With a rapid deployment of SAP Cloud for Customer, Jemena became the first APJ customer to implement the solution – and gained an unpredecented level of visibility into its customer interactions in the process. Freya Purnell reports.
Background
Jemena is an Australian infrastructure company that builds, owns and manages a combination of major electricity, gas and water assets. Jemena has over 1300 employees across Australia, and manages more than $8.5 billion worth of Australian utilities assets and specialises in both transmission and distribution of electricity and gas.
“At Jemena, our customers are at the heart of everything we do. Millions of Australian households and businesses rely on us to deliver energy and water services safely, reliably and efficiently every day,” says Cameron Dorse, CIO, Jemena.
“To maintain our customer focus and maximise opportunities for growth in a rapidly changing business environment, we made improvements to our business processes, which meant reevaluating our IT platforms.”
Jemena senior SAP enterprise architect, Judith Caball, says the company wanted a central location for all communication and interactions with customers.
“Our customer information was located in different systems and separated across the company. We had no visibility of the day-to-day activities our customer service teams undertook and it was impossible to get one clear view of our key customers across the business,” she says.
Jemena operates three business divisions – gas, pipelines and electricity, and has some of the same customers serviced by two or more business units.
“Without a centralised customer relationship system it was difficult to ensure these customers were being serviced effectively,” says Caball. “We also wanted to establish a streamlined ‘lead to opportunity’ process to ensure information about new customer prospects was collected and acted upon appropriately.”
As well as not having a single source of truth for all customer related data and interactions, there was no visibility of sales cycle activities and customer records, and Jemena didn’t have a collaboration tool to integrate organisation-wide efforts towards improved customer management.
Choosing a solution
When Jemena went looking for a solution to address these issues, other requirements were real-time reporting and mobile-enabled capability. The new solution also had to be implemented in a short timeframe with minimal impact on the business.
As an existing SAP customer, Jemena wanted an ‘out of the box’ application with best practice processes and no customisations. The company teamed up with SAP and implementation partner UXC Oxygen to deploy the SAP Cloud for Customer solution due to its ability to cater to the company’s tight timeframes and deliver the exact functionality they were seeking.
“We were in the middle of a business critical upgrade of our on-premise SAP systems and didn’t want the new implementation to interfere with that project,” says Caball.
The implementation
Jemena was the first APJ customer to deploy SAP Cloud for Customer. Using a rapid deployment methodology, UXC Oxygen implemented the solution in under eight weeks, beginning with a pilot that was delivered for a fixed scope, fixed timeline and fixed fees.
The solution provides full integration with Microsoft Outlook with a single view between the two applications.
UXC Oxygen also implemented ‘out of the box’ sales force automation scenarios, providing account and contact management, visit planning, opportunity management and a ready to use pre-delivered reporting framework.
Cloud for Customer also offers native mobile capability, which offers consistent operability across devices and computers – mobile, tablet and PC.
Business benefits
As a result of the implementation, Jemena now has a unified view of all customer information and interactions across its three business divisions, enabling better customer service delivery.
“We now have a central location and one view of customers across our entire business. We have gained increased efficiencies around call cycle planning, customer visits and other interactions,” Caball says.
Jemena general manager customer service, Erin Chain, says the solution helps drive a deeper understanding of the business’ customers and their needs so Jemena can provide targeted, timely and efficient services. With improved data gathering, collation, aggregation and analysis, marketing, sales and customer service teams can now deliver a consistent customer experience, as well as gain deeper insights into who their customers are and what services they require.
Customer representatives can now also easily access customer information and manage tasks in the field via its mobile capabilities, saving significant amounts of time and increasing productivity.
“Our customer service representatives now visit clients armed only with an iPad, which they use to access and update information when needed, providing better customer service and satisfaction,” Caball says.
With a user interface based on SAP UI5, Jemena is seeing improved SAP user acceptance, and is enjoying a high return on investment from the project due to the fast, cloud-based deployment and subscription-based pricing.
“We now have a cost-effective system where every single opportunity and interaction with the customer from all sides of the business is being captured,” Caball says.
Thank you to UXC Oxygen for its assistance with this case study.
