Day 1 notes are Day 1 Jump Start to SAP for Utilities
This is day 2. The morning schedule included keynotes, a customer panel session, and awards to companies for being "top innovators".
Stephen Dubner, author of Freakanomics, had a big keynote this morning and there was an interesting story about why doctors should wash their hands. There were different studies provided about different ways to wash their hands.
Source: Picture by Jonathan Toomey, Eventful Group who is pictured on left with Stephen Dubner
Stephen Dubner made some interesting comments that bad predictions are never punished (and someone responded by twitter the same goes for weather forecasters). We should understand and know the limits of predictions.
Source: Tom Raftery
At the customer panel, predictive Analytics, asset analytics, aging workforce, energy conservation were the top topics. Customers don't want rate increases which would be needed to modernize the infrastructure.
Customers on the panel said their customers are looking for an Amazon self-service type of model, where they do not want to engage with the company directly.
Source: PG&E
Customer awards were given to Nebraska Power District, CenterPoint Energe, Pacific Gas & Electric, National Grid and Energie NB.
Henry Bailey spoke again, saying customers expect a mobile app to pay and report an outage, and to monitor customer sentiment. The "four pillars" for Utilities are: cloud, mobile, social media, and big data.
He said there are over 2600 utilities around the world using SAP. He said we should Google Solution Explorer to find the Value Map for Utilities. I did this and found this link, which requires a Service Marketplace ID.
Then we had a break and we visited Basis Technologies vendor booth to see a demo of their implausibles solution.
SaskPower
The next session I attended was by Sheldon Smith of SaskPower who openly shared their customer rating scores, and what they did to improve street light improvements. He discussed how mobility helped end user enablement. They are using SUP. They take a long complicated process out in mobile app for casual user. Their power users still use SAP GUI SAP.
They are implementing Fiori with HR with "my pay stub" to approve time sheet and enter time. They had a streetlight story where they had an app with camera and GIS from an iPhones
They did in stealth mode without talking to users. They presented this to their users who complained how this drived more work, need more workers
They had issues identifying which light needed to be fixed. To help speed up the work, they developed a cloud solution to plot on Google map and send to SAP. It has a "locate me" feature and zoom to neighborhood. They received positive tweet in 2 days
Our Presentation
We spoke about our data migration project using SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions. We wouldn't have known about this if it weren't for an ASUG webcast on the topic a few years ago, specific to SAP Utilities.
So I encouraged everyone to visit the ASUG booth outside the show floor to be sure they were signing up for webcasts.
It was nice to be introduced by Sue Daulton, who is the ASUG Volunteer for the Utilities SIG. She ensured we were comfortable, ready and prepared. Also a big thank you to the Eventful AV team for ensuring the video in our presentation worked.
Last Keynote
The last keynote was by Peter Baines, discussing his work Hands Across the Water. I plan to buy his book on the Kindle. It is such a moving story, a recap doesn't do it justice.
Eventful
I finally met Steve Morris today in person, after several phone conversations. Eventful is so good about asking you multiple times, "how is the event going" and seeking feedback.
Reception sponsored by Vertex
We finally went outside for a lovely reception sponsored by Vertex.
- SAP Managed Tags:
2 Comments
