I was recently asked to submit a case study for an SAP User Group Forum. I had to contact our SAP
Analytics Solution Architect to ask him what complex solutions we could present with a customer that nobody else has done.
After a bit of researching we realised, that yes, there are no cool new innovations at some customer sites, but by and large, the South Africa Analytics market already has the best skills and has deployed many innovative solutions.
So, my dilemma – what to present?? the SAP HANA use case is not yet ready to be presented, BW and BOBJ integration case studies have been done, nobody wants to hear about how to design a dashboard …and we didn’t want to open Pandora’s Box - BOBJ 4.0 landscape sizing.
So, while chatting to a customer, and hearing about what they achieved with their SAP Analytics solution, I realised – why present something complex? Let’s show that simple solutions that add the most value are what gives every company massive ROI. So, with that, we agreed to present the case study on how Energy Cybernetics, powered by SAP Analytics and other proprietary applications, and supported by Britehouse, are helping to keep the lights on in South Africa.
Background
From 2008, South Africa’s power generation and distribution utility was forced to implement a program of load shedding to balance the supply and
demand of electricity needs across the country in order to ensure that we were not faced with rolling mass blackouts. There were several root causes of issue, but that’s not important to this discussion.
The load shedding resulted in several suburbs without electricity for several hours each day to manage capacity to service critical requirements industries. South Africans suddenly became green and environmentally conscious = looking for all sorts of ways to stay ‘off the grid’ and still keep the lights.
The government and corporates country implemented various campaigns to encourage (and force) residents to become for energy efficient and thus ensure there was enough capacity to keep the lights on. One of these programs is an information and education process on the current state of power usage to encourage uses to become more aware:
Important lesson: " There is a difference between energy savings and energy efficiency”
Project
Britehouse was approached by Energy Cybernetics, a solution provider of energy efficiency programs to develop SAP Business Objects
Dashboards. The solution would collate and present dashboards to users to make the understanding of energy usage simpler. It also models scenarios to
evaluate the cost benefit analysis of becoming more efficient.
The Britehouse team worked with Energy Cybernetics to develop simple dashboards to present this info. And then realised that the data
collated by BOBJ could also be used as the trigger mechanism to send data to the broadcast channels and verify that the stations have displayed the
appropriate message to +/- 40 million households daily.
Value Add
This is where it gets interesting. The direct value add to Energy Cybernetics is obvious – it has allowed the company to collate and display their clients energy utilisation data using BOBJ Dashboards which allows for simple analysis of complex data.
But the secondary value add which we did not directly determine was the impact on the South African energy consumption patterns from this solution. Because this power consumption alert is sent to every major broadcaster, it is displayed on most television screens during peak viewing periods and every household around the country knows that they can make a difference by switching off non-essential appliances.
Lessons Learnt
By the Way!
The solution was branded as PowerAlert at is deployed to many office buildings and production lines to monitor energy consumption. One of the buildings using this is the SAP South Africa offices.
So we can truly say that: "SAP Runs PowerAlert"