Adding new lines of business to SAP

We previously wrote about how ARRA has provided millions of dollars to utilities, which presents recipients with the challenge of accounting for those grants. Beyond that, many utilities in rural parts of the country are not only considering investing in their existing infrastructure, but also expanding into new lines of business, such as broadband services, which the FCC has specifically encouraged.

Adding a new business means that SAP will be asked to handle even more data, so its reach needs to be extended for both internal financial and external regulatory views. While every such project will entail customized steps, we see a few that are worth considering:

• Apply existing business processes to the new line of business. For example, in CCS (now CRB) add the new utility service to the customer's bill, while maintaining the existing services. Likewise, keep your existing reports, but simply add a new line to them covering the latest service offering.


• Turn on SAP's Business Area functionality, to subdivide the Chart of Accounts and create General Ledgers for each line of business


• Create dashboards for each line of business with Business Intelligence (BI) to put key financial and operational metrics within easy reach—including non-SAP data that management values for decision-making. Also consider pushing this information out to mobile devices for selected users who are often away from their desks.

We'll report further on this matter in the coming months as we assist HPC customers who are themselves expanding into new ventures.

Smart Meters and SAP AMI Integration for Utilities

Smart meters have been a controversial news topic during the last year. While the idea of monitoring and pricing energy usage by time of day as a means to foster conservation sounds good, in practice it's generated concern and even backlash. Allegedly inaccurate meters make the evening news, and consumers' lack of understanding of what the technology really means precludes a clear connection between their consumption and their meters.

While raising consumer awareness and managing expectations about smart meters will take time and concerted effort, one tool in particular stands out as being integral to that process. SAP AMI Integration for Utilities holds real promise for improved communication. It can be tied into billing to provide residential customers with more information about their energy consumption and resulting costs. It can be used to identify areas for improvement, for example by advising customers on ways to adjust their usage to decrease costs. Likewise, if the system detects a spike in usage, consumers could be notified and asked to identify the cause in order to understand, if not prevent, its future occurrence.

We're also expecting utilities to have to replace outdated systems with more sophisticated solutions that are compatible with unbundled services (and their associated costs). As regulators require a greater diversity of rate plans to support conservation, and as consumers come to expect utility options that meet their individual needs—much as they do from cell phone and cable television plans—utilities will need to measure, manage, and market their services in increasingly more granular terms.

You watch: we'll bet that 20 years from now we won't even remember how it was done before.

Sustainability and SAP - Start Measuring Now

In June, we outlined three different sustainability-related products from SAP: Carbon Impact, Sustainability Performance Management (SuPM), and Environmental Health & Safety (EH&S). We're anticipating that regulatory, political, and community expectations will drive utilities to increasingly embrace carbon reduction, and the first step to doing that will be to establish benchmarks based on historical data. (You can't change what you don't measure!) Utilities therefore need to start tracking generation and spend, ideally on a functional department level, and then get that data into SAP. It's not unreasonable to expect that management will be evaluated on its sustainability performance, such that IT, Power Plant, Fleet, and other department heads will have a vested interest in measuring their respective carbon footprints.

SAP Document Printing Optimization

One of our customers in the nuclear power industry faced daily headaches from printing critical documents with the stock SAP forms (SAPScript). The inherent limitations of that tool for formatting, processing, and development finally became too much to bear, and the customer asked us to develop a better solution.

We solved the problem with coded custom print layouts using Smartforms for key Plant Maintenance (PM) documents, including orders, maintenance plans, and notifications. These layouts allow advanced formatting enhancements that we take for granted in everyday word processing applications—such as indenting, bulleting, and macros to insert predefined text—but that are simply not possible with out-of-the-box SAPScript forms.

As a result of this work, our customer was able to achieve a number of important benefits, including more efficient document creation, formatting, and management; increased readability with fewer errors; and more consistent presentation within and across departments. In addition, the customer is now better able to comply with its regulator's documentation requirements, such as no orphaned signature lines. The Smartforms that we created prevent unwanted line breaks, and enable the utility to print important documents correctly the first time around.

Utilities and SAP Grant Management

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has directed hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to utilities, enabling new projects to get off the ground that otherwise would have never been considered.

What, then, does a utility do to track the grants it applies for and the funds it receives from federal or state agencies? Some utilities are tempted to use an Excel spreadsheet; it's easy to download SAP orders manually, and there's comfort in the application's familiarity. But what are the costs? Let's count them...

    1. Your data is static once you've downloaded it
    2. There's no drilldown functionality for detail support
    3. You can't exclude non-funded costs
    4. You can't summarize accounts into grantor categories automatically
    5. There's a serious risk of manual errors
    6. There's little or no audit capability
    7. There's no document repository

We could come up with additional reasons, but the bottom line is that Excel just won't fly with your external auditor—let alone your grantor, should they want to see how their funds were utilized.

There is a better way. SAP's own Grant Management (GM) module is ideal for tracking every grant dollar received, and it integrates seamlessly with your existing SAP infrastructure (including FM, FI, and CO in particular). GM displays each grant's lifecycle and status, and allows you to establish financial conditions, legal rules, and allowable project expenses.

After Grant Management is implemented, you'll be able to see a running total of the money remaining in each grant, plus have easy access to all of the details for each expense. This degree of transparency makes grant management a no-brainer, and we're recommending that many of our clients consider it seriously. In a future post, we'll get into some of the technical details you should know when implementing the GM module.

Case Study: SAP ECC 6.0 and Smaller Utilities

Trans Bay Cable (TBC) is a $500 million energy transmission infrastructure project chosen by the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to provide reliable energy to the City of San Francisco. Selected over a number of alternate solutions, and running a lean operation with a very small staff, TBC LLC required an ERP system that would meet the same FERC reporting standards of traditional utilities.

The outcome? HPC America architected an SAP ECC 6.0 solution that delivered best-in-class functionality with the highest cost efficiency—illustrating a replicable model for other growing utilities that cannot rationalize conventional, big company SAP installations. Read the complete case study.

Part 3: Capital Expenditures and the FERC Module

Wrapping up our look at the FERC module and capital expenses, we'll use another real-world example.

Let's say we have not one, but two capital orders for the month. The first one has $1M in it. But the second one has $100K posted to it, and it settles to a cost center. Thus, the second order is expense by definition, because all orders settling to a cost center are expensed. Now, let's assume further that the order type is designed for expense. Furthermore, the order was created, but for some unexplained reason, the regulatory indicator never got assigned and was left blank.

When it comes time to run the trace, this second order, having no regulatory indicator, will still need to be translated to the FERC or RUS chart of accounts. The trace is designed with two back-up translation rules in such an event, as follows:

If the regulatory indicator is blank or invalid then:

1. The trace looks to the responsible cost center on the order.


2. If found, the regulatory indicator on the cost center (looked-up on CSKS) is used. This will most often be an expense regulatory indicator.

If there is no responsible cost center assigned to the master record on the order (table AUFK), then:

1. The regulatory indicator is assigned from the default indicator shown on ZFERCR010 (run using ZE_FERCTRACE.) This is the regulatory assignment of last resort.


2. The assigned default is set to CAPT for all instances.

Our second expense order in this example, having a blank regulatory indicator, would then trace the debits to the Holding Account, but would never get an offsetting credit. Why? Because the order is not going to be capitalized. Rather, the order really should have had another valid O&M regulatory indicator, but it was blank and went to 'CAPT' by default. So there in will sit in the Holding Account without ever getting an offsetting credit for the $100K.

What can you do about such a discrepancy? By looking at results by month, you may find a timing problem between what the trace is saying should be capitalized and when the direct post is seeing the actual settlement.

If you can verify that all five conditions for capital orders are validated, there may be at least one order each month that has a blank regulatory indicator. To pinpoint that, reverse one of the FERC periods for the given year in QAS. When re-running the trace, change the default regulatory indicator to another O&M regulatory indicator. Changing nothing else, run the trace, trace post, direct post, and drill-down as normal. Check the balance in the Holding Account for any change. If it changed, then one of the orders supporting the Holding Account was blank, causing the discrepancy.

Got it all straight? Good, this is not easy stuff. Thoroughly confused? Not a problem, we can help.