The following partner insight was authored by Victor Puente, Head of GTM — North America, cbs Consulting.
The path to SAP S/4HANA is rarely straightforward for utilities. Industry-specific functions are often anchored to SAP Industry Solution for Utilities (IS-U) and other legacy modules with no standard upgrade track. Longstanding custom extensions, many poorly documented or no longer maintained, add to the complexity. Meanwhile, regulatory constraints and operational risk leave little margin for error or delay.
Selective Data Transition (SDT) gives utility organizations a way to reimagine their SAP environments without discarding what still matters. Rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all migration, SDT supports a targeted approach, allowing teams to retain critical data, redesign processes, and define a system landscape that reflects operational priorities. The result is a transformation strategy grounded in control, flexibility, and real-world business continuity.
cbs has shaped its SDT delivery model around these demands. Backed by proprietary tools, deep process knowledge, and a leadership role in SAP’s global SDT initiative, cbs helps utilities navigate complex migrations with confidence and precision.
Why SDT Meets the Moment for Utilities
SAP’s greenfield model assumes a clean slate, but that rarely exists in regulated utility environments. Brownfield offers continuity, but risks locking in obsolete processes, unused master data, and aging extensions. Neither option addresses the more fundamental need to rethink what should and shouldn’t be carried forward.
For utility providers, preserving historical data is often a regulatory and operational requirement, not just a convenience. Information tied to asset maintenance, pricing, and customer billing often needs to remain accessible for compliance, reporting, and operational continuity.
SDT gives utilities control over which data and structures to migrate, which to discard, and how to reshape the target system for future readiness. That includes:
- Consolidating or splitting entities across systems
- Migrating in waves, such as region by region or company code by company code
- Integrating preparatory steps like business partner conversion or New GL activation into a single, streamlined migration
SDT also supports broader strategic goals. Utilities undergoing M&A or restructuring can use this approach to carve out, merge, or selectively absorb SAP environments across the organization, avoiding rework and accelerating time-to-value.
Holistic Delivery, Not Just Tools
As a founding member of SAP’s global Selective Data Transition Engagement, the firm plays an active role in shaping best practices and ensuring quality standards across projects.
SDT presents challenges that extend well beyond data migration. Many providers in this space focus narrowly on moving records but fall short when it comes to managing the broader transformation.
As a holistic systems integrator, cbs delivers every layer of the S/4HANA migration—from business process redesign and system configuration to interface remediation and data transition. All work is handled directly by cbs consultants, eliminating the need for external subcontractors or multi-vendor coordination. This unified delivery structure reduces risk, accelerates execution, and ensures accountability from planning to go-live.
cbs targets mid-market and upper-mid-market enterprises, particularly those with revenues between $1 billion and $10 billion. These customers often require highly specialized expertise and tight execution timelines, needs that cbs meets by assigning experienced, U.S.-based professionals who work closely with internal teams. Unlike high-volume firms that rely on offshore staffing models, cbs builds lean, expert-led project teams to maximize impact and speed.
Deep experience in public services, including support for the IS-U module, has positioned cbs to meet utility-sector requirements. The recent acquisition of a utilities-focused consulting firm has further expanded its domain capabilities and regional reach.
The cbs Enterprise Transformer software adds technical muscle to this approach. By enabling table-based, high-volume data migration directly into the SAP HANA database, the tool offers flexibility and speed beyond what standard SAP methods can provide.
Over time, cbs has developed expertise in public services domains that closely mirror utility industry needs, ranging from complex billing and customer information systems to outage management and regulatory compliance. cbs has consistently been at the forefront of SAP’s strategic products, pioneering the first of their kind SDT cloud migrations and shaping best practices for enterprise transformation.
By combining proprietary SDT tooling with full-spectrum transformation services, cbs enables utilities to streamline timelines, minimize disruption, and design future-ready system landscapes that reflect the full complexity of their environment.
Proven Success in Complex Transformations
cbs has delivered SDT projects at scale for organizations with complex system landscapes, stringent regulatory requirements, and zero tolerance for disruption.
One of cbs’s most complex utility projects involved a national provider in Malaysia, with nearly 6,000 employees serving 790,000 account holders. The company was operating in a fragmented state, split between SAP ECC and S/4HANA environments, with more than 500,000 vendor and customer records spread across 22 companies and 190 plants.
cbs ushered in a unified landscape by combining Selective Data Transition with system landscape transformation and change management. The result was a streamlined environment that preserved critical data, connected core processes, and set the stage for long-term operational consistency.
cbs has delivered complex transformations well beyond the utility space. At Kemira, a global chemicals company, the team completed a full transition to S/4HANA Private Cloud in just 15 months, consolidating 60 SAP systems and 58 company codes along the way. cbs migrated more than 4 billion records with near-zero downtime, consolidating finance structures and enabling centralized reporting through SAP Datasphere. The engagement marked a step change in Kemira’s global IT architecture and underscored the feasibility of high-speed, high-integrity SDT execution.
SPS Companies, a U.S.-based steel processor, faced a different challenge: decades of customization in a fragmented on-premise SAP R/3 environment. cbs led a full-scale system reorganization, selectively migrating five years of transaction data and reducing database volume by 89 percent. The project unified 15 company codes within a single S/4HANA Cloud landscape and introduced harmonized financial structures that will support long-term scalability.
Importantly, this engagement represented the first-ever cloud based SDT migration, delivered on SAP’s single Tenant Edition (today part of RISE with SAP). The project demonstrated cbs’s ability to lead from the front – aligning closely with SAP’s strategic direction and setting benchmarks for future cloud migrations.
A Smarter Path to S/4HANA for Utilities
Utilities navigating S/4HANA modernization—often alongside mergers, carve-outs, or major organizational shifts—require more than technical tooling. A tailored SDT program from cbs offers the clarity, control, and execution strength to make complex transformation achievable.
Victor Puente is Head of GTM — North America at cbs Consulting.