TEAG is one of Germany’s first energy providers to fully migrate its energy accounting processes in all three of its roles – as supplier, grid operator and meter operator – to the SAP Cloud. By doing so, the company aims to optimize its IT operations and better support its specialist departments through additional standardisation and automation, without compromising on flexibility in the choice of custom solutions for special requirements. Due to TEAG’s size and complexity, this innovation project serves as a model for the German energy industry.
The four-year contract is worth an eight-digit figure for the consortium made up of adesso, Natuvion and Power Reply. All three are acclaimed SAP specialists and certified SAP Focus Partners for energy processes under the software developer’s Diamant Initiative. The consortium members are also close development partners of SAP and play a part in the definition of process standards.
This wealth of expertise offered by Olaf Reiter from adesso orange – adesso’s SAP consulting business – and his team of specialists is what tipped the balance in the adesso-led consortium’s favour in the public tender.
As general contractor, adesso will take charge of project management and leverage its significant SAP and industry experience. The three members of the consortium are involved in all relevant S/4HANA and S/4HANA Utilities transformation projects in the German energy industry. The project team can draw on a large pool of highly qualified experts at the adesso Group, which includes adesso orange staff and a team specialising in SAP integration with MuleSoft.
adesso, Natuvion and Power Reply will provide TEAG with in-depth support when it comes to change management and adapting internal end-to-end processes to S/4HANA Utilities standards. The aim is to model at least 80% of these processes on the basis of either these standards or industry best practices, thereby reducing process costs and easing the workload at the specialist departments at TEAG and its three sales, grid operations and meter operations subsidiaries. The partners will serve individual requirements on the basis of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which TEAG can use to realise additional innovative specialised solutions as and when necessary.
Power Reply is primarily taking change of customer experience and customer engagement, while adesso’s responsibilities include introducing the SAP MaCo Cloud and integrating SAP BW/4HANA. Migration expert Natuvion’s task is to transfer data and processes to the cloud. The cloud systems are operated by SAP, allowing TEAG to benefit from modern and up-to-date SAP applications and removing any need to operate costly in-house infrastructure for the Utilities industry solution.
“By migrating SAP S/4HANA Utilities to the cloud, we are reducing our local IT infrastructure and the complexity of our SAP systems as a whole, as we are moving away from chunky custom code and more towards standardised processes,” explains Philipp Lübcke, Head of IT at TEAG Thüringer Energie AG. “This reduces the burden on almost everyone at the company, not just our IT and development teams. Despite the high level of standardisation, we still have easy access to custom solutions for special cases through the Utilities Industry Cloud.”
