A Rizing customer recently went live on an SAP® build that took three years and 25+ people to prepare for. Read on to learn what the launch contained, and how the customer expects to benefit from the work.
Big Bang
Depending on your interests, the Big Bang Theory usually refers to:
- An explanation for how our universe came into existence
- A sitcom that ran on CBS for 12 seasons
For Rizing Vice President, Business Development APAC Martin Greaves, “Big Bang” has a different (non-theoretical) meaning:
“It’s the typical implementation where you’re basically bringing all key processes for the organisation online at the same time,” he says.
Martin was describing the recent go-live of an SAP® S/4Hana implementation for a large Australian energy provider.
Three years in the making, elements of the big-bang go-live included:
- Enterprise Asset Management
- GIS integration
- Mobility system integration
- Project systems
- Plant maintenance
- Vegetation management
- Safety incident management
- Environmental management
- Operational risk
- Compliance
Dozens of Rizing staff
According to Martin, leading up to the go-live involved a large team of Rizing employees.
“Currently, we’ve got 25 functional people involved and another ten as part of an offshore digital design centre team,” he says.
COVID Impact
COVID has impacted how the work got done.
“The work had primarily been done face to face until about four months ago,” Martin says. “Since then we’ve been completely remote through user acceptance testing, cutover, and go-live.”
Power through partnership
The project was large enough in scale that Rizing worked closely with partners on the project.
“We partnered with Syniti,” says Martin. “They were in charge of the data extraction, transformation and migration.”
IBM was also involved, handling the finance and supply chain portions of the project.
Business benefits
Part of Rizing’s involvement in the project included mapping out expected business benefits the customer could expect to enjoy post go-live.
Cost savings, increased revenues, or improved efficiencies are expected in:
- Capital planning
- Asset strategy and maintenance
- Work management
- Customer Service
- Risk Management
- RIN Compliance
- Data governance and integration
Current project status
Rizing’s work doesn’t end when the go-live switch is flipped.
“We’re currently in hyper-care, which is a heightened support mode,” says Martin. “That will last three months, then there’s a warranty period.”
The first of 1000 steps?
Project launches are often celebrated as the end of a long process involving extreme amounts of planning and elbows-deep work.
And they are all of that.
But that’s not all they are.
“When you go live, it’s not the end,” says Martin. “It’s really the beginning.”
Elsewhere on Rizing.com:
- Press release: Rizing/Syniti Announce Partnership
- Blog post: Five Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started a Global Software Implementation Project
- White paper: Everything to Know About EAM Data Conversion