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A couple of facts about water - Humans are 60% Water - After 3 days without water your life is jeopardized - 71% of Earth is covered with Water. So it seems that we would be very concerned about the water industry in our daily lives - Right !? Certainly we at SAP recognize the importance of water in our daily lives and how it can make a tremendous change people’s lives.
Yet beyond the global support we provide to establish and maintain clean water we take it much further. Specifically in the area of utility that provide
water as a service. Two major areas are always involved when we discuss a utility inside of SAP - The physical side and the customer side - For this blog
I'd like to discuss the physical side of things.
Water utilities are by nature asset intensive operations, extraction,purification, transmission, distribution and metering all play a role in the
movement of this most precious combination of two Hydrogen and one Oxygen atoms. Following this we see that a great deal of water utility needs will be
et with a comprehensive Enterprise Asset Management solution such as SAP offers. Let us take this discussion a level or two down and begin to understand
more about our fit.
At the highest level we should consider the pipes - Linear Assets such as water piping is modeled in GIS which in turn is leveraged by SAP to deliver
spatial analysis and work support. Each segment of water pipe can be varying age or material, maintained differently over time and operated / measured
differently.
How about the Pumps that move the water around and provide needed pressure to make the trip upstairs to our tap ? Equipment records with Machine to
Machine communication provided by SAP MII help understand the latest condition of the pump and when / how best to maintain it.
Metering the water is especially important to the revenue side of the business - but even more so in arid countries the concern over water leakage
due to trouble with mains is a top of mind issue. SAP is able to support the search for leaking pipes through the use of modeling consumption in an
aggregate method and comparing these results to customer’s metered use. The difference is an indication of one of two forms of leakage - physical or revenue. Both of a concern but certainly different in cause!
As with every asset intensive organization - a dollar is a dollar be it CAPEX or OPEX line item. SAP Project Portfolio Management provides solid
methodology that will maximize the return on these precious dollars that go to project work. Not only will we be able to improve the allocation of dollars to
projects, we will be able to better track and monitor progress and outcome.
I believe this quick tour around the water company is a leap to recognizing the value to SAP to a water utility. The additional points and how our
customers approach their needs are the deeper story.
During our upcoming EMEA utility conference in Mannheim Germany - I will present this story in a half day workshop Tuesday April 8th - I'd
like to invite you to attend and hear the "Rest of the Story". Please check out the link and attend if possible - Your Body and The Water company will be Glad you did !
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