Powerlink Queensland is re-platforming its SAP system from its own Azure instance to the vendor’s managed cloud infrastructure, the latest in a series of upgrades of its enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Image credit: Powerlink Queensland
General manager of business IT Mark Pozdena told the iTnews Podcast that the move to ‘RISE with SAP’ is about 50 percent complete, with its R&D and development environments migrated across.
“Our dev environment is one of our most active environments due to the amount of digital projects that we run that are heavily integrated with SAP,” Pozdena said.
Importantly, running the SAP system on RISE opens Powerlink up to start using Joule, which is SAP’s AI copilot designed specifically to allow natural language interaction with SAP.
Powerlink has had success adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot, and this experience influenced the desire to have a similar AI augmentation capability within the SAP ecosystem.
“A big driver for us to go early with SAP RISE was access to the SAP artificial intelligence engines, including Joule, but then also the ability to integrate with [Microsoft] Copilot because bringing some of that functionality and that information together is worth its weight in gold, which we’ve discovered through the heavy use of natural language AI already at Powerlink,” Pozdena said.
“At an SAP conference, we saw a live demonstration of Joule. It’s that bridge to financial information, but more so from a functionality side of things where the natural language capability to interact with SAP functions is pretty groundbreaking.
“If we can use that to link over to other parts of our technology stack, be it Microsoft Copilot, or even Snowflake AI because we’re a Snowflake shop [for enterprise data], there is a lot of opportunity for us to continue that AI journey because the productivity gain is more significant than people realise.”
The path to RISE with SAP
Powerlink has been building to this point for some time, executing an ERP investment strategy as part of a broader effort to realise a digital vision.
The digital vision “is to give all [stakeholders] access to the right people, information, and services the way they need, when they need”, Pozdena said.
Underpinning that vision, and helping it to be realised, is a series of strategies, including a data strategy, ERP investment strategy, application lifecycle strategy and an information security strategy, among others.
“Security, because it’s 2024, and if we don’t have that, the rest of it doesn’t matter,” Pozdena adds.
Powerlink started out with SAP Business Suite, with a “heavily customised” Enterprise Central Component (ECC) at its core, backing onto an Oracle database on Oracle Exadata hardware in its own data centre.
The upgrades started as they often do for SAP customers, with the underlying database migrated from Oracle to an SAP HANA database in Azure.
“We just brought over the ECC as it was,” Pozdena said.
“Essentially, the business end or the end the users interact with, we left as-is so that we [the database and cloud migration] very clearly a technical project.”
A year later, Powerlink upgraded from ECC to S/4HANA, stripping out many of the previous customisations in favour of a more out-of-the-box build.
“We then immediately started with some investment in SAP Analytics Cloud and looked at taking advantage of some of the business planning and budget planning capabilities in that area,” Pozdena said.
“We’ve been on a pretty healthy delivery rate since then, so over the past 18 months we’ve put [electricity] transmission billing into SAP, we’ve stood up a Sustainability Control Tower for climate reporting, and in June, we went to the SAP S/4 2023 [release], so we had the most recent version of SAP.”
Pozdena noted the S/4 2023 upgrade is a prerequisite for being on RISE with SAP.
“RISE is a big shift for us,” he said.
“We were planning to do this in 2027. However, there was an alignment of the planets.
“We were always planning to do a refresh of the cloud infrastructure underneath our SAP environment, and we’ve just moved to SAP 2023, which is a prerequisite for RISE, and so it made sense instead of re-platforming our SAP environment within our own Azure, to re-platform it to SAP’s cloud environment.”
Pozdena said that Powerlink’s ability to achieve what it has with its SAP environment came down to three factors.
“Executive sponsorship is at the top of that list,” he said.
“We’ve had our chief executive, chief financial officer or head of corporate making it very clear why we’re doing things and supporting the changes.”
The company has divided projects by whether they are technical or business changes, and packaged work into smaller pieces, enabling it to make progressive upgrades with reduced risk.
This approach, Pozdena said, reduced the risk of business disruption that is a problem in ‘big bang’ style projects.