SAP and E.ON—one of the leading group companies in the field of engineering works related to security systems, LED lighting, and green energy technology—announced a new partnership to build a new process and technology platform for E.ON’s network operations using cloud solutions from S/4HANA. The project is set to enable ease of extending the company’s business processes running on SAP Cloud Platform as well as accelerate innovation.
According to the joint statement from the two leading German companies, the new platform will set a new standard in the country’s power grid business. The benefits—expected to be realized by E.ON as early as mid-2022—include:
- more efficient and consistent core processes around billing and information exchange
- simplified information sharing among energy suppliers, grid operators, and metering point operators
- standardized processes and more consistent data, with the various energy billing and data exchange systems at E.ON’s regional units moving to the new platform
- reduced cost of developing custom software (implementing innovative cloud solutions from S/4HANA is projected to save the company more than 40 percent in costs, long term)
- faster and more efficient response to customer requests
As reported by SAP, the decision to build the new platform was triggered by the integration of Innogy into the E.ON Group. E.ON acquired the energy company which was previously owned by RWE last year through a merger squeeze-out that made E.ON the only shareholder of Innogy. With the completion of Innogy’s integration into E.ON, the company now operates in 15 countries and employs around 75,000 workers who develop and sell products and solutions for private, commercial, and industrial customers.
CEO Johannes Teyssen emphasized the company’s plans to carry out the full integration of Innogy rapidly. He said,
“We’ve always stayed on schedule and will continue to do so, in integrating Innogy. We now can and will move forward even more swiftly with the operational implementation of the integration.”
Thomas König, board member in charge of energy networks at E.ON commented on the new SAP partnership:
“Partnering with SAP enables us to redesign processes and structures, especially following our acquisition of Innogy. This project will set a new standard in the market. Having maximum automation and standardization on the new platform will make our processes much more efficient.”
How E.ON Embraced Digital Transformation with SAP Cloud Platform
E.ON group has been a long time partner and customer of SAP. Back in 2016, with support from the SAP MaxAttention team, E.ON was able to develop innovative solutions to face the changing market through new technologies from SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Digital Business Services, and SAP Leonardo Innovation.
To support the creation of new business models and processes, E.ON decided to extend its existing IT landscape with technological solutions from SAP. With the cooperation of SAP MaxAttention, the company developed the E.ON Prototyping Factory which facilitated the evaluation and development of new business solutions in sustainably changing the company’s mode of operation.
Niklas Arndt, Head of Common Services at E.ON said of the digital transformation,
“We here at E.ON have noticed that if we want to drive innovation we have to adopt new approaches. We want to be able to quickly make the requirements of our customers tangible and really visualize them in order to achieve entirely different discussions with the customers and to find out other solutions than before.”
With the new partnership with SAP that will leverage cloud solutions from S/4HANA, E.ON’s innovative business processes running on SAP Cloud Platform can be extended easily, further allowing the company to focus systematically on its core businesses of intelligent power distribution networks and customer solutions.
