French Multi-national EUC company introduces SAP applications and ensures ongoing Innovation

A financially competitive and feature-rich SAP maintenance model overflowing with benefits 

A French multi-national energy and utilities company that provides global leadership in the fields of electricity generation and distribution, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear and renewable energy, and energy transition wanted to create a financially competitive and feature-rich SAP maintenance model. By doing so, the company was looking to its IT department to optimize the lifecycle of SAP applications, processes, and resource allocation, while eliminating redundancies and generating substantial cost savings. 

The organization’s IT department provides SAP application services for different business units in France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK – and the model it was seeking would serve these internal customers. To deliver this model, the company reached out to Capgemini to focus on contract maintenance, the transformation of 43 SAP business applications, and a committed savings target.

A comprehensive SAP service center maintenance solution from Capgemini’s ADMnext 

The Capgemini team began work on an SAP service center maintenance solution, which utilizes Capgemini’s Clear Sight IT Decision Maker. to conduct a thorough analysis of the existing SAP landscape. Next, the partners had to deal with the most challenging part of this journey: the transition from the previous vendor. Key members of the delivery team had to physically travel to the previous vendor’s office to ensure a smooth and complete handover. To make the process smoother, a cultural training program was put in place, along with the set-up of a translation factory that helped translate French, German, and Dutch documents into English. 

In addition, approximately 70% of the company’s applications were customized systems, meaning that the team had to undergo on-the-job training and perform a thorough review of application overview documents. Another key challenge was end-user comfort levels with offshoring, which was overcome by arranging a number of client visits to Capgemini’s India center. Following this initial transition phase, the team entered the stabilization phase, which focused mostly on the complete translation, documentation, and stabilization of service levels. A key development during this phase was the successful implementation of a One Team model, which ensured that representatives from both the company and Capgemini worked as one seamless team throughout the entire journey. 

Throughout the run phase, the team helped optimize the company’s processes with a number of additional ADMnext tools, models, and frameworks. These included tools such as RaRe, iDOC, and ABACUS, as well as industrialization levers such as Failure Mode Analysis (FMA), business process focus (BPF), and the continuous improvement plan. A key success was the implementation of the BPF assessment exercise, which provided multiple possibilities for the optimization of business processes. IT KPIs were replaced by business KPIs, helping optimize processes, save time, and improve business satisfaction. One notable outcome from the BPF exercise was the implementation of the iDOC monitoring tool, which helps save time by proactively sending failure alerts to concerned owners. 

Additionally, fixing recurring issues has led to improved applications availability with substantially less downtime while performing business transactions. Proactive alerts on incidents related to payment processes are strengthening business partner relations and delivering savings on penalties and interest for overdue outstanding payments. Automation of the payroll system is improving employee satisfaction with accurate pay slips data and the avoidance of losses of up to 360,000 pounds per year. Bots deployed within the SAP system are reducing manual activities and related costs while payroll automation is bringing substantial legal cost savings and a reduction in manual efforts. Now, the company is working with the Capgemini team to use Fiori automation to simplify the complexities of third-party invoice approvals. 

“During my visit to Mumbai, I was impressed with the fact that Capgemini SAP consultants and analysts were working on our cases with the greatest dedication in an office that is completely focused on us. I was presented really interesting analyses about problems on a few of our applications, followed by valuable proposals for improvement actions and future evolutions of our SAP systems.”

CLIENT’S SAP SERVICE CENTER MANAGER

50 innovation initiatives and 29,000 users across 10 countries 

Another key ADMnext lever utilized was the continuous improvement plan (CIP). CIP provides a structured framework, along with a dedicated forum in order to discuss ideas at the highest levels and deploy them in a planned manner. It was launched to bring in small, incremental improvements throughout the stabilization and post-stabilization phase. Since then, CIP has generated more than 50 innovation initiatives across different areas. Over time, these improvements have led to an expansion in the scope of the partnership, which now includes support for more than 29,000 users across 10 countries. Overall, the collaborative One Team approach brought the following key benefits: 

• Over 25% faster time-to-market after implementation of the flexibility model 
• Average savings of 10% on Total Cost of Operations (TCO) 
• Helped meet end-to-end KPIs through comprehensive process improvement 
• Incident turnaround time improved by 15% by leveraging the RaRe tool 
• Ensured corrective and change management for the entire SAP landscape 
• Optimized maintenance costs with a host of industrialized services 
• 30% reduction in effort estimation time using ABACUS 
• Multi-million savings through multiple payroll automation, legal compliance reporting, and inventory process improvements. 

Moving forward, the company and Capgemini will continue to look for new innovation opportunities, including: 

• Robotic Process Automation 
• Anonymization with the Qlick Gold tool to comply with nuclear data-masking constraints 
• Data mining with the Celonis tool to identify potential business process improvements 
• Chat bots to optimize the user experience and reduce turnaround time 
• Data virtualization to provide users with a controlled and flexible way to give SAP data to non-SAP business users and other applications. 

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