ENGIE elevates its billing process with SAP S/4HANA®

French multinational utility company ENGIE wanted to transform its billing and customer care processes to support growing business needs.

With the purpose of accelerating the transition toward a carbon-neutral world, global energy company ENGIE offers sustainable, competitive solutions to customers across the globe. However, its business processes built around a legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system were not intuitive, and new and infrequent users found it difficult to navigate them. Large commercial customers, in particular, were having suboptimal experiences with the energy producer’s consolidated billing processes, which were complicated and time-consuming. Maintenance and enhancements to the legacy system also caused significant delays and a longer time-to-market.

Another major challenge was to carve out ENGIE’s Enterprises and Collectivités (E&C) business from another business unit and reduce the cost burden of carrying two units in the same system.

As a leading energy player in the world, ENGIE realized it needed new technology and new business to build resilience and make itself sustainable in the long run. The company decided to retire the 20-year-old SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) system it had been using and put in place a simple and flexible solution for optimal operations.

Solution

TCS helped ENGIE move to an SAP S/4HANA Utilities billing and customer service system with minimal disruption to the business. 

ENGIE partnered with TCS to simplify and modernize billing and customer care for its large commercial customers. With a partnership that goes more than 10 years, TCS brought the required and unparalleled contextual knowledge to the engagement. We understood ENGIE’s need for a robust digital core that could help drive innovation and business growth. We also understood the importance of a simpler system with quicker turnaround time for changes to adapt to innovative and newer technologies.

TCS enabled the global energy player’s migration to a new SAP S/4HANA Utilities-powered system for billing and customer service with no disruption to the business. Our contextual knowledge was key to carving out the new entity and taking the right dataset to the upgraded system. We migrated a 14-terabyte (TB) Oracle production database, more than 25 billion data records, and about 56 inbound and 42 outbound flows.

TCS used a partner-provided tool to migrate ENGIE’s large commercial customers’ data from the legacy environment to the new SAP S/4HANA Utilities one. This strategic move helped streamline processes and operations for both ENGIE and its large commercial customers. We also simplified the customer data model, enabling faster data processing and more accurate financial reporting.

By fully integrating the new SAP S/4HANA solution with the company’s existing IT landscape, we enabled the following quickly and efficiently:

• To make bill-to-cash processing more efficient, we used SAP S/4HANA Utilities and SAP Financial Contract Accounting, an essential part of SAP Utilities Core Business modules.
• To improve customer invoicing for multiple sites and to prevent erroneous invoices, we used SAP Convergent Invoicing.
• To bring consistent and a holistic user experience by applying modern design principles, we leveraged SAP Fiori.
• For effective and optimized recovery of unpaid debts, we followed the SAP Business Rule Framework.

With the Fiori apps, TCS enabled a contemporary design for the new billing and care solution, prioritizing ease of use and responsiveness. This resulted in a highly intuitive and personalized user experience for ENGIE’s business users.

What’s more, we ensured that the entire migration was completed within the committed timeline of 48 hours with zero critical post go-live defects.

Benefits

ENGIE elevated user experience and set the stage for future innovations.

The SAP S/4HANA implementations resulted in numerous benefits for ENGIE—from real-time data exchange and a simplified user journey to improved performance for online transactions and faster processing of invoices. The multinational utilities company was able to improve user satisfaction and enhance operational efficiency significantly.

The new cloud-based SAP S/4HANA system simplified the management and administration of the IT landscape. Today, it serves as a robust digital core for business process simplification and innovation. ENGIE has now got a system that is future-ready and more adaptable.

Tangible impact:

• Performance: 20% performance improvement for online transactions
• Sustainability: 70% reduction in legacy data, leading to a decrease in ENGIE’s digital carbon footprint
• Reporting: Improved financial reporting with simplified data model