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We are happy to announce that FARYS has gone live with SAP Cloud for Energy. This is a first major milestone in FARYS’ digital journey towards a Smart Water Platform and SAP is honored to be part of this success story.
As a major multi-utility in Belgium, FARYS offers municipalities across Flanders a broad range of services, including water supply and management, domain services, sports facilities maintenance, and purchasing services for governments and nonprofits. With the aim of enhancing customer service and its own enterprise operations, FARYS took another major step in its journey with SAP: with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud for Energy, FARYS benefits from speed and agility in operations as well as extension capabilities to support future innovation and development.
When FARYS started its activities around the Smart Water Platform, the major objectives were a seamless integration between all components, one source of truth for their entire data and extensive analytical capabilities. They are focusing on innovative (future) functionalities and Cloud as their preferred deployment option. Moreover, they wanted to accomplish a meter independent platform with capabilities for integrating different Head-End-Systems (HES), DaaS providers, and other sources of data.
Under these boundary conditions, a co-innovation project between three Flemish water companies FARYS, Pipda and de Watergroep, Capgemini and SAP was initiated to focus on the deployment of SAP Cloud for Energy and its integration to the HES, as well as the integration in the S/4HANA Utilities solution. The partners agreed on a phased approach - to start with certain use cases in such a hybrid environment, and then to rollout more and more devices over time by replacing classical meters with smart meters.
As you can see in the graphic above, S/4HANA Utilities is still the leading system for device master data, leveraging all the advantages of the full meter lifecycle management in the solution. Once a meter is created or changed, its master data is synchronized through a standard web-service-based integration enabling correspondence between the master data in S/4HANA Utilities and SAP Cloud for Energy.
As a next step, the index readings from the HES (60min and daily interval meter readings) are imported through the CIM-based interface (IEC 61968-9). Comprehensive validation and estimation rules assure that the data is of the highest quality before it can be used for subsequent processes. These processes can be the visualization of the data to the end customers through a portal, any type of analytical purpose also in combination with the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), or usage of the data for all backend processes such as billing, move-in, etc.
One example from several innovations that were implemented in close collaboration is the View Operational Monitoring app that is illustrated above. With this tool, the customer can obtain a personalized consolidated view of all data qualities when importing values from external sources.
This is not the end of the co-innovation program with the Belgium customers: as a next step there will be a roll-out of the platform to Pipda and de Watergroep. Moreover, plans are already in place for the extension of the Smart Water Platform towards more IoT and asset-related data enabling processes such as non-index-data, alarm and event management, extensive analytics, and specific use cases such as leak detection in the distribution network, water balance, and water quality to name just a few.
We would also take this opportunity to thank you very much to all the teams of FARYS, Pipda, de Watergroep, Capgemini and SAP for the shared vision, trust and constructive collaboration in creating this first step towards the Smart Water Platform.
Michael Dobler & Holger Schweinfurth
Read the full success story of FARYS Smart Water Platform here.
As a major multi-utility in Belgium, FARYS offers municipalities across Flanders a broad range of services, including water supply and management, domain services, sports facilities maintenance, and purchasing services for governments and nonprofits. With the aim of enhancing customer service and its own enterprise operations, FARYS took another major step in its journey with SAP: with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud for Energy, FARYS benefits from speed and agility in operations as well as extension capabilities to support future innovation and development.
When FARYS started its activities around the Smart Water Platform, the major objectives were a seamless integration between all components, one source of truth for their entire data and extensive analytical capabilities. They are focusing on innovative (future) functionalities and Cloud as their preferred deployment option. Moreover, they wanted to accomplish a meter independent platform with capabilities for integrating different Head-End-Systems (HES), DaaS providers, and other sources of data.
Under these boundary conditions, a co-innovation project between three Flemish water companies FARYS, Pipda and de Watergroep, Capgemini and SAP was initiated to focus on the deployment of SAP Cloud for Energy and its integration to the HES, as well as the integration in the S/4HANA Utilities solution. The partners agreed on a phased approach - to start with certain use cases in such a hybrid environment, and then to rollout more and more devices over time by replacing classical meters with smart meters.
FARYS: Simplified Scope & Scenario (Initial Scope)
As you can see in the graphic above, S/4HANA Utilities is still the leading system for device master data, leveraging all the advantages of the full meter lifecycle management in the solution. Once a meter is created or changed, its master data is synchronized through a standard web-service-based integration enabling correspondence between the master data in S/4HANA Utilities and SAP Cloud for Energy.
As a next step, the index readings from the HES (60min and daily interval meter readings) are imported through the CIM-based interface (IEC 61968-9). Comprehensive validation and estimation rules assure that the data is of the highest quality before it can be used for subsequent processes. These processes can be the visualization of the data to the end customers through a portal, any type of analytical purpose also in combination with the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), or usage of the data for all backend processes such as billing, move-in, etc.
SAP Cloud for Energy: View Operational Monitoring
One example from several innovations that were implemented in close collaboration is the View Operational Monitoring app that is illustrated above. With this tool, the customer can obtain a personalized consolidated view of all data qualities when importing values from external sources.
This is not the end of the co-innovation program with the Belgium customers: as a next step there will be a roll-out of the platform to Pipda and de Watergroep. Moreover, plans are already in place for the extension of the Smart Water Platform towards more IoT and asset-related data enabling processes such as non-index-data, alarm and event management, extensive analytics, and specific use cases such as leak detection in the distribution network, water balance, and water quality to name just a few.
We would also take this opportunity to thank you very much to all the teams of FARYS, Pipda, de Watergroep, Capgemini and SAP for the shared vision, trust and constructive collaboration in creating this first step towards the Smart Water Platform.
Michael Dobler & Holger Schweinfurth
Read the full success story of FARYS Smart Water Platform here.
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