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Until recent­ly, field crews at BC Hydro’s gen­er­at­ing sta­tions and sub­sta­tions were coor­di­nat­ing their days through cal­en­dars pinned to walls, dis­patch files passed hand-to-hand, and work lists scrib­bled on white­boards. The util­i­ty knew its aging SAP ERP sys­tem need­ed to be mod­ern­ized. Get­ting its field work­force to come along would prove to be the hard­er problem.

“Just mov­ing to stan­dard EAM alone is very sig­nif­i­cant,” said Mike Seblani, his voice car­ry­ing the weight of some­one who has spent nine years nav­i­gat­ing BC Hydro’s dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. As Senior Man­ag­er for Mobil­i­ty, Ana­lyt­ics, and Inte­gra­tion, Seblani wit­nessed a prob­lem that had grown over a decade: field work­ers relied on mul­ti­ple mobile appli­ca­tions across dif­fer­ent devices just to com­plete dai­ly tasks.

A com­pa­ny that gen­er­ates clean elec­tric­i­ty for over 5 mil­lion peo­ple across British Colum­bia was run­ning on home­grown tools, Excel spread­sheets, and back-office sup­port that couldn’t keep pace. Field work­ers man­ag­ing 31 hydro­elec­tric facil­i­ties with 83 gen­er­at­ing units faced fre­quent appli­ca­tion switch­ing, repeat­ed data entry, man­u­al rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, and delays as office staff com­piled frag­ment­ed records.

The break­ing point came when BC Hydro real­ized its core SAP ERP sys­tem, which sup­port­ed every­thing from hir­ing to pro­cure­ment to cus­tomer billing, need­ed to mod­ern­ize. With­out inter­ven­tion, the already frag­ment­ed mobile land­scape would only dete­ri­o­rate further.

The util­i­ty launched a 10-project ERP pro­gram, with each ini­tia­tive designed for deliv­ery with­in approx­i­mate­ly 18 months and over­seen by its own steer­ing com­mit­tee. All projects were sequenced under a uni­fied pro­gram to man­age depen­den­cies across the portfolio.

The Sta­tions SAP project, the effort to dig­i­tize field oper­a­tions at BC Hydro’s gen­er­at­ing sta­tions and sub­sta­tions, became one of the program’s most vis­i­ble prov­ing grounds.

“Work­ers Are Attached to Their Ways of Working”

“We’re intro­duc­ing smart devices like iPads to com­plete the work in the field. This in itself is a sig­nif­i­cant change to work­ers,” explained Seblani, describ­ing the cul­tur­al shock of dig­i­ti­za­tion. Field crews at BC Hydro’s sta­tions had worked this way for years, and those ana­log process­es had become embed­ded in the culture.

Beyond train­ing, ask­ing peo­ple to trade tac­tile, vis­i­ble process­es for dig­i­tal work­flows done on a tablet required trust. Vin­cent Koh, BC Hydro’s Mobile Prod­uct Own­er, under­stood this from the begin­ning. The solu­tion had to feel right to peo­ple whose work­days were spent in the field, not behind desks. The human ele­ment of this trans­for­ma­tion became cen­tral to every design deci­sion that followed.

BC Hydro’s mobil­i­ty strat­e­gy was guid­ed by prin­ci­ples that served as deci­sion fil­ters through­out the Sta­tions project. A key prin­ci­ple was con­sol­i­da­tion: the team replaced Excel tools and paper process­es with a uni­fied SAP envi­ron­ment built on EAM, Resource Sched­ul­ing (RSH), Ser­vice & Asset Man­ag­er (SSAM), and Field Ser­vice Man­ag­er (FSM).

Select­ing solu­tions with pre­built SAP inte­gra­tion com­po­nents meant the 9‑phase work man­age­ment life­cy­cle could oper­ate across enter­prise sys­tems with­out the bur­den of cus­tom inte­gra­tion work. SSAM and FSM were cho­sen in part because their mobile inter­faces were intu­itive enough that field work­ers would actu­al­ly use them, and their offline capa­bil­i­ty ensured that over 600 work­ers at remote hydro­elec­tric facil­i­ties and sub­sta­tions could exe­cute work regard­less of connectivity.

Under­neath all of it, a strong inte­gra­tion lay­er con­nect­ing ERP, GIS, and OMS gave BC Hydro native access to sup­ply chain, project sys­tems, human cap­i­tal man­age­ment, and finance mod­ules, elim­i­nat­ing redun­dant data management.

Phase-Based Main­te­nance and the Real Implementation

The Sta­tions SAP project became the prov­ing ground for this new approach. The 9‑phase work man­age­ment life­cy­cle it sup­port­ed cov­ered every­thing from work ini­ti­a­tion and plan­ning, through sched­ul­ing, exe­cu­tion, and completion.

“The project solu­tion will enable var­i­ous func­tions per­formed through the nine-phase work man­age­ment life­cy­cle,” empha­sized Koh. Deliv­er­ing it meant replac­ing a con­stel­la­tion of lega­cy sys­tems — Pass­Port for work orders and main­te­nance, Excel-based sched­ul­ing tools, paper main­te­nance instruc­tions, change request and work plan tools, and Share­Point work­flows — with the uni­fied SAP envi­ron­ment and dynam­ic forms.

The tech­nol­o­gy was one dimen­sion. The project also deliv­ered 42 new or revised process­es and 26 train­ing cours­es cre­at­ed specif­i­cal­ly to pre­pare field work­ers for the tran­si­tion. Change man­age­ment and expec­ta­tion set­ting would remain ongo­ing chal­lenges well beyond the go-live: mov­ing to stan­dard EAM rep­re­sent­ed a pro­found shift in how peo­ple worked.

The ulti­mate val­i­da­tion came in August, when the Sta­tions EAM imple­men­ta­tion and BC Hydro’s S/4HANA brown­field migra­tion went live on the same weekend.

In a sin­gle cutover, BC Hydro moved to the cloud, changed its data­base, con­sol­i­dat­ed sep­a­rate SAP instances, migrat­ed all inte­gra­tion inter­faces to SAP BTP Inte­gra­tion Ser­vices, shift­ed its front end from Por­tal to Work­Zone, and launched the green­field EAM plat­form that replaced the paper process­es and spread­sheets BC Hydro had spent years work­ing around. The cutover tran­si­tioned 10,200 active users and com­pressed BC Hydro’s data­base from 13 ter­abytes to four.

Lessons for Oth­ers on the Same Journey

Seblani sees this as the begin­ning. ​“After the Sta­tions SAP project is com­plete, there are sev­er­al projects lined up to imple­ment SSAM and FSM to oth­er parts of our busi­ness,” he said. The 5‑year roadmap antic­i­pates a planned expan­sion from Sta­tions to Trans­mis­sion EAM, Dis­tri­b­u­tion EAM, and even­tu­al­ly con­trac­tor work­flows and ser­vice orders.

This phased approach kept the team focused on address­ing issues as they arose and work­ing with SAP to refine solu­tions based on real-world feed­back. BC Hydro is in the process of acti­vat­ing Joule and pilot­ing pre­dic­tive capa­bil­i­ties in SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud as it explores how AI can extend the val­ue of its mod­ern­ized SAP foundation.

The trans­for­ma­tion also sur­faced a crit­i­cal les­son about change man­age­ment. BC Hydro invest­ed heav­i­ly in train­ing mate­ri­als, but Nada Kovace­vic, BC Hydro’s Direc­tor of Enter­prise Solu­tions and Ana­lyt­ics and ERP pro­gram direc­tor, said the real gap was else­where. ​“What we would do dif­fer­ent­ly now is we would focus more on how you can do your job dif­fer­ent­ly in the new sys­tem, not just how to use the new sys­tem,” she explained.

Field work­ers had no trou­ble nav­i­gat­ing S/4HANA. Their con­fu­sion sur­faced when they tried to repli­cate famil­iar man­u­al steps that the sys­tem had auto­mat­ed away, and no one had explic­it­ly mapped those old rou­tines to the new way of working.

Kovace­vic can­did­ly acknowl­edged the toll the pro­gram exact­ed on the peo­ple who deliv­ered it. ​“I don’t want to sug­ar­coat it and make it sound like it was all won­der­ful and smooth. It wasn’t,” she said. ​“But every­body had the same man­date, the same goal, and looked toward the same thing. Every­body stepped up at the end and made it happen.”

For oth­er util­i­ties embark­ing on sim­i­lar trans­for­ma­tions, BC Hydro’s expe­ri­ence offers clear lessons: con­sol­i­date frag­ment­ed sys­tems before try­ing to inno­vate, treat the ERP plat­form as a strate­gic foun­da­tion, engage field work­ers ear­ly to ensure solu­tions reflect real oper­a­tional needs, and don’t under­es­ti­mate the cul­tur­al chal­lenge of mov­ing from famil­iar ana­log process­es to dig­i­tal workflows.

The jour­ney from white­boards and paper cal­en­dars to iPads run­ning inte­grat­ed mobile appli­ca­tions required new soft­ware and, with it, a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about work.