Kick-off SAP Cloud for Utilities Co-Innovation Group in Heidelberg’s App-House

After SAP announced in the spring that it would significantly accelerate the development of the new industry solution SAP Cloud for Utilities, the first potential pilot customers met with the responsible development departments in Heidelberg in July 2019 to launch a joint co-innovation project.

During the two-day workshop, 12 energy suppliers and IT service providers from Germany, Austria, Portugal, China and the USA, together with SAP and Accenture, discussed a cooperation model that ensures the consistent alignment of the solution with market requirements and enables a rapid market launch. The primary goals of the co-innovation project are the fast and agile realization of the consolidated market requirements as well as the immediate productive implementation of the new developments by the participating pilot customers.

After the kick-off, nine utilities companies have confirmed their interest in being part of the Co-Innovation Group as contributors, among these utilities companies we have EDP from Portugal, a leading utilities company from Hong Kong, rku.it, Conergos, Innogy, MVV from Germany, and two leading utilities companies in the US, one of them is SDGE. The activity with these key utility players has started and during October the first workstream workshops with the development teams will be held. The Co-Innovation Group is still open for utilities companies who are interested to join as active contributors and SAP expects other key players to join the Co-Innovation Group in the next weeks.

The first series of workshops of the Co-Innovation Group with the SAP development teams will be conducted during October in Frankfurt.

With the foundation of the “SAP Cloud for Utilities Co-Innovation” Group, SAP is continuing its successful tradition of developing industry standard solutions together with customers and market partners: The On Premise industry solution SAP for Utilities (aka “IS-U”), which has been available since 1998 and has been continuously further developed since then, was developed together with 7 pilot customers from Europe, the USA and New Zealand. Today, SAP for Utilities is the market-leading customer information and billing system for the utility industry, processing more than 3 billion customer invoices per year worldwide. With the completely newly developed SAP Cloud for Utilities, SAP offers an alternative that can intelligently supplement or completely replace the traditional SAP for Utilities – depending on our customers’ preferences.

Please contact me if you want to now more about the program or if you are interested in joining the Co-Innovation Group!