Electric utility increases FERC reporting flexibility and labor burden transparency in SAP

"Regional Utilities" is an electric utility company serving 60,000 delivery points in the United States.

In anticipation of its 2016 rate case, RU saw an opportunity to improve its SAP Financials foundation before beginning the significant effort of prep and filing.

To that end, RU engaged HPC America to move regulatory accounting (SAP FERC) into its SAP ERP, and to implement a new fixed overhead design for greater labor cost transparency and efficiency. "HPC's understanding of both SAP and the business of a utility was exactly what we needed to start this project with confidence," said RU's Controller. Read the complete case study.

SAP S/4HANA Readiness - 6 Tips for Utilities on SAP

Today, many utilities are looking into SAP S/4HANA carefully, trying to understand their options and the implications of different approaches to the new, in-memory platform. Concurrent with this research, customers ask us if they should take on new ERP projects while waiting on S/4: “What should we do, if anything, before we’re ready to move to S/4HANA? What are some specific S/4HANA readiness steps?”

While it’s tempting to stay in a holding pattern, we see a number of ways that utilities can prepare for S/4HANA and gain immediate benefits to their existing SAP ERP. Request your copy of our latest CXO Guide to get six S/4AHANA readiness tips that have value even if you don’t move to S/4 for several years—nothing is throwaway work.

Business case for SAP® S/4HANA for utilities on SAP

At HPC America, we've been championing SAP ERP modernization for many years, primarily in terms of Financials and the regulatory reporting obligations with which U.S. utility companies must comply.

 

Now that SAP S/4HANA is available, the business case for updating your ERP is even stronger—especially if you've been tolerating sub-optional performance from your ECC 6.0 system and old business processes.

We see at least six reasons to move to S/4HANA. To learn more, request your copy of HPC's CXO Guide to SAP for Utilities, Building the Business Case for SAP S/4HANA.

Resources for utilities on SAP®

HPC America is pleased to announce a new repository of resources for utilities on SAP. This page centralizes our variety of customer case studies, solution data sheets, FAQs, white papers, and other resources for utility companies on the SAP ERP.

Whether you're running ECC 6.0 or S/4HANA, these documents will provide insights and real-world examples of SAP Financials and Work Management best practices for utilities on SAP. Visit our new resources page for utilities on SAP.

Cost Flow Streamlining for Utilities on SAP

For utility companies running the SAP ERP, HPC America is pleased to announce a new service that improves cost transparency, job estimation accuracy, and operational metrics monitoring. Based on our 20+ years of experience in utility financials, HPC Cost Flow Streamlining delivers the ideal mix of direct cost assignment, allocations, fixed overheads, and final cost settlement to help Accounting, Rates, and Operations perform their work more effectively with SAP software.

This service, typically completed within 3-6 months, minimizes SAP cost assessment processes that are often applied to expense and capital work but are confusing and difficult to explain--let alone plan for. HPC Cost Flow Streamlining replaces opaque allocations with transparent, easily understood overheads that enable project managers to plan and monitor the cost of work more accurately and consistently. Cost Flow Streamlining is available to utilities on ECC 6.0 and S/4HANA Finance.

Learn more about HPC Cost Flow Streamlining for utility companies on SAP.

Improving Budget-to-Actual comparisons with HPC JETS

Budgets are generally entered into SAP at the cost center level. Actuals, however, can be charged to either a cost center, an order, or a WBS element.  So, to compare budget to actual, charges to orders or WBS elements must be settled to the responsible cost center holding the budget and to the same cost element where the dollars were budgeted. Settlement provides a way to summarize actual costs to compare against the budget provided to the cost center.

When a charge is made to the wrong order or WBS element, the charges must be reversed. It is therefore imperative to reverse the charge in the exact amount that was charged erroneously. In order to maintain valuable detail, HPC recommends reversing the individual line items, not the total (or lump-sum) of two or more line items. Reversing and re-posting at the line item level ensures that the cost center receiving the settlement will get full credit (reversal). That said, we recognize that correcting errors at the line item level is time-consuming—and prone to error itself because the process is often manual.

That's where the HPC Journal Entry Transfer Solution (JETS) adds tremendous value. JETS enables authorized SAP users to move dollars from one cost object to another, line item by line item, far more efficiently than is possible manually. Only charges already posted may be adjusted.

Without JETS, users will likely avoid this tedious process, and post a lump-sum adjustment that may not credit the full amount of the erroneous charge(s) settled originally to the responsible cost center. In that scenario, costs may be left in the (mischarged) cost center because line-item charges weren't reversed exactly the way they were charged originally.

In other words, because SAP provides for settlement rules based upon specific cost elements charged, lumping together two or more cost elements into one adjustment can alter the settlement results, leaving dollars in the responsible cost center that would have been reversed had the adjustment been made to the original cost object and cost element. In contrast, using HPC JETS enables you to move all of the dollars to the correct cost object, such that budget-to-actual comparisons will retain their full integrity. Learn more about HPC JETS.

Jerry Cavalieri speaks to SFSU MBAs about SAP

Last night, HPC CEO Jerry Cavalieri reprised his presentation about "ERP's Changing Role in the Age of Connected Everything" to the San Francisco State University MBA program's BPM class. SFSU has a thriving SAP Award Recognition Program for undergraduate and MBA students.

In addition to giving a live demonstration of SAP Financials, Cavalieri discussed how SAP has become foundational to the enterprise, and how businesses adopt new BPM strategies that redefine and modernize their ERP to adapt in today's social, mobile, and cloud IT architectures.

Students were particularly interested in learning how SAP is making the ERP easier to use, via HTML5 interfaces, and in Cavalieri's recommendation to boost their appeal to employers through the development of niche skills and continuous learning of new technologies.