Capgemini’s “One Team” approach brings trust and innovation to major energy player

Optimised SAP application lifecycles, processes, and resource allocation have generated substantial, ongoing cost savings

Challenge

French multi-national energy and utilities company, ENGIE, wanted to create a financially competitive and feature-rich SAP maintenance model to optimise their applications and processes. The global leader in the fields of electricity generation and distribution, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear and renewable energy, and energy transition was looking to eliminate redundancies and generate substantial cost savings.

They turned to Capgemini, who worked hand in hand with ENGIE’s internal team to deliver their ambitious plans that would see them transitioning from their previous vendor to a corrective, evolutive maintenance setup. This model would mean ENGIE could benefit from Capgemini’s vast experience in delivering excellence and innovation to a broad spectrum of clients.

Solution

Capgemini used their economic Application Portfolio Management (eAPM) to analyse the existing SAP landscape and designed a service centre maintenance solution, including an offshore team in India.

To increase end-user comfort levels with the 60% offshore model, Capgemini arranged a number of client visits to their centre in India. Concerns around sharing sensitive nuclear-energy-related data with the offshore team were successfully addressed with the implementation of an innovative data scrambling solution.

After the transition from the previous vendor was complete, the project entered a period of stabilisation, when the “One Team” model was introduced. The approach saw ENGIE IT and Capgemini teams working seamlessly alongside each other in a relationship of trust and a spirit of innovation. This ensured that the team in India was not just a development silo, but an integral part of a collaborative team of consultants, functional and technical analysts adding value at every stage.

The latest applications to be integrated into the service delivery centre in 2023, Storengy and Elengy, harness the latest high-performance SAP S/4HANA technology to deliver new functionality to support the production and transportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) all over Europe. In the current energy climate, LNG is a strategic factor in the transition to cleaner energy and energy security, as well as being a major, high-margin opportunity for ENGIE.

A number of innovations outside of the core systems include the use of mobile devices, such as barcode scanning in warehouses, and a tool to extract system logs at the time of an incident, to make the investigation and resolution process considerably more efficient. SAP Fiori has been used to create more user-friendly interfaces, with bots being developed to automate some complex tasks.

Benefits

By partnering with Capgemini, ENGIE benefits from reduced, predictable ongoing costs for running their IT systems, including day-to-day helpdesk support, maintenance and upgrades. The initial benefits of the partnership included:

• Over 25% faster time-to-market
• Average savings of 10% on Total Cost of Operations (TCO)
• Incident turnaround time improved by 15%
• 30% reduction in effort estimation time

But, of course, the advantages don’t end there. With Capgemini’s global position as a leader in harnessing the power of technology, ENGIE can also enjoy:

• End-to-end consultancy in defining and delivering newly identified business requirements
• Proposals for innovation driven by Capgemini monthly innovation meetings and centres of excellence
• A One Team model to support a collaborative, shared approach and remove silos
• Efficient use of staff based on effective capacity planning, active skills management and mutualisation of resources
• Business Process Focus (BPF) approach, to ensure that business processes are analysed and optimised first for efficiency, before applying IT solutions

Satisfaction surveys across all modules in all functional domains have shown year-on-year increases since the start of the partnership, to the current average of 4.7 out of 5.

The main challenge for the Capgemini team is continuing to innovate with the highly mature system now in place. However, the advent of Storengy and Elengy in the current energy climate brings new opportunities for technological advancement in this long-term partnership, which is based on effective communication, trust and sharing.

“I was impressed with the fact that Capgemini SAP consultants and analysts were working on our cases with the greatest dedication in an office that is completely focused on us.”

Engie’s SAP Service Centre Manager

Capgemini is trusted by its clients to address the entire breadth of their business needs, from strategy and design to operations. Contact us today to learn how we can help you harness the power of technology in an ever-changing world.