East Coast Utility Purchases HPC Utility Financials Accelerator

We're very pleased to announce that another utility has purchased HPC America's Utility Financials Accelerator. HPC UFA integrates with SAP® solutions to help utility companies address today's more stringent regulatory reporting standards, and provides management with increased audit transparency and rate case support. In 2010, HPC UFA achieved SAP certification as powered by the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform.

Part of our team will be spending the summer in the Mid Atlantic to implement UFA for our customer. The project's goals include the following:

• Allocate costs charged to FERC accounts to transmission and distribution lines of business and state jurisdictions


• Create a controlled report distribution process with less reliance on Microsoft Excel


• Increase flexibility to use accepted cost allocation models for FERC accounts in SAP


• Provide enhanced regulatory drill-down functionality in native SAP ECC 6.0

HPC UFA is already in production at Trans Bay Cable, Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, and Tacoma Power.

Phased SAP Implementation Generates Big Bang Results at Sonoma County

Last November, we announced that Sonoma County Water Agency had selected HPC America to implement SAP ECC 6.0. The project has been intense but smooth; in fact, the Water Agency completed blueprinting, realization, and go-live of its SAP license in just eight months.

This initial phase focused on enhancing critical business processes, including streamlined time card entry, cost and overhead allocation to projects and funds, and a new order management system that improves managerial visibility into business operations.

The project was successful for many reasons: the Water Agency had a truly dedicated project manager; key staff recognized the long-term benefits SAP could deliver; and our phased approach built foundational user acceptance. As a result, the implementation stayed on schedule and budget, and the Water Agency now enjoys functionality its county does not provide. It also caused stakeholders to think about their business differently and authorize the next phase of SAP implementation.

Overall, Sonoma County Water Agency is a real testament to how a smaller utility with modest resources can implement SAP successfully while still meeting the strict requirements of its municipality and contending with decades-old legacy systems. Stay tuned for a full case study later this year.

City of Palo Alto Awards HPC America Financial Supply Chain Management Contract

HPC America will be leading the City of Palo Alto's implementation of a collections management solution in SAP. Our approach will enable the City to create and maintain customer master data records efficiently and thoroughly; to automate the collections and dunning processes; to facilitate the handling of disputes and maintain coordination with external collections agencies; and to access user-friendly reporting on account history, collections data, and advanced collections analytics.

We're looking forward to working with the City on this important, revenue-generating element of municipal operations, and will share more news in the coming weeks.

FERC/NERC compliance report from InsiderResearch

InsiderResearch recently published a special report on FERC and NERC reporting and compliance. The 42-page study is packed with survey data from utility companies, best practice advice, and a chapter from HPC America on optimizing the SAP IS-U/FERC module for today's regulatory and management requirements. The report has great potential to help you prevent regulatory fines and penalties.

When you're ready to enhance your own SAP FERC module, please contact us for some personal insights on improving the accuracy and convenience of regulatory reporting for utilities on SAP.

Update: Request our white paper on enhancing the FERC module's configuration.

SAP Enterprise Asset Management, Plant Maintenance and Design Engineering Hierarchies

HPC America has more client work to share. We're back at one of the largest utilities in the U.S., enhancing a control panel that we had originally developed a few years ago. The control panel comprises most of the functionality the utility needs to accomplish its day-to-day work, as well as manage outage or break down work using SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM).

We're now updating the "design engineering hierarchy" of the control panel. It enables users to select the type of work that needs to be performed, including any technical drawings to be attached, and with just a few clicks the program creates all of the required documents and manages their hierarchy. By using our custom design engineering hierarchy, the Plant Maintenance (PM) module's functional location and equipment master is updated timely and accurately without manual maintenance in SAP.

Replacing legacy CMMS with SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)

A transmission utility company we work with has two separate legal entities, one for Operations and another for Administration. Operations uses ManagerPlus to manage the utility's assets and their maintenance. In order to integrate that data with Administration's SAP FI/CO solution running on ECC 6.0, we're migrating the ManagerPlus data to the SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) module. The end result will be a single, integrated system that enables Operations to manage its maintenance work through PM orders, which collect the hours and rates of the employees performing the maintenance work. The SAP EAM solution will enable maintenance planning, work scheduling and a complete functional location hierarchy for fully-integrated SAP EAM work management and logistics with SAP Financials. By leveraging SAP's deep integration, the utility plans to eliminate time-consuming re-allocations of invoiced O&M work from their separate operating company for streamlined and accurate costing for rate case support.

HPC America Wins Sonoma County Water Agency SAP ECC 6.0 Implementation

SAP implementation news: We recently signed a contract with Sonoma County Water Agency (Water Agency) to implement and host SAP ECC 6.0. HPC America will oversee the project and help the Water Agency to simplify its current business processes and prepare for future projects that require a robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) infrastructure.

The SAP implementation will initially focus on enhancing critical, day-to-day business processes, including a streamlined time card entry for Water Agency employees, cost and overhead allocation to projects and funds, and a new order management system. Contractor billing, accounting for vehicle and equipment usage, and tracking grants the Agency receives will be addressed subsequently.

The SAP software and hosted servers will replace an IBM mainframe computer application. HPC America's hosted services will enable the Water Agency to take advantage of SAP's benefits without requiring an investment in new hardware and IT staff.

More news to follow in the coming weeks.