Announcing HPC's Rapid Prototype Service for SAP New GL Migration

How will the SAP New General Ledger impact your financials?

Find out before committing to a costly, time-consuming migration through HPC's exclusive prototyping methodology and regulatory reporting solution.

The HPC Rapid Prototype Service is a fixed-price consultation that simulates the SAP New General Ledger. It shows how migration will affect your natural and regulatory accounts by modeling your existing FERC configuration. The Rapid Prototype Service is based on HPC America's 15+ years of experience with utilities, and our software solution HPC Utility Financials Accelerator, certified by SAP as powered by the NetWeaver® technology platform. It's cost effective, efficient, and utterly transparent. For utilities seriously considering migration, there is no better way to make an informed decision about the New GL.

Learn more online or download the data sheet. To discuss your plans for SAP New GL migration, please contact us for a consultation.

HPC CEO Jerry Cavalieri to Join SAP Advisory Board of San Francisco State University

We are pleased to announce that Jerry Cavalieri, CEO of HPC America, has joined the SAP Advisory Board of the College of Business at San Francisco State University. The Advisory Board provides guest lecturers and collaborates with the SFSU Information Systems (IS) faculty to enhance the University's curriculum with respect to SAP and the employability of IS graduates.

SFSU Professor Sam Gill commented that, "Jerry will bring his vast experience in helping organizations implement SAP to the development and implementation of SAP-enriched curricula at SFSU. In particular, Jerry will assist with the integration of SAP into the financial curriculum, which would also also include the implementation of GAAP using SAP. Jerry will also advise on how to extend the SAP curriculum to the use of the Sybase platform (acquired by SAP) to advance mobility solutions."

Open jobs: SharePoint Developer and SAP BASIS Consultant

HPC is hiring for two contract positions: a Microsoft SharePoint Developer, and an SAP BASIS Consultant. Both roles are for work in the San Francisco Bay Area, so local candidates are a must. Make sure to include a cover letter with your resume that articulates how you'll add value to our team and help delight our customers.

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SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Benefits

The latest water cooler talk at HPC was about Enterprise Asset Management. By combining elements of Plant Maintenance, Project Systems, Materials Management, and Warehouse Management, SAP EAM enables utilities to realize much higher productivity from PM orders compared to Internal Orders. After setting up a Functional Area hierarchy and identifying the location of all assets, utilities can create orders more efficiently via notifications (what we'd call a "pre-order"). So if the inspection of a pump, for example, identifies necessary corrective maintenance work, the order for that work can be created automatically. Tight integration with the MM module, plus records of prior labor and parts history, also mean that repair kits with all relevant parts can also be identified easily.

For utilities that are considering transitioning from their legacy CMMS to SAP EAM, we would make two particular recommendations. First, ensure that your project team includes subject matter experts from Engineering, Construction, Generation, Transmission and Distribution Maintenance—that is, the people who know what it takes to fix things that break. Their knowledge and requirements will ensure the success of the initiative beyond the needs of IT and Finance. Second, conduct a thorough review of all equipment so that nothing is inadvertently left out of Plant Maintenance. For selected assets, seriously consider bringing in a year or two of work history from the external CMMS.

Document Splitting and the Balance Sheet in SAP New GL

In all of our previous posts about the SAP New General Ledger, we've only looked at P&L accounts.  But what about the balance sheet? Using the New GL will eliminate either the accounts approach or the company code approach to IFRS compliance using SAP. A somewhat complicated feature is the use of document splitting, which we'll touch on next.

Let's suppose a vendor is paid with invoice line items charged to both generation and transmission on the same invoice, but with only one offset to the vendor account on the balance sheet. Using document splitting, the offset account charged to accounts payable is allocated or "split" between the generation and transmission lines. So, if $300 is charged to generation and $500 charged to transmission on the same invoice, the offset for the total of $800 is split to "follow" the P&L accounts that were charged originally.  By doing this split, separate balance sheets can be generated for each segment (i.e., generation and transmission) below the company code level. This will save time during document entry, as the preparer doesn't have to be affected by a process change. An employee in Accounts Payable doesn't change his SAP business process. Rather, in the background, SAP will split the transactions entered to create the separation by segment.

Document splitting can be a complicated undertaking and shouldn't be conducted without ample testing. In fact, a utility's New GL conversion scenario should consider the impact of document splitting when determining a migration data and activation date. Since most large utilities can have thousands of open items during a New GL migration, it is suggested—and we highly recommend—to set an activation date as close to the migration date as possible to limit the amount of documents (and line items) that will need to be split.

New SAP for utilities email newsletter

We've just launched an email newsletter for SAP for utilities professionals to get our latest news and insights. We'll send periodic product updates, customer case studies, white papers, and other tips and tricks on regulatory reporting and enhancing SAP for utilities. We won't share your personal information with anyone outside HPC, and you can unsubscribe at any time.  Subscribe to our email newsletter online.  If you have any requests for content that we cover, please let us know.