The utilities business value chain has several unique business functions that are not typically seen in other industries. Even within enterprise-wide functions that are common across other industries, the critical processes and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) differ for utilities. Each of the business functions within the utility has multiple business processes and sub-processes.

For example, the asset management function has sub-processes like plant engineering and asset maintenance, that is, plant maintenance and operations. Operations in a utility are usually very complex, requiring huge amount of data to be managed under stringent regulatory conditions with a very wide and demanding customer base.

For Delhi-based BSES Power Limited, a company with an annual turnover of around 8169 crore, the situation was no different. “To ease out the work of the operations team within the company, we initiated automation of business processes enabling better customer care, and covering automation through implementation of ERP, SAP IS-U/CCS,” says Karan Singh, VP-IT, BSES Power Limited.

IS-U/CCS is an industry solution from SAP which addresses the needs of a customer oriented utility company. The solution encompasses Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Warehouse (BW).

The project was called as Enhanced Data Generation for Enterprise or EDGE that was conceived and implemented targeting one lakh consumers in Phase-I towards migration from legacy application to ERP. The modules successfully implemented included Billing, Device Management, Financial and Contract Accounting and Customer Service.

“As ISU has hardly been implemented in India by any enterprise because of its complexity, cost and availability of skill sets, it became a challenge for us to migrate our existing billing data and make it live for one lakh customers,” says Singh.

The implementation was achieved by first mapping the business process, preparing a Business process document(BPD), taking a signoff from business, mapping as-is process to required process and then automating the same in SAP ISU/CCS.

The EDGE framework was developed by keeping in mind a customer centric view that allowed the team easier tracking of customer behaviour and usage pattern.  The integrated system is flexible and future proof and can be configured to handle changing business needs and demands. It can handle concurrent users and millions of customer accounts.

“Some of the most innovative aspects of this project were seamless migration of live billing data from legacy to ISU/CCS with zero glitch and the handling of change management issues without any operational pause,” says Singh.

The total cost of the project was around 21 crore and the company expects to recover the RoI within a year or two.