Walldorf, Germany May 15, 2001 SAP AG today announced new enhancements to its solution for utilities, including industry-specific customer relationship management, energy data management, and new work management functionality.
The enhancements to the mySAP Utilities solution work with SAP's billing engine, which is installed in more than 230 utilities in 36 countries and helps deliver streamlined administrative processes, optimized resources, and more personalized products and services to more than 140 million customers.
mySAP Utilities is an e-business solution that offers Web-enabled, integrated solutions for managing personnel, facilities, financial matters and procurement in an open, collaborative, personalized environment. mySAP Utilities provides a fully integrated, scalable solution for companies of all sizes in the electricity, gas, remote heating, water, waste water and waste-management businesses. Its unbundled system architecture allows for a focused system configuration, according to the utility's role as a competitive retailer, pure distributor, meter operator or a full-service utility.
"mySAP Utilities offers what every utility needs in a quickly changing market," said Klaus Heimann, vice president of business development for SAP Public Services Inc. "On the one hand, it provides a comprehensive and adaptable standard functionality that can be configured along each utility's role-specific business processes. On the other, it provides a componentized, extremely scalable system architecture that significantly reduces implementation time and training efforts, improves usability, and cuts cost of ownership."
mySAP Utilities integrates a collaborative and analytical customer relationship management solution, utilizing portal-based workplaces, with a utility-specific back-office system that handles energy data, billing and revenue management for private customers as well as commercial and industrial customers. Designed to support utility enterprises in a competitive retail market, the solution features sales and enrollment applications for customer interaction center agents as well as quotation and order processing for supply products, service products, sales materials and combined products.
The configuration engine of mySAP Utilities allows utilities to define combined products; translate sales orders into energy contracts, material contracts or service contracts; and connect to the utilities billing engine. mySAP Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM) for the utilities industry provides a customer interaction center, offering expanded communications channels to improve customer service including telephony, e-mail, text chat and Web collaboration, as well as communication between service providers in the deregulated energy marketplace.
"Utilities require a solid, integrated solution to avoid inconsistent customer data, uncoordinated campaigns, a disconnect in sales order processing, or even missing or incorrect bills," said Michael Blalock, vice president, mySAP Utilities, SAP America Inc. "SAP offers the first collaborative front- and back-office solution that won't push unnecessary integration costs to the customer."
