Utegration
Unleashing the Power of SAP for Utilities

Today’s immensely complex business landscape demands tools that simplify tasks and manage, analyze and capitalize on data like never before. The German software powerhouse, SAP, stands out as a leader in this ecosystem by offering a repertoire of enterprise-level applications for organizations to transform their businesses to become more customer-centric and data driven. Utegration is a full-service SAP consulting and solutions company focusing solely on the utilities industry. Based out of Houston, Texas, Utegration’s services encompass advisory, implementation, solution development, and application managed services. The organization has become a trusted partner to utilities who want to leverage the latest SAP technologies and achieve the greatest value from them. In an interview with CIO Applications, Bart Thielbar, CEO at Utegration, discusses the value proposition that sets his company apart.

The Partner of Choice for the Utilities Community

Utegration was founded in 2008 with the goal to deliver best-of-breed service to utilities across the SAP footprint. “Excellence is our standard” was our motto then, and still is today. Our complete focus is to help our customers envision and realize how to harness the power of SAP so they are able to reach their future state in the smartest way possible.

Over the past decade, as our customers have gotten value from engaging us, we have grown and expanded exponentially. Our customer base is now spread across North America, and the team that serves them has grown to nearly 300 very talented and dedicated professionals. We offer services and products to the utility industry across four domains— customer experience and billing; financial and asset performance management; energy data and analytics; and intelligent enterprise managed services, where we help clients run their footprints for SAP systems.

We are seen as innovators in the market. From a product perspective, we identify areas where customers have needs and create solutions that provide high value. We have a team that is the best in the analytics industry and we offer analytics solutions for customer experience, for asset management, for revenue protection and more. Some of our clients subscribe to our Analytics-as-a-Service offering. This gives them the power to solve a big, specific business problem—like maintenance issues or process inefficiencies in customer service.

Mitigating Challenges and Steering Ahead

The utility market has been in a state of transformation and will continue to be for many years to come. After about 100 years of running their businesses one way, utilities now need new models and technology to adapt and thrive. For example, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and others are causing an impact on electric utilities.

There are also big changes in customer engagement, as customers want to interact with utilities using mobile devices and different channels of communication like social media. Utilities are investing in technology that will support them long-term, and help them run efficiently. Utegration’s reason for being is to help our clients envision and build for the future—which means the right technology, optimized, as well as effective organizational change management to help our customers achieve the value for their technology investments.

When it comes to onboarding new customers, we are actually quite fortunate and flattered. Our current customers often recommend us through word of mouth, so we receive calls or e-mails directly from prospective customers. We are also approached through the competitive tender process. Clients value our expertise in configuring and provisioning their SAP systems to meet changing regulations, as well as customer and operational demands in the market. And we provide 24/7 support for clients through our onshore and offshore locations.

When it comes to innovation, Utegration has built some advanced products on the SAP platform specifically for the unique needs of the utility industry. We have been using the Agile model to deliver projects more rapidly, which has been greatly welcomed by our customers. We’re also preparing our customers for a big change: SAP is moving its technology to the SAP S/4 platform, and all their customers must migrate by 2025. Our customers are going through that planning process with Utegration now so they can be confident in their path to migration and adoption.

Strategic Alliance with SAP

We have had a wonderful, strategic alliance with SAP since our inception and that alliance continues to grow every day. Our customers appreciate the strong relationship we have with SAP and vice-versa. In fact, we were selected as the SAP Partner of the Year 2015 in the utility space. Our commitment to excellence can be measured the company’s success rate: Utegration has had no failed projects. That translates to a very level of high customer satisfaction— including happy customers for SAP.

Fully Loaded Team

Utegration has consistently grown ever since it was founded. This year, we’ve added new leadership to our company. Henry Bailey joined the organization as Chief Strategy Officer. He has spent a good share of his career at SAP leading the global utility practice and is well respected in the industry and by our customers. Sadi Fieldsend also joined recently as Executive Director of Customer Excellence. Sadi is a passionate leader who has years of experience working with SAP and leading digital transformation projects. While we’ve added new team members, we have also maintained the amazing talent Utegration is known for, including our solution and domain leaders, such as Chris Bui, Henry Le, Alan Tan, Kai Bi, and Dennis Kurlandski. People join the company for the challenging projects and family-like culture. We’re really proud of that and know it benefits our customers, too.

Market Leadership and Innovation

In 2019, we see utilities taking bolder steps toward digital transformation. To support them, we will deliver the next level of maturity across all four of our domains. In analytics, we will leverage data modeling, data visualization, and predictive analytics to help clients run with greater insight and efficiency. We will also build new value-based use cases for our Analytics-as- a-Service offering. In the customer domain, we are bringing the next level of sophistication and digitalization to our clients so they can get closer to their customers. In our financial and asset performance management domain, our reporting and advanced analytics solutions will deliver significant savings at a time when utilities really need it, so they can invest in their infrastructure. And finally, we expect growth in our intelligent managed services area as more utilities face resource shortages or want to better manage costs. As experts in both SAP and the industry, we have a lot to offer utilities and enjoy being of service to this important part of our society and communities.