For almost two decades, Southern California Edison (SCE) has lived with the constraints of a legacy SAP ECC environment. While the system supported core financial processes, there were aspects that also created friction: fragmented data, offline analysis, spreadsheets passed from team to team, and critical hierarchies managed outside the system of record. 

As SCE moves to SAP S/4HANA, the utility is using the transition to modernize technology and rethink how projects, costs, revenues, and regulatory reporting are structured across the enterprise. At the center of that rethink is SAP S/4HANA Project Systems (PS) and an expansive, non-traditional use of Work Breakdown Structures (WBS). 

“We’re not just implementing a module,” said Rahul Chopra, SAP Solution Architect and Senior Manager at Ernst & Young LLP. “We’re fundamentally changing where and how costs, revenues, and capital live in the system.” 

From Cost Centers to a Unified Enterprise WBS 

SAP S/4HANA PS is designed to plan, execute, and control projects of many types: internal initiatives, customer-driven work, and capital investments. Its primary cost objects are WBS elements, which define hierarchical project structures and capture financial activity in real time through integration with Finance and Controlling (FI/CO). 

At most organizations, WBS elements are used narrowly: a project starts, costs are collected, the project ends. At SCE, that paradigm is being stretched. 

“Traditionally, WBS elements are leveraged to account for cost,” Chopra explained. “But at SCE, we’re taking it one step further. Not just cost, but revenue and capital costs will be recorded against WBS elements as well.” 

In the future-state design, WBS elements will replace cost centers as the final resting place for operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses. Capital expenditures will continue to be captured in PS, but within a redesigned structure. Revenue and regulatory balancing account transactions, which historically lived elsewhere, will also be recorded on WBS to enhance analytics, reporting, and accounting. 

From an enterprise perspective, SCE has made a deliberate decision: WBS will become the common destination where financial truth converges. 

The Challenges of ECC and the Opportunity of S/4HANA 

The motivation for this shift is rooted in experience. SCE has been on SAP ECC since 2008, and while the system met baseline needs, it forced teams to improvise. 

“We’ve had a lot of pain points that forced us to do a lot of work outside the system,” said Dena Berkin, Senior Advisor for Business Transformation & Readiness in Corporate Accounting and General Ledger at SCE. “We pulled data into other systems, tracked things in Excel and Microsoft Access—just all sorts of craziness.” 

One of the biggest gaps was structural. SCE invested heavily in creating activity-based hierarchies to understand how work was performed across the organization, but ECC lacked a natural destination to store and manage them. 

“We had no place to put those hierarchies in SAP,” Berkin said, referring to their reliance on a third-party tool. “So we came up with an idea that would give us flexibility and power by moving those hierarchies back into SAP and unifying everything where the costs and revenues end up.” 

The result is a design that leverages WBS not just for projects with start and end dates, but as standing, persistent cost objects that reflect how work actually happens at SCE. The question “Why limit WBS to projects?” became a turning point. 

“As we started seeing the functionality of WBS, we wondered: ‘Why are we limiting it to projects with an end date?’” Berkin said. “Why not have a single set of hierarchies that can cross revenue, O&M, interest, depreciation, and traditional work management?” 

SCE is deeply invested in plant maintenance (PM) orders, work orders, and work management processes. Fixed assets are managed through PowerPlan. Rather than disrupt those systems, the S/4HANA design connects them. 

PM orders and work orders will continue to execute work, but they will settle to WBS—making it the unifying layer that links operational execution with financial insight. 

“Why not just do it all in WBS and unlock some of the cool stuff that WBS unlocks?” Berkin said. 

Liberating Project Systems for the Business 

For SCE, this is both a finance transformation and a business transformation. 

“We’re liberating Project Systems and WBS to not just support finance, but to support the business,” said Tiffani Argandona, Principal Manager of Business Transformation & Readiness for Corporate Accounting and General Ledger at SCE. 

Under ECC, customizations filled functional gaps, often at the expense of transparency and flexibility. S/4HANA’s fit-to-standard capabilities offer a way out. 

“WBS gives us the ability to get different functionality captured in one place and get rid of significant customization we have in ECC,” Argandona said. 

One example is assignment functionality, which allows detailed PM order costs to be visible within WBS structures both before and after settlement. That visibility supports forecasting, oversight, and decision-making that previously required offline analysis. 

“We think these enhancements will greatly improve people’s ability to see what’s going on and make sound decisions,” she said. 

From Spreadsheets to Real-Time Windows 

Today, many teams rely on spreadsheets simply to keep track of the work they own. 

“We’re aware of folks keeping track of thousands of order numbers in spreadsheets,” Argandona said. “They copy and paste them into reports just to run basic analysis.” 

A well-designed WBS structure changes that dynamic entirely. 

“I really like the analogy of WBS as a window with a real-time view,” she said. “You can see what people are charging, who charged it, what materials are coming through, which vendors are involved. That’s something we definitely don’t have today.” 

Berkin echoed that point, emphasizing the depth of detail available when WBS is designed correctly. 

“If you want to see the details of all the objects assigned to your WBS, you can see who charged the labor, which vendors were used, and you can drill right into it,” she said. 

Achieving that transparency requires thoughtful design. 

Berkin acknowledged that it would be challenging, “But it’s worth it. We really think we’re going to unlock so much ease of use and eliminate a lot of the offline analysis people do today.” 

Strengthening Regulatory and Balancing Account Processes 

The expanded role of WBS also plays a critical role in SCE’s regulatory reporting. 

Allie Sharkey Lois, Senior Technology Consultant at Ernst & Young LLP, described a significant business process improvement underway, leveraging standard functionality to replace a major enhancement for SCE’s Balancing Account processes. 

“During detailed design, we identified that putting all those dollars used to calculate provisions and over-unders into one house would really help automate the process,” she said. 

By using WBS as the central structure, SCE can ensure calculations and reporting are seamless across regulatory deferrals, while reducing manual intervention. 

“It’s very exciting to add this new substructure,” Sharkey Lois said. “It’s going to make automation a lot more seamless.” 

SCE is building an enterprise WBS with five substructures designed to capture O&M, non-O&M, capital, revenue, and all components of regulatory balancing accounts. 

Governance, Flexibility, and Organizational Change 

With this level of centralization comes the need for governance and flexibility. 

“We’re going to build governance in up front,” Argandona said. “We’re doing the work now to make this work for everybody.” 

One advantage of a hierarchical WBS design is adaptability. Organizational responsibility, or what SCE refers to as “entity”, will be able to shift over time without rewriting history or rebuilding systems. 

“If meter services move from one group to another, you just swing those in WBS,” Argandona explained, referring to flexible Global Hierarchies in SAP S/4HANA. “Meter services is a kind of work. You can move it under one group or another.” 

That same flexibility applies to regulatory recovery strategies, rate cases, and longer-term course corrections. 

“You can move activities or realign things in the hierarchy and avoid offline, second-system analysis.” 

At the end of the day, the guiding principle is to keep the WBS structure based on the work itself and use hierarchies to group and regroup as business needs evolve. 

Bringing It All Together with Real-Time Analytics 

SCE will have an enterprise WBS with five substructures to capture O&M, non-O&M, capital, revenue, and all components of regulatory Balancing Accounts. From a technical standpoint, the design brings multiple SAP capabilities together. 

“This is how we’re planning to bring everything into our reporting solutions,” Chopra said. “We’re building alternate activity-based and entity hierarchies in S/4, with all cost settlements, budgets, and plans flowing through those five substructures in Project Systems.” 

All of it integrates in real time with other SAP modules, posting directly to the universal journal (ACDOCA) and planning tables (ACDOCP). 

This foundation opens the door to embedded analytics and master data–driven reporting that reflects real-time operational and financial reality. 

“We haven’t built this yet,” Chopra said candidly. “But we’re very confident this is going to work.” 

Redefining the Role of Project Systems 

SCE’s approach challenges a common assumption in SAP landscapes: that PS is only for time-bound projects. 

By reimagining WBS as a persistent enterprise structure that captures cost, revenue, capital, and regulatory activity, SCE is positioning SAP S/4HANA as a true system of record for how work gets done. 

“It’s not going to be easy,” Chopra said. “But we’re going to make it work.” 

If successful, the payoff is significant: fewer spreadsheets, fewer shadow systems, stronger governance, and a single, real-time view of work and financial performance across the enterprise.