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Key Takeaways

• Southern California Edison (SCE) launches its first NextGen products this October, ahead of a conversion from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA next July.
• SCE’s scheduling and mobility tools were headed for end of life anyway, so the program folds much of a roughly 300-system landscape into one platform.
• Chris Lorimer and Karen Cheung urge peers to nail down requirements early and to keep AI out of the business case until the foundation is set.

About a month before Southern California Edison (SCE) launches its first SAP field products, the project team uncovered a requirement years of design and build had never surfaced. Meter reads are entered right to left, starting from the furthest-right of the five dials on a meter face. The new system was configured the opposite way, and when SCE’s meter readers finally got their hands on it, their entries came out backward.

“We had never had a requirement. We never talked to anybody that said, ​‘Hey, by the way, when you enter your meter numbers, make sure they go right to left,’” said Chris Lorimer, Director of Operations Integration at SCE. The team scrambled to reconfigure the system before bad reads spread companywide, adding the episode to a file of lessons about what a utility takes for granted.

Lorimer and Karen Cheung, Director of Technical Integration at SCE, have spent three-plus years steering NextGen, the utility’s program to replace an aging patchwork of work management systems with one SAP platform. The effort dates to around 2021. A yearlong solution analysis ran from mid-2023 into 2024, and the program has been in design and build since mid-2025.

The first release lands this October, putting SCE’s meter organization on SAP Field Service Management (FSM) and SAP Service and Asset Manager. November adds SAP Ariba and Icertis for procurement, plus Taulia and Concur companywide, with Concur retiring a homegrown expense system. The centerpiece, the conversion from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, comes next July, and a release focused on asset strategy follows about a year later.

The pair run NextGen jointly, Cheung leading technical delivery and solutioning, Lorimer heading business representatives with 20 years in SCE operations. ​“We’re only two sides of a coin, so we don’t really make decisions independently ever,” noted Cheung.

A Platform Strategy Born of Obsolescence

“We didn’t just wake up one morning and say, ​‘Ah, we want to do SAP,’” she said. ​“The foundational need was obsolescence.” ClickSchedule, SCE’s scheduling product, sits at end of life, and the utility’s custom-built mobility tool runs on code Cheung calls ​“archaic,” with no vendor to declare its expiration.

With ECC’s end of life approaching too, SCE saw an opening to redesign end-to-end processes around a platform strategy of shared data models and native integrations. ​“Disparate systems create disparate data,” said Cheung, adding that over decades of organizational evolution, systems that were purpose-built for an earlier era no longer work effectively as business processes and organizations have evolved and streamlined.

Lorimer frames the timing in mechanical terms. ​“The hood’s open,” he said. ​“What else can we change while we’re fixing things in the engine?” SCE runs some 300 systems today; NextGen will replace a good share, work order management chief among them. A single work order can pass through a homegrown work management system, the Design Manager tool, SAP, ClickSchedule, and the consolidated mobile solution SCE ​“cobbled together” for the field, with a nightly build shuttling scheduling data back into SAP.

When those systems fall out of sync, employees compensate with outside trackers he calls ​“time-consuming” and ​“not accurate,” and departments still end up disagreeing about which phase a project is in. Completed field paperwork adds its own lag. ​“Sometimes a week or two weeks or three weeks before you actually know what was done, how much did it cost, and are we on budget, are on track, or not?” he said.

The trackers should start disappearing at launch, said Lorimer, since FSM works straight off SAP data and the lifecycle from planning to scheduling to dispatch to execution gets easier to see. The bigger payoff lands next July, when Service and Asset Manager reaches field operations with S/4HANA; he expects real-time statuses and financials as crews build a project.

Lessons From Three Years In

Asked what they would tell utilities earlier in the journey, Cheung opened with restraint. Asked what they would tell utilities earlier in the journey, Cheung opened with restraint. ​“Don’t get caught up in the hype of AI at the start. True transformation is still foundationally built on good data and processes. Focus on that first,” she said. AI won’t solve everything, she added, and foundational design is still required when building large, enterprise-scale technical solutions. 

SCE deliberately kept AI out of its business case and early implementation. ​“I still don’t think it’s that mature, frankly,” she said. ​“At the end of the day, it’s still a big ERP implementation,” she noted, one that rewards examining processes first and weighing whether any customization is worth it.

For Lorimer, her point about data and processes is the argument for the ​“clean core, SAP-first mentality” the program established in 2023, a hard sell in the early workshops, where the pushback ran to ​“we want it to be the same.” His team answered no; moving to standard processes, they argued, is what keeps SCE compliant with the product as it matures. ​“Instead of trying to figure out how to customize the product to what you want, figure out how to move your business to what the product does,” he said.

His second lesson produced the meter-read story. ​“Don’t wait on defining requirements and getting into details because you really got to do that early, deeper, and you might be pushed not to, and you should definitely push back,” said Lorimer. Early testing caught a similar gap when the system refused multiple meters on one work order, a routine need at an apartment complex, because the programmers had ​“no concept of utility work.” ​“Everybody knows that poles go in the ground, right? It’s like no, you got to be very specific sometimes with requirements,” he said.

Bringing the Field Along

Device changes have generated their own friction. SCE is moving field forces from ToughBook laptops to iPads, and some workers miss physical keys or cannot work a touchscreen with gloves on. Some legacy software will not run on an iPad either, so some employees will carry both for a stretch, a gap in the user picture that could have surfaced two years earlier, said Lorimer.

NextGen’s organizational readiness group has answered with engagement forums, roadshow-style sessions where end users ​“touch and play with” the tablets before the software is finished. Change management, in Lorimer’s experience, mostly demands patience. ​“You got to get repetition and time. Let them kind of live with it, get their feelings out,” he said, so employees ​“can start to go through the seven stages of grief earlier.”

Cheung’s team is deep-analyzing system test scripts and sitting through user acceptance testing to capture user feedback on cumbersome transactions and user experience. AI enters here, on SCE’s terms. ​“Where there are opportunities where we can introduce an agent or automations to streamline usability to help with adoption. This is where we’re now capturing all those opportunities,” she said, with builds targeted shortly after go-live.

Data Quality Under Wildfire Scrutiny

Few utilities face the regulatory and public attention that wildfire mitigation brings to SCE, and it shaped what the platform must deliver. Today, validation checks run after the fact, flagging gaps once crews are back in the office or on to the next job.

With Service and Asset Manager, SCE is embedding SAP Master Data Governance validations directly into the fields where crews capture data, catching a bad serial number or missing location attribute on the spot. ​“The foreman can’t move on. He has to get the rest of that data before they enter that record,” said Lorimer. The cleaner records will flow straight through to asset visibility in high fire areas.

Once FSM, Service and Asset Manager, and linear asset management work together on S/4HANA, a foreman will also see open maintenance notifications on nearby structures and close them out during the same visit, he said, keeping assets better maintained with less crew time.

A Voice in the Product

SCE committed to SAP’s clean core framework and designed NextGen with it as a leading principle, said Cheung, who expects lower build costs, easier maintenance, and nimbler upgrades. SCE’s heavily customized ECC environment made keeping up with version upgrades effort- and cost-prohibitive.

“We were operating on a version that was, I don’t know, 10, 15 versions behind,” she said. ​“We were doing upgrades because we were forced to.” The goal now is proactive access to ​“all the bells and whistles.” The upgrade path is also SCE’s route to SAP’s emerging AI capabilities, including Joule, said Lorimer.

The SAP relationship has already reshaped the product itself. When SCE first evaluated FSM two years ago, the tool was built around the lone technician. ​“We don’t use individual technicians; we create crews of three or four guys at a time,” said Lorimer.

SAP’s FSM development team ​“dove in and really listened,” he said, building crew management into the product and then, at SCE’s urging, committing multiple-crew visibility, a capability SCE had in ClickSchedule, to the standard build early next year. He put the turnaround from concept to development at roughly a year.

Cheung credits monthly access to SAP’s product team, plus the embedded Design Success group, which weighs in when SCE and its system integrator disagree. ​“They’ve just been a really good partner to help neutrally, objectively have a point of view for us for technical decisions, process decisions,” she said.

For Lorimer, who will highlight the collaboration alongside Cheung in an upcoming SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG presentation, the value reaches past one company. ​“We are just representative of the entire North American utility industry. SCE is a big utility, but it’s not the biggest. It’s not the smallest,” he said. ​“These things that we’re talking about here are universal. Everyone’s got crews.”

Register for SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG, Oct. 6 – 9 in San Antonio to hear more customer stories like SCE’s.