The Customer
The largest state public power utility in the United States. New York Power Authority (NYPA) provides some of the lowest-cost electricity in the nation, operating 16 generating facilities and more than 1,400 circuit miles of transmission lines.
The Project
Adoption of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) to replace legacy SAP solution (BW-IP) and manual processes, while modernizing reporting
Overview
NYPA’s strategic plan details the vision of becoming the world’s first fully digital utility. The organizational objective towards digitization and automation of multiple business processes and practices are fundamental to delivering on NYPA’s commitment to be the world’s first fully digital utility. New business intelligence capabilities, innovative analytics, and real-time access to data were growing needs across the business.
The Challenge
NYPA identified challenges when it came to its previous approach to financial planning and analysis (FP&A) which relied on its leverage on legacy and manual processes to address planning and reporting needs. Many of the previous processes and systems were Excel-based, enduring far too much manual input. This caused the previous environment to encompass disparate data sources and lacked the ability to access and analyze the data on a detailed level.
The desired outcome was to have the ability to showcase visibility and automate the entire process of eight core business groups throughout the enterprise while streamlining the operating forecast processes to meet regulatory, security, and management reporting requirements.
The ability to normalize data throughout the organization while setting up automation standards to reduce risk, regulate reporting and reduce previously incurred human error, exposing the organization to never before seen information were the key drivers in the NYPA’s decision to move forward on such a large-scale project
The Solution
When NYPA’s looked to transform the FP&A reporting and automation process they turned to Improving (Toronto), an SAP Gold Partner that specializes in delivering advanced analytics solutions for the utility sector with industry-leading Financial System Architects and Consultants who have delivered upon various projects, using SAP BPC, SAP SAC, BOBJ, and BW/4HANA.
Improving (Toronto) conducted a data and organizational readiness assessment to provide a total solution to determine the status of existing processes, present and future architecture, and the financial budgeting & planning within NYPA’s environment before preparing for deployment. While the assessment provides an overview of the organization’s current state of data analytics, it also identified voids, helping to identify the prioritization of workloads to offer the greatest business impact. SAC was selected given its capabilities and fit within the SAP landscape.
The Business Benefits
NYPA was able to leave its legacy systems and limitations in the past, with better business decision-making and outcomes coming in the initial successes of the Improving (Toronto) deployment.
With the adoption of SAP Cloud Solutions, the level of detail and visibility required was achieved allowing for the automation of regulatory and variance reporting. By normalizing data, cross-collaboration between business units was made seamless accounting for process improvement against KPIs. Most importantly, NYPA was able to leverage predictive data and innovative analytics to set forecasts for outward years, helping to reduce manual effort.
Why Improving?
By leveraging SAP Cloud Solutions, the Improving team was able to design an architecture that successfully delivered the desired insights by combining data from multiple business groups.
SAP Analytics Cloud is an analytics and planning solution supporting trusted insights and integrated planning processes enterprise-wide to help client decision-making.
Get Started
Learn more about how Improving can help you get started by contacting us today at sales@improving.com or filling out a contact form through the link below.
