Today’s energy industry is rapidly evolving as utility companies strive to turn away from carbon-emitting energy, and rely on more renewable sources of energy, such as electricity which is quickly becoming a primary power source. Utility companies need to continue to innovate to meet the growing demands of their customers and to remain competitive in the broader electricity industry.
ENMAX Corporation is a vertically integrated utility that operates across the energy value chain including as a regulated wires provider, a competitive power generator and an energy retailer. As a retailer, ENMAX Energy provides electricity and natural gas to approximately 725,000 residential and small commercial customers throughout Alberta. The City of Calgary contracts ENMAX Energy to provide billing and customer care for municipal services, including water utility services, garbage, recycling and food and yard waste.
ENMAX Energy needed to define its digital transformation strategy to achieve operational excellence through the modernization of their assets. Working with a tight timelines, in November 2023, ENMAX Energy migrated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud leveraging RISE with SAP, becoming the first Canadian utility to do so. The company also moved its CRM to a co-located Microsoft Azure hosted solution.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and SAP partnered with ENMAX Energy to implement SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition for Industry Solutions for Utilities as the transformation basis. This offered ENMAX Energy holistic coverage across business functions and processes, making it suitable for a future-oriented enterprise, enabling billing scalability for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), building a robust data layer, and supporting the SAP Customer Relationship Management application.
This partnership with SAP and TCS enabled ENMAX Energy to leverage the benefits of RISE with SAP, for faster innovation, improved control over IT infrastructure, scalability, and reduced capital expenditure. The migration process involved carefully transitioning ENMAX Energy from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition, switching and moving software using the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach. ENMAX Energy performed six full conversion cycles to prepare for the final switch, which was completed in just over a year which is a quick timeline for a project of this size.
“We have thousands of customers and hundreds of employees that rely on our billing system, so it was essential that this project be implemented quickly and flawlessly,” said Wayne Calder, Director of Business Applications and Project Delivery, ENMAX Energy. “We brought two teams together, SAP and TCS, to deliver this migration, seamlessly, transparently, collaboratively and on-time, operating as one-team.”
The completion of this project has enabled ENMAX Energy to modernize its billing with SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition for Utilities, improve system resiliency, reduce hardware and license IT costs, and streamline its application suite. ENMAX Energy has enhanced its user experience through improved training software, better performance and optimization of processes using SAP Fiori applications. The project also successfully reduced its data footprint by reducing reports by one third and data through improved data management and compression.
“Customers are at the core of everything we do, and our people are the key to enabling an excellent experience for them,” said ENMAX Energy’s Vice President, Retail Mass Market and Customer Experience, Corry Poole. “This transformation was a critical step in the alignment of our strategic cloud foundation to ensure ENMAX Energy can support future innovation to remain resilient and competitive.”
