Dwr Cymru Welsh Water transforms its financial planning using SAP

With high expectations and a tight deadline to meet, I’m proud to announce the success on how Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water (DCWW) the not-for-profit water utility organisation has transformed its financial planning processes using the SAP BPC 10.1 Embedded Model solution.

Developed by Capgemini’s SAP Enterprise Performance Management Solutions team, DCWW operational and capital expenditure, and budgeting and forecasting processes have been upgraded to drive efficiency and improve planning quality. With DCWW being the first within the water utilities sector to adopt the SAP BPC 10.1 Embedded Model running on a SAP BW 7.5 on HANA highlights positive transformation within sector.

Like many other UK water utilities, DCWW has made a significant investment in SAP for their core back and front office applications. The SAP BPC implementation was critical part of DCWW’s Management Accounting Transformation Project, which aims to remodel and improve their financial processes, whilst reducing business risks. Given the relatively large scale of their activities, DCWW’s operational and capital expenditure planning and reporting processes must be accurate, effective and efficient to deliver the best value to its key stakeholders i.e. its customers…but these processes were previously based on a series of offline spreadsheets.

DCWW established a number of objectives for the SAP BPC implementation including:

• Reducing its reliance on offline spreadsheets previously used for core planning and reporting
• Enabling regulatory rules and calculations to be derived automatically
• Allowing business users to break down information to understand root cause analysis
• Enabling budget holders to plan and analyse both operational and regulatory views of spend

Prior to the implementation, Capgemini carried out an initial requirements analysis and high-level design to help DCWW to understand the capabilities of SAP BPC and align internal stakeholders around the objectives of the implementation. To accelerate this process, Capgemini applied various SAP BPC template solution examples, which enabled DCWW to benefit from the best practice and experience of other clients and industries.

The SAP BPC solution was on time and to budget despite it being widely recognised at project inception that the implementation timeline was extremely aggressive. As a result of this transformation initiative, DCWW achieved/expects to achieve a number of tangible and intangible business benefits, including:

• Enabling driver-based budgeting and forecasting
• Process efficiencies and enhanced user experience
• Greater understanding and management of regulatory costs
• Facilitating better decision-making
• Risk reduction
• Improved ownership and confidence
• Future scalability

With the implementation of its SAP solution, DCWW achieved simpler, more efficient, and more effective financial processes. Now, the company has gained greater visibility of its spend, enabling it to make decisions with greater confidence that they will have a positive impact on its customers.

If you would like to read the case study, click here.

If you want to know more about SAP’s next-generation SAP business planning solutions and how Capgemini can bring their knowledge, experience and capabilities to help your organization to deliver benefits, make sure you attend my session at the upcoming SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG event in Orlando where I will present this story.

Yet, the excitement doesn’t stop there, Capgemini Experts are available at Booth 622 to talk through how you can turn your vision and strategy into reality.