The fol­low­ing per­spec­tive was authored by Marc Rosson, Enter­prise Archi­tect for Sno­homish Coun­ty PUD.

Hel­lo Util­i­ties Community, 

Recent­ly, I had the plea­sure of attend­ing SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG, our annu­al con­fer­ence for the SAP util­i­ties com­mu­ni­ty, held for the first time in Chica­go, at the Sher­a­ton Grand Chica­go River­walk, from Oct. 9 – 11. 

For those of you who have attend­ed in pre­vi­ous years, you already know that this con­fer­ence is our Thanks­giv­ing din­ner; we gath­er to see our fam­i­ly, with whom we have lots in com­mon, but whom we do not see year-round. Every year, new mem­bers of the ever-grow­ing util­i­ties com­mu­ni­ty join our SAP fam­i­ly, and this con­fer­ence offers a chance for us to wel­come and sup­port them. 

At this year’s event, we had three gen­er­a­tions of SAP Util­i­ties lead­er­ship on stage; Michael Sul­li­van, SAP Nation­al Vice Pres­i­dent of Renew­able Ener­gy and Util­i­ties, inter­viewed Lloyd Adams, Pres­i­dent of SAP North Amer­i­ca, and then pre­sent­ed Michael O’Donnell, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent & Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of Dig­i­tal Sup­ply Chain for SAP North Amer­i­ca, with a sur­prise thank you, in recog­ni­tion of O’Donnell’s six years of ser­vice lead­ing the SAP Util­i­ties community. 

Our com­mu­ni­ty con­tin­ues to grow with new util­i­ties, new SAP man­age­ment, and new tech­nolo­gies. Through it all, we con­tin­ue to embody the val­ues of a true com­mu­ni­ty, whose mem­bers sup­port and learn from one anoth­er. That is why I love work­ing with all of you. 

I was not able to attend every ses­sion that I want­ed to see, but I want­ed to high­light a cou­ple. Tina Kuo, Prod­uct Man­ag­er, Ser­vice Cloud for Util­i­ties at SAP, showed us the future of our cus­tomer inter­ac­tions, explor­ing all aspects of our cur­rent and poten­tial future busi­ness cas­es while dis­cussing the mod­ern­iza­tion of SAP’s cus­tomer ser­vice capa­bil­i­ties for util­i­ties. Lever­ag­ing every­thing we have learned across the past 10 years with SAP Ser­vice Cloud, the future of this tech­nol­o­gy will take util­i­ties’ enter­pris­es to the next lev­el and max­i­mize the val­ue we derive from cus­tomer inter­ac­tions while fur­ther accel­er­at­ing the stan­dard oper­a­tions we are all respon­si­ble for. We have over 20 util­i­ties already live on SAP Ser­vice Cloud and as a team con­tribut­ing to what its next edi­tion needs to pro­vide, in addi­tion to util­i­ties that will start their SAP jour­ney on SAP Ser­vice Cloud 2.0 as ear­ly adopters.

In the util­i­ties com­mu­ni­ty, we love our fam­i­ly dis­cus­sions (also known as pan­els), and this year sup­plied some great oppor­tu­ni­ties to dive in. (If you have not already done so, explore the con­fer­ence’s con­tent library, fea­tur­ing 60 pre­sen­ta­tions as pre­sent­ed at the con­fer­ence.) What I love about our com­mu­ni­ty is that we’re always get­ting bet­ter and work­ing to improve our oper­a­tions. What has nev­er changed is the spir­it of col­lab­o­ra­tion I’ve felt from this com­mu­ni­ty as we have tack­led our prob­lems together. 

I had the plea­sure of par­tic­i­pat­ing in ​“Imple­ment­ing Util­i­ty Dis­patch with SAP,” fol­lowed by an Idea Jam, in which we dis­cussed chal­lenges we have faced for many years with regard to dis­patch capa­bil­i­ty and sched­ul­ing to mobile devices, across many dif­fer­ent prod­ucts and his­to­ry with SAP. The pan­el fea­tured util­i­ties already live and work­ing with SAP’s Field Ser­vice Man­age­ment (FSM) solu­tion as well as util­i­ties deal­ing with exist­ing chal­lenges on lega­cy sys­tems and explor­ing what it will mean to move for­ward and solve some of their issues with new SAP soft­ware. Those issues range from issues with peo­ple, process­es, and tech­nol­o­gy — but, again, we are all in it to win it, work­ing togeth­er to help one anoth­er succeed.

As one per­son, I could not get to all the ses­sions on offer at SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG, but I plan to review the con­tent of its many pre­sen­ta­tions with our inter­nal teams in the com­ing weeks. For me, the dis­cus­sions of both RISE with SAP and SAP Sig­navio were high­lights of the con­fer­ence; see­ing so many cus­tomers lead­ing in these new spaces is so true to our com­mu­ni­ty. We all take our turns leading.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, util­i­ties led the way with com­pat­i­ble units, which had been built for the util­i­ties indus­try and are now part of core SAP solu­tions. We led the way on the mul­ti-mod­el SAP HANA data­base back in 2012, mov­ing off lega­cy man­age­ment sys­tems. More recent­ly, util­i­ties led the way to SAP S/4HANA and SaaS-based appli­ca­tions like SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors. Now, util­i­ties lead­ers are mak­ing progress in their moves to the cloud and embrac­ing the future of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) accel­er­a­tors becom­ing more inte­grat­ed into our day-to-day busi­ness­es. We all take our turns lead­ing, and we all take our turns learn­ing from those who are doing the hard work, reduc­ing the risk for all of us who’ll fol­low, and ensur­ing — togeth­er — that our util­i­ties will be successful. 

Marc Rosson is Enter­prise Archi­tect for Sno­homish Coun­ty PUD.