Hello, SAP utility community!
As we prepare to wrap up this amazing year, let’s celebrate our achievements and look toward our goals for 2024. Across these last few years, we have been sharing our insights, challenges, and solutions with each other through various channels, and we're proud of the impact that each and every one of us has made in the utilities space by working together. This collaboration shifts our industry forward.
SAP Utility Community Voices
One of this year’s highlights was the debut of SAP Utility Community Voices, a series in which we featured monthly articles from different utilities gas, water, electric –as well as from both public and IOUs.
Published in collaboration with ASUG through our newly launched and fast-growing newsletter, "The Topic: Utilities," these articles showcased the diverse, innovative ways our community members are transforming their utilities with SAP solutions. Here are the articles that we published this year:
- June: Introducing the ASUG Utilities Newsletter, by Marc Rosson, Enterprise Architect for Snohomish County PUD
- July: Consumer. Prosumer. Flexumer. What’s In A Name?, by Shachella James, Vice President of Infrastructure and Technology Services at CenterPoint Energy
- August: A Journey to the Present, by Thomas Lord, VP, CIO at UGI Utilities, Inc.
- September: A Brighter Future: The Journey to 100% Renewable Energy, by Alejandro Reyes, Chief Digital Officer at AES Clean Energy
- October: Leading the Way: At SAP for Utilities, by Marc Rosson, Enterprise Architect for Snohomish County PUD
- November: At BC Hydro, A Platform Approach to Mobility, by Mike Seblani, Solution Lead - Enterprise Mobility at BC Hydro
Expect more inspiring stories to come from leaders in our SAP utility community who are forging the future of their utilities in these fascinating times. Between the ever-changing regulatory environments and business challenges we all face, our utilities are also responding to the need to integrate the adoption of new technologies, such as generative AI, into the complex business outcomes we are all seeking to achieve.
We hope you can see yourself in the stories of success, adversity, and resilience shared through the SAP Utility Community Voices and are motivated to share your own voice in 2024. Please reach out and let us know if you would like to be considered for a future column. We would love to learn from your experience.
Webinars and Subgroups
As we continue to present webinars, including many in collaboration with ASUG, that explore topics related to SAP solutions for utilities, we’ve seen terrific participation from this community. From more than a dozen discussions of SAP S/4HANA to specific presentations on RISE with SAP, SAP Field Service Management, and mobility strategy, 2023 was a busy and productive year. Equally valuable were conversations that customer subgroups collaborated to host and share directly with SAP product managers, providing their collective input on the products we’re all using.
Next year, we have multiple presentations already in the works, including:
- Customer engagement presentations from multiple utilities using the embedded customer relationship management (CRM) product in SAP S/4HANA
- A presentation by Southern California Edison, with representatives discussing recent enhancements to the company’s CX implementation
- The launch of a community subgroup for water utilities, led by Corix Infrastructure and SouthWest Water (a combined entity of two private water utility firms), focused on learning, sharing, and collaborating between U.S.-peer water utilities
If you have a topic that you’d like to share, please let us know. And for many of you who shared stories at the SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG conference, expect to hear from us soon about the possibility of reprising your sessions as webinars.
SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG
With over a thousand attendees at this year’s Chicago edition, the SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG conference continues to be a hugely successful event for the utilities community—and we are planning for next year’s conference, in Miami next October, to be even larger.
Expect more news to come on that front shortly; these conferences remain invaluable opportunities to see everyone in our SAP community in person. We will have great stories to share, from utilities selecting RISE with SAP to accelerate their go-live on SAP S/4HANA to utilities leveraging SAP Service Cloud 2.0 and Joule, SAP’s generative AI assistant.
That said, please don’t wait until next October to start sharing and contacting each other. Given the pace of change and challenges we are taking on in the utilities sector, the only way to reduce risk is to phone a friend, share an innovative solution, and—as always—don’t go alone.
Thank you for your continued support of our collaboration within the SAP utility community, I want to personally thank each one of you, and wish you all a wonderful holiday season.
Marc
Marc Rosson is Enterprise Architect for Snohomish County PUD.