As a state-reg­u­lat­ed util­i­ty man­ag­ing water — an increas­ing­ly pre­cious resource — in Flori­da, a state near­ly sur­round­ed by water, the South Flori­da Water Dis­trict (SFWD) han­dles the ebb and flow of busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy chal­lenges and change well. In this ASUG inter­view, SFWD SAP Sec­tion Admin­is­tra­tor Rich Sands dis­cuss­es the utility’s SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion progress, his plans for SAP Fiori that extend beyond a ​“toe in the water,” and polit­i­cal cli­mate challenges.

This is an edit­ed ver­sion of the full conversation.

Q. What SAP tools and tech­nolo­gies has the SFWD pre­vi­ous­ly used in its business?

A. Around 2006, we went from our old in-house finan­cial and HR sys­tems to SAP. The dis­trict was going through a busi­ness automa­tion and enhance­ment effort. We want­ed an ERP-type sys­tem to do most of the ground­work for the busi­ness. This would allow indi­vid­u­als to do less man­u­al work and do high­er-lev­el work. For exam­ple, a con­tract spe­cial­ist — instead of them con­stant­ly writ­ing con­tracts, we want­ed them on the phone nego­ti­at­ing bet­ter terms for the busi­ness. We went to SAP to move the dis­trict out of the 1970s [from ECC on-premise] and to move us into at least the late ​’90s.

Q. Between then and now, did you add any SAP sys­tems or enhancements?

A. We brought in the plant main­te­nance and the HR mod­ule … I’m only speak­ing from the busi­ness side because I was on the busi­ness side until last May, when I was asked to do this job. We want­ed to auto­mate process­es. For instance, we do a lot of plant main­te­nance. We have field sta­tions that do a lot of work orders. We do a lot of cap­i­tal con­struc­tion. We devel­oped link­ages so the peo­ple in the field could change work orders and those would auto­mat­i­cal­ly get dis­trib­uted to the net­work activ­i­ties and Project Sys­tem. So both sides — Plant Main­te­nance and the field sta­tion man­agers — got the data they want­ed, and the sys­tem did all that work. We focused on process­es, mak­ing the work as slick as we could.

Q. You said you were on the busi­ness side before switch­ing over last year. Could you pro­vide a lit­tle back­ground on that?

A. I was on the busi­ness side, essen­tial in an office of man­age­ment and bud­get. I worked the man­age­ment side, so I direct­ly ran project sys­tems and plant main­te­nance. I kind of watched over the work­flow for the entire busi­ness and watched how all the ERP mod­ules inter­act­ed with each other.

If you go back to when we made the deci­sion, maybe two-and-a-half years ago, to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA, they hired a guy who’d worked in SAP his entire life. He was very good and they hired him to pre­pare for the imple­men­ta­tion, to then run the imple­men­ta­tion, and to long-term run the shop. Two months before the imple­men­ta­tion, he gave notice and left. The IT divi­sion direc­tor approached me and said we couldn’t afford to bring any­body else in, that I was the only one who could pos­si­bly run the imple­men­ta­tion. And then, was I will­ing to run the shop after­ward? I said, I know how to use the appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming inter­face, but I don’t know how to run SAP. So here I am. I’m a good sol­dier. I knew how big the mis­sion was. I knew it was impor­tant to the dis­trict. So, I did it, and here I am learn­ing how to run SAP every day. I have good peo­ple to work with, so all I do is try to get all the pieces togeth­er so we can keep going.

Q. The deci­sion to tran­si­tion to SAP S/4HANA was made two-and-a-half years ago. What were the busi­ness dri­vers for that deci­sion? The tech­nol­o­gy drivers?

A. There’s a lit­tle bit of pol­i­tics involved as well — Flori­da state pol­i­tics. When Rick Scott became gov­er­nor, he made a mas­sive cut in gov­ern­ment ser­vices. We went through a 33% lay off here. Once the lay­offs occurred, I spent a lot of time redesign­ing work­flow process­es so those could replace 30-year employ­ees. We ana­lyzed what they were doing, and we fig­ured out how to get SAP to do that heavy lift­ing. That’s how we sur­vived. And then we went through two, three, or four direc­tors. Rick Scott final­ly put Pete Antonac­ci in charge as dis­trict direc­tor. He was Scott’s per­son­al lawyer. Antonac­ci was look­ing at how much we spent to main­tain SAP and he said, I want a study done to tell me if I can get rid of SAP and run this thing inter­nal­ly. Gart­ner did the study and came back to say that the only rea­son we were able to func­tion is because SAP was doing the work of about 600 full-time employ­ees. That was around 2017. Antonac­ci got the report and said, well, I can’t hire any more peo­ple. What we’ve got to do is make SAP bet­ter than it is today.

Then I got sent to SAP­PHIRE NOW® in Orlan­do. Met with a lot of peo­ple up there and became enam­ored with SAP S/4HANA and Fiori. I came back, met with Antonac­ci, and said we had to go there — the expense was going to be worth it. Antonac­ci essen­tial­ly made a pre­sen­ta­tion to the gov­ern­ing board. They vot­ed for us to go ahead and they fund­ed the effort.

Q. What were the key ele­ments of the busi­ness case that per­suad­ed the gov­ern­ing board?

A. At the time, we had two gov­ern­ing board mem­bers who were busi­ness­men them­selves. Those two, for the most part, drove the peo­ple who weren’t busi­ness ori­ent­ed toward the deci­sion, and that’s kind of how the vote went down.

Q. You were enam­ored with SAP S/4HANA and Fiori. Why?

A. The old SAP is like using For­tran. It’s not cool and slick. When it’s not pret­ty, they don’t like it here at the dis­trict. So, I met with the Project Sys­tem peo­ple in the plant, and said show me what this thing can do, and I just start­ed going at it. Then I said, I want to see this Fiori thing. And they just said, run the mouse and it will guide you. I pressed one but­ton, and all of a sud­den — what nor­mal­ly would take three dif­fer­ent Busi­ness Ware­house reports and a whole bunch of manip­u­la­tion to get into a graph — it all popped up in front of me with­in sec­onds. I said, ​“How is this done?” And they said, it’s just cod­ing behind the scenes. I run all the busi­ness intel­li­gence reports. Every Fri­day we send out a huge report. It takes us two days to get it togeth­er. When I saw what Fiori was cre­at­ing, it was the busi­ness intel­li­gence reports that would take us three hours to do. This is where we need to get to. And I want­ed the direc­tor to be able to press a Fiori tile on his desk­top and have the data pop up, as opposed to call­ing me say­ing, Hey, can you run the report that tells me how many pur­chase reqs haven’t been processed?

That’s why I was enam­ored. I saw how our jobs could get much eas­i­er and I could focus on mov­ing the busi­ness in bet­ter directions.

Q. Where are you on the S/4 jour­ney and in the imple­men­ta­tion of Fiori?

A. July 4, 2021, was our go-live week­end. Did they all do the test­ing as they should have? No. So we found things that didn’t func­tion after­ward. We’ve spent a good while just set­tling the sys­tem down. I liken it to a horse that needs to get accli­mat­ed. It came out on July 4 and it was all full of spir­it. But then, as we rode along, we need­ed to set­tle it down so it would do a bet­ter job of pulling the wag­on. And we’re final­ly there. We’re run­ning, spend­ing maybe 20% of the time fix­ing stuff and 80% of the time on enhancements.

The SAP Finan­cial Account­ing mod­ule was our tough one. It was also where our weak­est test­ing was — our weak­est point. HR did a good job and test­ing went much smoother. I real­ly thought pro­cure­ment was going to stum­ble over Busi­ness Ware­house, but they didn’t.

In terms of results, Busi­ness Part­ner has improved the busi­ness work­flow process between our HR, Finance, and Pro­cure­ment Bureaus.

Q. Did any SAP part­ners sup­port you in the work, or was it all internal?

A. It was 50/50. I’ve got rough­ly sev­en full-time employ­ees in house, but we had Infos­ys as our con­tract assis­tance. Infos­ys did a lot of heavy lift­ing behind the scenes as far as get­ting mod­ules ready for conversion.

Q. Is the busi­ness envi­ron­ment or the cur­rent state of the oper­a­tion more chal­leng­ing because you are a reg­u­lat­ed entity?

A. In Flori­da, we’ve got the Sun­shine Act. Every­thing that we do as dis­trict employ­ees, state employ­ees, any­one can ask, ​“I want to see all the records.” Because of this, we have noticed phish­ing and attacks on the sys­tem. Any­one can ask for any con­tract infor­ma­tion. So, they do so, and what we’ve found is that the evil side of the world finds out. When you become a ven­dor in south Flori­da, your busi­ness is open to the world because of a pub­lic records request. … So that’s been a tricky point for us, reg­u­la­to­ry wise.

Change man­age­ment is also dif­fi­cult. We go through cycles. We’ve had a large amount of turnover — peo­ple who are very knowl­edge­able of SAP and work togeth­er as a team across the mod­ules and across the busi­ness. Half of them retire or leave and will get oth­er jobs. And then, the new peo­ple come in and haven’t got that expe­ri­ence. So there’s a lot of change — con­trolled time waste is what I call it.

Q. What are some of your next steps?

A. We made the deci­sion to go on-prem for the SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion. Before I leave for retire­ment in sev­en years, we’re going to take this from on-prem to cloud. It needs to be in the cloud so we can con­trol our main­te­nance of it a lit­tle bit, to have SAP shoul­der more of the day-to-day code maintenance.

Also, with Fiori, we’ve only got our toe in the water. We got our 1099s in Fiori now and we’ve got maybe eight to 10 of our HR Fiori tiles built out, but that’s all we’ve done. But I have a big vision toward that. It’s just that we haven’t had time to do it. Automa­tion of our finan­cial record keep­ing; scan­ner uti­liza­tion in sup­port of repair-part sup­ply oper­a­tions; mobile man­ag­er approval of work items from hand­held devices; and veg­e­ta­tion field man­age­ment work order updat­ing from the field are some of our opportunities.

Out­side of that, the oth­er big dream has been to do auto­mat­ed parts order­ing for our field sta­tions. This is because we have a bad habit of buy­ing auto­mo­tive and machin­ery air and oil fil­ters with our cred­it cards and pay­ing extreme prices for it. I want to get to where SAP is look­ing at the minimum/​maximum lev­els in a ware­house toward parts that we need to run all our equip­ment. Then it gets down to two parts left — SAP auto­mat­i­cal­ly orders and it shows up at the door.

A year from now, we’re going to move to a more hand­held input envi­ron­ment. We want to get to the point where every­one can access and use SAP away from their work­sta­tions. For exam­ple: man­agers approv­ing work items, mechan­ics updat­ing work order per­for­mance, and veg­e­ta­tion man­age­ment per­son­nel adding field find­ings to work orders.