About the Client
Our client is a Renewable Energy Producer (REP) with over a decade-long trajectory of sustainable growth. They develop, build, and operate renewable energy projects for the long term, with a focus on providing green, affordable electricity to our customers and acting as a true social citizen where it operates.
They currently have a total capacity of over 9GW, including a development pipeline of more than 6GW, across Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the USA, and the UK. The company continues to expand its global footprint across OECD countries, through acquisitions and development of renewable energy projects.
The Challenge
The energy producer was running multiple ERP systems, 9 legacy systems in total and was looking to simplify and consolidate by moving to standardised processes primarily across the finance areas. This will deliver many efficiencies, additional visibility, governance and control across the organisation as a whole, delivering significant value. In essence, our client required one global template based on best practice processes and roll it out that across the globe. This will help drive down their total cost of ownership and drive-up visibility and governance.
SAP Solution Objectives
SAP was chosen over alternative products as our client wanted a solution that was cost-effective and quick to implement across a complex landscape of countries and legal entities. They wanted a model where they could easily adopt industry best practices as opposed to defining each of the requirements. Finally, they wanted to be able to pick the best practice processes and adopt them as an organisation.
They do not have a large team that can be involved in a transformation project where all the processes can be defined as a group, nor do they have the capacity for representatives from each country to be involved in each workshop. So instead, they have established a governance structure with a nominated group of people acting as a design decision board that enables swift global decisions and when needed to involve the specific countries, this has helped achieve an accelerated implementation approach.
The key objectives have included enabling the organisation to scale, driving efficiencies, transparency in decision making and controls, simplification of processes, reducing total cost of ownership and the resilience of IT platform. Access of the system from anywhere and through various access methods such as mobile.
Working with Birchman
The project kicked off In June 2023 and is being implemented in two phases with the final go-live in February 2024. S/4HANA Public Cloud was selected based on their global model with relevant localisations to cover the whole organisation. This will be rolled out to new entities as they come on board.
They selected Birchman as their implementation partner following a competitive selection process having evaluated our credentials as a platinum partner and long implementation history since the mid 1990’s; today we are leading the way with S/4 Public Cloud projects. The client also appreciated that our project team are based onshore unlike many of our competitors, along with a highly pragmatic approach and assisting them with activities that would ordinarily sit with the end user such as managing data and system security.
