Hidroelectrica is the 2017 SAP Quality Awards Gold Winner (CEE) in the Fast Delivery Category
Background
Hidroelectrica is the Romanian national company licensed to generate electric power from hydraulic potential energy of over 250 hydroelectric plants from the river basins in Romania. Through its electric power generation business profile, core business activities include maintenance, investment projects, electric power production and trading.
Hidroelectrica used 8 isolated ERP systems covering few financial and maintenance processes needs. The former legacy systems provided limited reliability on the consolidated financial statements and no direct connection between the managerial accounting and the maintenance programs. The other business processes used Excel or some external applications, providing inadequate visibility and control for the management.
Challenges
The main challenge was the short implementation time available for obtaining a set of fully functional processes (all the core processes, allowing the decommissioning of the existing systems). The SAP ERP had to accommodate more than 3,500 employees and 300 SAP users from HQ and 13 branches.
The complete system had to cover all the value chain inside Hidroelectrica, from managing purchases and acquisitions, through controlling budgets and costs (salaries, parts, and subcontractors), following all the way to energy trading and production monitoring. The customer needed a centralized system with strongly connected business processes and better corporate governance and segregations of duties.
The key requirements were process integration, business optimization and transparency, increased efficiency in the managerial decision process, modern accounting, control and management methods, and the implementation of multiple labor management and division forms.
Solution
The project is highly innovative due to the adoption of business best practices using a preconfigured baseline system and a very fast go live. In an industry where projects last between 18 and 36 months, the Team achieved a complete implementation in two steps, in 5 months and then another 7 months. Within a year Hidroelectrica had a functional and complete ERP and reporting system.
The cutover and go-live activities were minutely scheduled, with detailed tasks for everyone involved, from the first day of the month of go-live until the 25th day of the next month, when the fiscal reports were due.
The first go live was achieved on September 1st 2016, including all core financial (FI, CO), logistic (MM), and human resources management (HR) processes in the preconfigured baseline (all-in-one) form. The project schedule was closely monitored in every steering committee, management or regular project meeting.
The second go live was achieved gradually between January 3rd and February 1st 2017, according to each department’s readiness for processing the required data. From the business perspective, the go live was January 1st 2017 as all 2017 data was input in the system.
Result
The SAP system gathered the relevant legacy data from the existing eight financial systems, using a well-defined migration strategy. The financial department confirmed the closing balances in the eight separate systems and the opening balance in SAP ERP.
The project helped Hidroelectrica adopting the industry best practices. Processes in various branches are managed in the same way and configured in a single approach, consistent and auditable for the entire organization.
Using the SAP ERP system, Hidroelectrica was able to react promptly to legal changes (such as VAT reports changed in July 2016, October 2016, and January 2017). The former distributed system could not have coped with these significant changes.
Business reports, previously maintained in excel spreadsheets, are now obtained from the SAP system providing accuracy and transparency. Users can input this information directly in the SAP system, while managers can verify key figures without needing additional external reports.
About the project
“Thanks to SAP Best Practices for Utilities, we were able to have a fast implementation and help ensure a quick return on investment to cover key business requirements. This project should become a reference point and a case study for the IT and business community of Romania for the budget, fast delivery, and the quality of the implementation.”
Yugo Neumorni, CIO, Hidroelectrica
