Mapping the Journey of Digital Transformation Through SAP S4 HANA for US Utility Sector: 2021-2024

“Today, when the entire world is connecting, interacting and converging through the internet, it is important for all businesses to deploy technology to create better and easy user experiences to harness this scenario. 'Digital transformation' entails 'radical rethinking' and 're-strategizing' concerning deploying technology for usable, accessible experiences and better outreach to a wide base of customers for your product and services. Thus, driving home, the point that how crucial it is to irreversibly transform via use of digital technology in the current business & social scenario.” - As per renowned Digital Transformation (DT) expert.

The alpha level analysis of AllTheResearch.com states that 53% of user stories fail while selecting the right tech partner who can help in achieving DT in agile and scientific manner. SAP has played a critical role in giving dimensions to DT for the energy and power sector, since last 10-12 years.
 

We have seen disruption SAP application has made on legacy business applications of the energy and power sector. In a way it has empowered existing leading businesses by offering a platform and environment which can enhance the business-critical systems. Naturally owing to the dependency of critical system energy and power users are very careful while attempting to change existing production SAP environments, due to possible outages. If we see the evolution curve, SAP has evolved from the original ERP R3 to ECC to S4 HANA. SAP S4 HANA is an in-memory columnar database architecture that is optimized for SAP users/systems. As per leading publisher AllTheResearch.com alpha level finding, in the next 3 years 88% of energy and power companies of the United States will embrace the SAP S4 HANA for below mentioned reasons:

• Speed – Customized high-performance architecture of S4 HANA which uses SAP-optimized in-memory database model can deliver powerful speed improvements in addition to optimizing memory usage to minimize the amount required.
   
• Integration of next-gen technologies- Although this pointer depends on the strategic outlook of companies, broadly speaking utilization of deployed IoT infra with Artificial Intelligence is a strategic roadmap of 75% energy and power companies of United States. Processes like Asset Monitoring, Meter to Cash, RPA enabled machine-human engagement and Advanced Metering will be either redesigned or upgraded by considering customer/user as a nucleus.
   
• Optimized User Experience (UX)- There is a clear gap in the user-friendly interface between a resource who is a master of SAP script and a user who is using SAP for business-critical processes. This gap increases the number of support calls between SAP master and SAP user, which of course not the ideal scenario considering the fast-paced business environment. Now for this point, SAP Fiori delivers HTML5-centric GUI for users, making the SAP interface less complex and much better for the overall customer experience. 
   
• To embrace the trend of Cloud first-Mobile first and Intelligent Technologies- As per a public document of SAP named as -Upgrading SAP S/4HANA: Why, How, and Best Practices; “SAP S/4HANA was first introduced to the market in 2015 as SAP’s strategic Digital Core solution for the Intelligent Enterprise. It was a bold vision to make a major shift from the very successful SAP Business Suite to a new future-focused solution that took a cloud-first, mobile-first, and intelligent technologies approach to SAP’s comprehensive ERP solutions”.

Believe it or not, the risk of storing sensitive datasets on the cloud and cybersecurity threat is expected to reduce -45% by the next 3 years. This will impact the integration of cloud by energy and power players of the United States. At present, most energy and power players run on-premises today, but the integration of S4 will impact the usage of Cloud technologies.

Now the million-dollar question- When is this expected to happen and What revenue disruption it may cause; we should understand that migrating to the new platform will take some time, effort, and monetary investment and of course on the back of automated database clones. As per AllTheResearch answer to above question is, this transition will take 3 years to cross 90% penetration and the $7 billion mark. Our Market Intelligence report covered key pain points, challenges, voice of customers/technology enablers and Contribution of players by their positioning in the value chain.

Key Companies Mapped in SAP S4 HANA:

• Utility Players (Tentative List)
  • Duke Energy
  • AES Corporation
  • Xcel Energy
  • Southern California Edison Co
  • Commonwealth Edison Co., IL
  • Florida Power & Light, FL
• Technology Enablers (Tentative List)
  • ABB
  • Honeywell
  • Tech Mahindra
  • GE (including subsidiaries)
  • Eaton
  • Accenture
  • Siemens
  • SAP
  • Capgemini
  • Microsoft
  • IBM
  • Cisco

Request for Market Intelligence report on SAP S4 HANA’s role in digitizing, energy & power sector of the United States here: https://www.alltheresearch.com/speak-to-analyst/428

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