A global energy management firm reduced its lead time in deployment up to 20% by driving business application transformation via SAP Core rollouts.

Client background

The company is an energy management firm that offers solutions for electricity distribution and automation. The European multinational, that has more than 150,000 employees on board, also makes installation components for energy management. With Asia Pacific, North America and Western Europe each accounting for more than 25% of its revenues in 2015, the company has operations across the globe.

Industry landscape

Energy management, an integral part of manufacturing and industrial sectors, is now entering into a phase of consolidation and innovation for optimizing costs and better control of global operations. New and emerging technologies are providing actionable insights for consistent view across the energy industry landscape -- from procurement to order management. Thus, the “one organization” view for companies that have operations across the world helps ensures increased global monitoring of business processes.

Opportunity

The client needed a single view of its core IT systems that would give consistent information across operations. The need of the hour was to have global processes in place that would enable the company to move from country specific to a centralized core IT system. This would help reduce not only overall TCO and rationalize IT spend but also improve customer satisfaction levels. The energy management firm was looking for a centralized design that would scale up their mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy by harmonizing and improving diversified business processes. And also help overcome the challenge of change management as a result of the M&As.

Solution

Wipro partnered with client for Bridge, one of the largest and most complex SAP deployment programs. We helped the client put together a centralized, multi-level governance model for IT systems.

The 3-tier program delivery organization structure looked like this:

Core Team - with solution design authority to govern business processes, solution and data structures

Hub and Spoke Deployment Teams - to maximize coverage and achieve economies of scale

Centralized Factories - for Build & Test, Data Management and training for all deployments

Here is how we helped the client reduce program costs and timelines:

•  Global rollout of SAP core template across 77 countries and about 25,000 users as part of the customer’s Bridge Program
•  Deployed standardized template based on the “Factory Model” concept, with Hub and Spoke Deployment Teams enabling execution of several projects in parallel
•  Delivered pre-configured systems before project kick-off to accelerate Blueprint and ran two pilots in 6 countries to check the efficiency of the templates
•  Designed a core model for governance of global and local processes
•  Usage of localization kits (configuration BC sets, RICEFW objects and Test Scripts) for 20 specific countries
•  Carried out industrialized data transformation and migration from legacy systems using SAP Legacy System Migration Workbench (LSMW) and Informatica tools for uploads

Business impact

The global core system allowed for rationalization of application costs and maximization of savings at the infrastructure level. The Bridge Program significantly reshaped the IT landscape of the client, enabling them to move from numerous local IT systems to one Unique Global Core. This brought down costs drastically.

• Reduced engineer to order cycle time by 25%
• Cost efficiency improved by 20% over previous deployment model
• Harmonization of more than 250 business processes improved customer satisfaction levels, gave a 360 degree view of customer
• Reduced lead time in deployment by 15-20% due to a federated landscape and industrialized data transformation
• Scalability and flexibility of operations reduced deployment costs by 30%
• Improved Master Data quality across operations
• Enabled faster integration of new acquisitions due to unified processes
• Drastic reduction of TCO across application landscape