloud helps utilities companies to understand their customers’ needs and preferences and deliver personalized customer experiences. It provides utilities-specific segmentation functionalities and 360° Customer Profile with utilities-specific attributes. Dedicated predictive analytics and scores (e.g. churn propensity) and the Trigger-based communication across the preferred customer communication channel increase the effectivity of marketing processes significantly. The SAP Marketing Cloud data model has been enhanced with Utilities specific data, provisioning of standard extractors and interfaces for S/4HANA Utilities on premise.
- The SAP Commerce Cloud enables utilities to offer a flexible, contextual, personalized shopping experiences across any channel and on any device with the Utilities Storefront. It facilitates the easy creation and maintenance of rapidly changing product offerings (commodity and non-commodity), product bundles, prices, web content, rules and promotions with back office administrative tools. The system masters the commercial product catalogue across channels and across systems and empowers end customers with feature-rich self-services and the full control over their customer journey. Configurable guided selling procedures including cross and upselling features and the capability to offer complex bundles and subscriptions increase the success of customer acquisition and retention processes.
- The SAP Service Cloud ensures optimal customer service across all interaction channel at reduced cost for utilities. It supports the intelligent routing of customer inquiries and a seamless transition of self-service processes to the call center. Business processes are tailored to the needs of the utilities industry and include amongst others billing inquiries, consumption details, meter reading entry, master data maintenance, payment overview and payment methods. SAP Service Cloud uses chat bots and Machine Learning to effectively automate responses to customer inquiries.
- The SAP Cloud for Energy is a scalable high-performance platform for the management of energy data. It provides enhanced energy and water data analytics such as load profile aggregation, consumption pattern determination, peak load determination, benchmarking and forecasts (planned). It also enables the Validation, Estimation, Editing (VEE) of time series data and the calculation of billing determinants as input for subsequent billing systems.
SAP Cloud for Energy has a microservice-oriented architecture and supports the easy integration to other systems via CIM-based APIs. The optional integration to SAP for Utilities on premise is included in the standard functionality.
Next steps on our planned C4U roadmap will focus on the simplification of the product modelling process. The Utilities Product Modeler is currently in development and will equip utilities product managers with an intuitive, business-user-friendly app to quickly define new commodity products without dependency on IT billing experts. The application will feature commodity, non-commodity products as well as product bundles. This functionality will significantly improve the time-to-market of new products and increase the competitiveness of the sales process.
We will continue to update you regularly about the progress of SAP Cloud for Utilities — stay tuned!
