The following Utility Voice was authored by Marc Rosson, Enterprise Architect at Snohomish County PUD.
For many years, we have all collaborated on our shared products. Some of us are new to SAP, others have 30+ years of work order history, but all of us share the SAP Enterprise Asset Management Suite and how we leverage it for our asset-intensive industry.
Many of us have volunteered our time to participate in SAP Customer Engagement Initiatives (CEI) hosted by SAP product development to provide our industry focus in the product development lifecycle. These include SAP Asset Management Mobile Product, which was launched way back in May of 2016 with SAP’s Apple partnership. More recently, in February 2025, SAP and Apple announced a new enterprise collaboration, including SAP applications for Apple Vision Pro and SAP Mobile Start features.
To that end, SAP has already launched a CEI for SSAM, given the new partnership, and will be sharing its efforts with the group in January 2026. The innovation effort continues now with another call to action, and this is mission-critical to all of us. There are also Continual Influence Councils available on SAP’s Influence site for both SSAM and FSM.
Compatible Units are bundles of labor and material that utilities use to manage work in the field and also integrate into their design tools. SAP has had a few changes to Compatible Units (CU) over the years, but has never had a CEI focused on CU. This is our opportunity to influence what we need for CU and make sure that the changes being delivered with future releases of S/4HANA are adding the most value throughout our engineering lifecycles and are easy to maintain and support.
That’s why I’m asking you to sign up and register by November 14th, 2025. It’s a very small time commitment with some virtual meetings where you get a chance to share your requirements, network with other utilities, and see demos of future S/4HANA versions before they are released for production.
Inside the Initiative
SAP has some near-term fixes in mind, starting with getting CU integrated into maintenance orders. There are also bigger changes down the road: phase-based processes and advanced execution capabilities. What we’re after here is making CU design and configuration less complicated, getting orders created without jumping through hoops, and having a framework that matches how utilities actually operate in the field.
You’re looking at about 4-6 hours per month, kicking off with a call on January 15th, 2026. There will be site visits, workshops, and video conferences, and you’ll see prototypes and demos before anyone else does.
SAP is looking for maintenance planners, engineers, supervisors, and service managers to validate ideas, share requirements, discuss pain points, and help prioritize what gets built. This is your chance to make sure the changes coming to S/4HANA add real value to your engineering lifecycle and are easy to maintain and support.
In addition to the CEI sign-up above, we also need your voices on key Influence items that are being considered in the next S/4HANA version. Please vote; it only takes a minute and does not require any time commitment — just an indication that you would implement and support this feature.
- Compatible units — Currently at 15 votes
- Applications in new service connections — Currently at six votes
- New service with adv. execution (multiple work orders) — Had 10 votes, but SAP IBU is not moving this forward due to design issues, so we need a workaround
- Appointment processing — Currently at five votes
- Quotation and tariff rate support for customer-requested work — Currently at five votes
Make Your Mark
Having participated in a number of these Customer Engagements initiatives before, across the last 18 years, we have always gotten more out of them than we put in. Enabling industry experts to collaborate and share ideas with other utilities for a specific business process has allowed us to come up with better ideas — and share those ideas with SAP for innovation in the future.
So please raise your voice, log in, and click to register by November 14th — to help all of us ensure CUs and the entire EAM suite continue to provide value for our industry.
To get involved and keep up with the latest, join ASUG’s Utilities Community.