How often do we hear that it takes a long time to implement new solutions?
How often do we see projects taking ages to show something tangible and real to business people, something that could be used in real life and for real customers?
Well, our people have delivered a working solution to support advanced sales processes for a real customer, in a real project environment, setting up a fresh SAP CRM for Utilities instance in just over three months!
Early in the year, our consulting team had agreed to take on the challenge to prove a real customer that SAP CRM for Utilities would be able to meet demanding business requirements around B2C energy sales processes, aiming at showing the flexibility of the SAP solution, the ease of use of the new system while leveraging on the existing IS-U instance.
This was as a key input to a strategic decision for the selection of the CRM platform aimed at supporting the business for the future.
The team adopted the Advanced Delivery Model, minimising the time to implement the solution and gain acceptance by the customer by using predefined content to show the customer how to execute the relevant processes directly in SAP systems.
The consultants collected and validated the specific requirements with regular play-back sessions to users, focusing on maximising the use the standard configuration to implement, on the customer’s system, using customer’s data and configuration, best practices that could be easily ported in production.
The production-ready solution included:
- Set up of a fresh, new SAP CRM for Utilities
- Configuration and testing of the integration with SAP IS-U and replication of data to/from SAP CRM
- Definition of a number of “products” that mimic existing and new tariffs
- Define and create variable configuration for the product “attributes”
- Define and configure the pricing tool
- Define the relevant billing configuration and the integration with the CRM product configurable attributes
- Configure and test the sales processes up to the point of acceptance of the offer
- Trigger the Change of Supplier processes
The scope involved mapping and integrating the existing IS-U and market messaging applications, in a copy of the production environment.
The team comprised Utilities consultants from the EMEA and Global ENR hub, coordinated by the local MU and supported by the regional organisation.
Thanks to the extraordinary contribution of Marlene Goncalves, Carlo Avversari, Maria Santos, we were able to deliver the critical elements that allowed the SW sales organisation to close a multimillion deal that included our Software, Support and Consulting contracts in spite of a very aggressive competition.