SAP is working with seven major power utilities to integrate
enterprise resource management software with advanced metering
technology.SAP on April 21 unveiled a collaboration
effort with seven major utility companies to integrate Advanced Metering
Infrastructure technology with SAP’s
enterprise applications for billing, customer relationship management and asset
management.
To support this effort, SAP and the
utilities announced the SAP AMI
Lighthouse Council, which will work to integrate AMI
systems from leading manufacturers with the SAP
for Utilities enterprise applications.
AMI technology enables the remote reading
of electric power and gas meters, with the results transmitted to utilities’
back-office software applications and some front-end applications to calculate
pricing, produce bills, communicate with customers, and track revenue and
assets, according to Wayne Longcore, manager of enterprise architecture and
standards with Consumers Energy, a power and gas utility based in Lansing,
Mich.
Around the world and particularly in North America, Europe
and the Far East, “most utilities are moving to this
Advanced Metering Infrastructure to provide more information to the consumer”
and to bring greater automation to utility business processes, Longcore said.
"A major advantage of AMI is it
provides two-way communication where you’re able to communicate prices and
understand how better to work with pricing environment” so consumers have more
control over energy consumption, he said.
AMI is also the foundation of the
industry’s vision of developing “Smart Grid” technologies that improve energy
efficiency and the reliability of the power distribution grid.
The other utilities joining the Lighthouse Council are CenterPoint Energy, CLP
Power Hong Kong, Energy East, Florida Power & Light, Oklahoma Gas &
Electric, and Publish Service Electric & Gas.
The council is also working with several key meter technology producers,
including eMeter, Itron and OSIsoft, to ensure that their metering systems are
compatible with the back-end SAP for
Utilities applications.
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The council still has a lot of work to do in terms of defining the many
business processes that will be automated by the back-end software systems,
such as processing the data collected and transmitted by the latest AMI
meters. Most major utilities are in process of deploying or evaluating AMI
technology, Longcore said.
The wide deployment of these meters will enable on-demand readers of a
customer’s meter through a call center; support for remote customer disconnects
and reconnects to support the bill collection process; outage reporting; and
the implementation of time-of-use pricing.
SAP is planning to roll out AMI
integration in SAP for utilities by the end
of the year, said Maureen Coveney, industry principal for utilities at SAP.
However, it’s also part of SAP’s effort
to keep pace with similar moves by archrival Oracle in the utilities industry.
In November 2006, Oracle announced it had acquired SPL World Group, which
developed utilities revenue and operation management applications. Oracle
officials said the acquisition was strategic because more than 2,500 utilities
worldwide run Oracle databases and applications.
In January 2008, Oracle announced that Cellnet+Hunt, a developer of metering
and infrastructure communications systems to electric, gas and water utilities
in North America, was deploying Oracle Grid, which is a grid computing system
based on the Oracle database that delivers computing power to customers on
demand.
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