Five Benefits of the SAP New General Ledger

More utilities are exploring the impact of an SAP New GL migration on their financial and regulatory reporting. While HPC is agnostic in the Classic vs. New GL, FERC or no FERC debate (we've built effective solutions for every scenario), we recognize five key benefits to migrating:

1. Integrates external legal accounting with internal cost reporting
2. Provides a means to satisfy IFRS reporting (although convergence deadlines are still pending)
3. Allows for full balance sheets below company code level (e.g., by segment)
4. Provides extensibility to introduce new fields to the GL (e.g., FERC account)
5. Quickens the month-end close

Utilities on SAP can realize these benefits in part due to key features in the New GL that are not available in the Classic GL. Click the image below for a larger version:

HPC Order Adjuster for SAP Internal Orders

Even in the most disciplined of organizations, corrections and changes to SAP internal orders are inevitable. Employees inadvertently charge to the wrong order number; project managers need to move labor from one cost center to another; or expense orders occasionally must be recategorized as capital work instead of operations and maintenance.

The typical solution is often a lump sum journal entry by the accounting department, which sacrifices detail to expedience. The HPC Order Adjuster eliminates the shortcomings of such basic, corrective journal entries, to the advantage of project managers, accountants, business analysts, and other stakeholders in your organization. It's a set of ABAP code that enables authorized SAP users to move designated transactions from one order or cost center to another, automatically generating fully auditable documentation of the adjustment.

The HPC Order Adjuster simplifies what would otherwise be a prohibitively labor-intensive correction process by seamlessly integrating the order research and adjustment steps into a single graphical interface. Based on your specified search criteria, the Order Adjuster fetches all relevant transactions from your database. Once you mark the transactions or cost elements to be moved to a different order or cost center, it creates a parked document for each transaction via an SAP BAPI call. Upon formal approval, the original order is credited and the new order debited. Learn more about how the HPC Order Adjuster works, or contact us for a demonstration.

New Project: Automated SAP FERC Processing

This week kicks off a new project for another utility company on SAP. We're going to assess the utility's SAP FERC processes, many of which have become manual and are now conducted outside of SAP over the years. Our customer understandably wants to automate these labor-intensive steps, so we'll be considering a number of different ways to optimize their current configuration of the SAP regulatory reporting module and streamline its processes. 

We'll also take into account some related initiatives the company may undertake in the future -- such as leveraging Plant Maintenance further, utilizing the HR module, and migrating to the SAP New General Ledger -- and factor these elements into our FERC automation recommendations.

The net result of HPC's assessment will be a highly actionable report for the utility company. It will lay out several optimization paths to automate currently manual processes and to manage labor, fleet, and cost center costs more effectively within SAP, thereby minimizing the use of external spreadsheets and applications.

In our experience, many utilities that have been running SAP for years benefit from this type of rapid evaluation and action plan. Over time, the configuration of their FERC module and related business processes morph into something less than ideal, and the best way forward is an outsider's fresh look. If your regulatory reporting processes aren't easily managed within SAP, such that management can't get the data it requires quickly and efficiently, contact us to talk about your own assessment. And if you're considering a New GL migration as well, let's talk about prototyping it for you.

SAP New GL extensibility and real-time FERC data

Today, we have more news about prototyping the SAP New GL and real-time FERC for a utility company in the midwest. We've been busy testing primary and secondary cost postings to the new functional areas that we'll use for FERC derivation.

Contact us to learn more.

Interested in this type of project for your utility? Check out our New GL prototyping service.

Functional Areas, FERC, and the SAP New General Ledger

We have now completed the proof-of-concept that secondary cost postings will indeed update the General Ledger. This was not possible prior to the New GL, except for cross-company transactions.

Contact us to learn more.

Stay turned for more updates on our progress later this summer.

SAP Fleet Management and fuel consumption data

As we mentioned earlier in the month, HPC has developed a template for improved fleet management on SAP by integrating mileage and fuel consumption data. Our approach retains preventative maintenance schedules and costs in SAP; allocates fuel costs per vehicle; and derives truly accurate fleet rental prices based on actual cost of service. And all with a single point of entry that improves operational efficiency. Learn more about our SAP fleet management settings for utilities.

SAP New GL prototyping - continued

We've now gotten deep into the data redesign for prototyping the SAP New General Ledger at a utility company in the midwest.

During this pre-migration discovery phase, our joint HPC-client team has also identified a number of areas in which the utility could benefit from a larger SAP footprint, including extending Plant Maintenance to a greater portion of its business; utilizing Project Systems to manage schedules while FI/CO manages costs; and implementing a Fleet Management solution that tracks per-vehicle costs. More on this latter opportunity in the near future, as we're just about to roll one out at Sonoma County Water Agency that will be applicable to many other utilities and municipalities that want to track fuel consumption and vehicle costs as part of sustainability initiatives.