For more SAP util­i­ties cus­tomer sto­ries, reg­is­ter for the SAP for Util­i­ties con­fer­ence in San Anto­nio, Oct. 6 – 9. 

The City of Taco­ma launched its SAP Busi­ness Suite ECC in 2003, pro­vid­ing a foun­da­tion for sev­er­al of its pub­lic ser­vices, includ­ing Taco­ma Pub­lic Util­i­ties. Over 20 years lat­er, it was due time to refresh its out­dat­ed tech­nol­o­gy landscape.

Christo­pher Orge­les, Senior Solu­tion Archi­tect for the City of Taco­ma, and his team start­ed its trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney in 2023, gain­ing bud­get approval to look for part­ners that could assist with the work; the RFP process took about a year. ​“Being a local gov­ern­ment, we have to go out to bid,” and they select­ed HCLTech in the sum­mer of 2024, offi­cial­ly start­ing the project that September.

The City of Taco­ma is now live on SAP BTP, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence (CX), and RISE with SAP in 2025. The city also uses SAP for Pub­lic Ser­vices and SAP Indus­try Solu­tion for Util­i­ties (IS‑U). ​“The city runs all of our busi­ness through SAP,” he said. Orge­les will speak in a ses­sion at SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG, shar­ing more of the City of Taco­ma’s dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion journey. 

Chal­lenges and Solutions

“It was a fair­ly hec­tic project,” Orge­les said. He said that one of the more dif­fi­cult parts of being a pub­lic enti­ty is the bud­get­ing process. The City of Taco­ma works on its bud­get every two years, but imple­ment­ing RISE with SAP has required some changes along the way, affect­ing the data­base size or the need for addi­tion­al servers, lead­ing to ​“a lot of nick­el and dim­ing.” Get­ting approval for a bud­get can be dif­fi­cult already, and is made hard­er by unknown costs.

Anoth­er bud­get­ing issue that has arisen came out of doing a Bill of Mate­ri­als for RISE with­out a sys­tems inte­gra­tor. Orge­les told ASUG that SAP said the city would not have to pay for its on-premis­es instance, but that was inac­cu­rate. Still, they are pay­ing a low­er rate than orig­i­nal­ly. ​“We’re going to have to pay that until we get off of ESS and PI, unfor­tu­nate­ly.” 
Ulti­mate­ly, the RISE BoM cost $10.7 mil­lion from 2025 through 2030, along with HCLTech as an SI that cost $12.5 million.

To save some mon­ey for the project, the City of Taco­ma worked with Gart­ner, which exam­ined oth­er SAP con­tracts and helped nego­ti­ate a bet­ter deal, sav­ing the city mil­lions of dol­lars. ​“It was real­ly help­ful to have some­one who knows this stuff,” Orge­les said. We also ded­i­cat­ed a large num­ber of busi­ness, IT, Project Man­age­ment, and OCM resources to sup­ple­ment cost.

Staffing was anoth­er chal­lenge. With more than 100 con­sul­tants, 70 of whom were off­shore, there were a lot of peo­ple to bring togeth­er to solve prob­lems. There was also key tal­ent from the City of Taco­ma leav­ing to retire or work else­where, tak­ing impor­tant knowl­edge with them.

These work­ers knew how to man­age var­i­ous oper­at­ing sys­tems and data­bas­es, but mak­ing sure the work is done isn’t as wor­ri­some now that SAP has a whole team work­ing in the back­ground for the City of Tacoma’s tech­nol­o­gy instance. SAP’s enter­prise cloud ser­vice and tech­ni­cal ser­vice man­agers make sure patch­es and upgrades hap­pen seam­less­ly, reduc­ing reliance on spe­cif­ic inter­nal team mem­bers. ​“It’s man­ag­ing as opposed to know­ing,” Orge­les said. ​“There’s less depen­dence on super­stars and [instead] you have a whole team.”

Test­ing, Train­ing, Iterating

The City of Taco­ma con­duct­ed four cycles of test­ing for this project, with a strong report­ing struc­ture under the project man­age­ment team for the tech­ni­cal aspects. Three tests were with core busi­ness users, then hun­dreds using the sys­tem for the final test. Orge­les shared that the team had good defect track­ing, risk logs, and issue logs, mak­ing a log­i­cal path for esca­lat­ing issues to project stakeholders.

Change man­age­ment at the City of Taco­ma required some changes of mind­set. For exam­ple, some of the Taco­ma team used SAP GUI for 20 years and still want­ed to use the old trans­ac­tions in that sys­tem, as opposed to Fiori. Get­ting 2,000 employ­ees to under­stand which trans­ac­tions are obso­lete was a strug­gle at first, Orge­les said.

Through lunchtime learn­ing ses­sions and a Q&A page that out­lined the changes, peo­ple using SAP at the City of Taco­ma got up to speed. Orge­les high­light­ed the tim­ing of train­ing as a chal­lenge; if con­duct­ing train­ing too ear­ly, indi­vid­u­als are like­ly to for­get what they need to know, but the teams work­ing on the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion were deep in the weeds of the project and try­ing to meet dead­lines, as opposed to build­ing train­ing. Ulti­mate­ly, train­ing took place a month before go-live. The team still gets ques­tions eight months lat­er, so they’re work­ing on refresh­er cours­es to solid­i­fy knowledge.

What’s Next for City of Tacoma

Next up for this project is cor­rect­ing some tech­ni­cal debt that arose. While SAP Ser­vice Cloud Ver­sion 2 was out when this ini­tia­tive began, few were live on the sys­tem, so Orgeles’s team opt­ed for Ser­vice Cloud Ver­sion 1. Now, they’re explor­ing mov­ing to the lat­est version.

Wide­spread inter­est in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence hadn’t quite tak­en off in 2023 when the project began, so the City of Taco­ma is explor­ing what they can use. They’ve imple­ment­ed some Copi­lots and Claude POC’s, and recent­ly did a busi­ness case for Joule in the devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment. The tech­ni­cal team will also need to set secu­ri­ty stan­dards for its future AI engines and models.

Orge­les expressed inter­est in using AI, but wants to first under­stand use cas­es that would be help­ful to the city. ​“We want a clear direc­tion,” he said.

Advice for Fel­low RISErs

When asked what advice he has for oth­ers work­ing on dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions in SAP, Orge­les said that hav­ing some­one knowl­edge­able on RISE with SAP is impor­tant — espe­cial­ly in the plan­ning phase. Because his team didn’t have an SI ear­ly on in this project, they didn’t have a real­is­tic under­stand­ing of how it should be built, the addi­tion­al cost for charge­able items in RISE, and the time need­ed to pro­vi­sion and com­plete a Ser­vice Request.

He also rec­om­mend­ed that orga­ni­za­tions encour­age their experts to look for­ward, rather than get­ting caught up in the day-to-day work. They’re work­ing to keep up with busi­ness needs, but it’s hard for them to have time to look to the future and plan for advanced technology.

On a relat­ed note, Orge­les advised giv­ing teams time to work on projects. ​“There are a lot of tired peo­ple; there are a lot of burnt-out peo­ple,” who were not tak­ing much vaca­tion dur­ing the project. But then when go-live hap­pens, the flood­gates open with even more work and ques­tions com­ing from through­out the business.

Orge­les also rec­om­mend­ed net­work­ing to learn more about SAP projects — not just look­ing for a new job. ​“Talk to all the peo­ple that have done it before you. Make friends with them. Build net­works,” he said. Then, lever­age their knowl­edge and apply it to inter­nal projects.