CitiPower and Powercor Bio

CitiPower and Powercor Bio

CitiPower and Powercor are Victoria’s largest suppliers of electricity to both residential and commercial customers. CitiPower delivers services to Melbourne’s inner suburbs and the CBD, and Powercor deliver electricity to customers in central Victoria and Melbourne’s outer suburbs. The business owns and manages core electrical infrastructure such as power poles and wires and are responsible for providing safe, reliable and cost effective electricity to over 1 million Victorians daily.

Powercor and Noveco ePM

Noveco ePM extends SAP PS, SAP PPM, SAP CPM functionality for Powercor by greatly increasing the productivity of Project Managers who oversee the effective maintenance of electricity infrastructure across Victoria.

Powercor’s SAP Limitations

The major issue with SAP PS, SAP PPM, SAP CPM before we implemented Noveco ePM was the inability to create project estimates, perform cost forecast, manage project variations, compare approved budgets with forecasts, run drill down reports in one central system. Although there are some standard transactions to report on project actual cost and commitments, SAP standard PS lacks functionality to manage project key financial parameters. At every month end we used to download data from SAP into excel sheets and had to run various macros to process and calculate project forecasts in excel sheets (including overheads on cost to complete). This was time consuming, inaccurate and inefficient. Having implemented one of the best ERP systems in the world we still could not manage project monthly forecasts, review projects and programs KPIs instantly at any given time and had to rely on excel sheets.

Noveco ePM Brings Efficiency and Standard Approach

Noveco ePM solutions made SAP to be the single source of truth where projects estimated costs, approved budget, forecasts, actuals, remaining commitments, variations are available in one central system. Noveco automatically recalculates project forecasts, so our Project Managers only had to make manual adjustment where it is necessary. Because Noveco ePM resides directly in SAP ECC and not in BW, all projects key financial information including the latest actual costs is available across all projects in all company divisions at any moment instantly. There are no data downloads and uploads required.
This increased both productivity and efficiency, as Project Managers do not have to maintain separate data sheets to manage their project financials outside of SAP. Noveco ePM brought a standard and consistent methodology to manage all of our projects; it also enabled detailed analysis on program expenditure right within SAP ECC.

“Noveco made SAP to be the single source of truth where projects estimated costs, approved budget, forecasts, actuals, remaining commitments, variations are available in one central system.”

Deepak Sharma

Noveco Implementation Results

The implementation process involved a number of User Acceptance Tests, where some issues were found but promptly addressed. The implementation process required a collaboration between various stakeholders, as it was going to change the culture of the organisation with regards to its projects cost governance.

Noveco were very adaptable with regards to customising the product to meet our requirements. For example, one of the biggest blockers to this product was the use of cost elements (and there are thousands.) Noveco devised a solution to group the cost elements as ‘Resource’ group that resulted in a lot of blockers adopting this system. Noveco were always looking to continuously improve the product to accommodate the requirements.