SAP ChaRM Implementation at CNP Diane Leal – CenterPoint Energy Prakash Lingidi – CenterPoint Energy

About CenterPoint Energy, Inc.

• Publicly traded on New York Stock Exchange

• Headquartered in Houston, Texas

• Over 5000 square miles of electric transmission and distribution service area

• Assets total more than $22 billion

• Over 8,700 plus employees

• CNP & its predecessor companies in business for over 130 years

Headquarters

Houston, Texas

Location of operations Services to states

• Arkansas

• Louisiana

• Minnesota

• Mississippi

• Oklahoma

• Texas

Total Number of metered Customers

• 5 million plus - Electric & Gas metered customers

Areas of Services

• Electric transmission & distribution

• Natural gas distribution

• Competitive natural gas sales and services

• Interstate pipelines

• Field services operations

Electric Business

• 2.3 million Electric Smart Meters

• 3,700+ miles of transmission

• 47,000+ miles of distribution

Electric Transmission & Distribution

Natural Gas Distribution

Interstate Pipelines

Field Services

Competitive Natural Gas Sales & Services

SAP @ CenterPoint

• SAP Landscape :

• 22 Production and 86 Non Production Systems.

• Technology Operations based in Houston, USA & Hyderabad, India.

• First SAP Golive in 1999.

Solution Manager 7.1 SP13 Enterprise Portal 7.4 Data services

ECC 6.0 EHP7 HANA DQM

CRM 7.0 EHP3 GRC 10.1 BW Portal 7.3

SRM 7.0 EHP3 BPC 10.1 PI 7.1

SCM 7. MDM 7.1 SP13 SRM Portal

BW 7.31 SLT SABRIX

SLD

• Custom Tool developed in house on SAP ECC System using SAP Work orders with custom web front end to capture approval process for SAP transports.

• A low priority change ticket is created in ServiceNow prior to SAP transport migration to production.

SAP Transport Current State

Create

Change

Request

ABAP

Change Requests SYNC

Transport Management

ITS

• In-house developed tool was unable to manage non-ABAP transports (i.e. HANA, JAVA, etc.), resulting in the need for manual intervention.

• A comprehensive view of all pending and upcoming changes on a single system to provide greater visibility and coordination of changes to production systems, does not exist.

• SAP Transports are manually sync’d up in project landscapes.

• Release management was not being utilized

Current State Opportunities

SERVICENOW

• Used for Technology Operation’s (TO) Service Management program.

• Provides a single system of record for all Technology Operation requests

• Gain transparency into all changes in the Technology Operation(TO) environment .

• Enforce standard change management process across entire SAP Landscape.

• Centrally manage change deployment process.

• Reduce number of changes to SAP Production Systems.

• Improve accuracy of release dates.

• Minimize landscape synchronization effort.

• Reduce Total cost of ownership.

Key Drivers For ChaRM Initiative

ChaRM Strategy

Create

Change

Request

ABAP Non - ABAP

SAP Landscapes

CRM Web UI

Change Requests SYNC

Change Documents

Transport Management

Solution manager

ChaRM

• Delivered with SAP Solution Manager; manages activities performed during changes from design to testing to final promotion and ultimately to the production environment.

• Provides a ‘workflow-based’ approval for transport management, as well as audit documentation of the changes in the solution landscape.

• Afforded the Transport Management System (TMS) functionality extension by ensuring all transports are moved together into QA, with integration/regression testing as a ‘unit’, and imported into Production environments collectively.

• Common Workflow and automation for Change management and deployment.

• Integrated enterprise-wide view of all changes in one system. SAP Change requests are initiated from ServiceNow and flow to ChaRM .

• Fewer transports to production with the use of ‘transport of copies’.

• All SAP transport types are visible, bundled and centrally managed by ChaRM.

• “N+1” transport synchronization is now an semi automated process, using the ChaRM retrofit capability.

• Transports are automatically tracked and sequenced for moving into the production landscape.

• Identification of program changes between landscapes using the ChaRM cross system object lock facility.

• No abandoned transports in the SAP systems.

• Elimination of custom tool maintenance for SAP Transports management.

SAP ChaRM Benefits @ CenterPoint

• SAP TCO study identified the implementation of SAP ChaRM, to help reduce our TCO.

• Paradigm shift with the Technology System Control Center (TSCC), providing visibility to all changes in the environment and coordinating the resolution of issues in the environment.

SAP ChaRM Journey

• An investigation of our current change management process magnified the fact that each team was using the custom developed tool differently, and for different purposes.

• Understanding the flow and unique uses of the custom developed client tracking system, identified the following:

– The system had evolved over time

– Different features / functions were developed, as opportunities were identified

– SAP as well as non-SAP applications utilized the system for approvals.

SAP ChaRM – The Beginning

• SAP MaxAttention facilitated numerous workshops to ensure there was a clear understanding of the ‘out of the box’ functionality provided by SAP ChaRM, and how CNP would implement that functionality. – Understand, at a high level, the custom tool currently in use

– Required team members from Application Development, Basis Support, SAP Security and Integration Solutions support

– Ground rules dictated that workshop participants would make the project decisions, and those decisions would not be revisited

SAP ChaRM Workshops

• Technology Operations management support.

• SAP MaxAttention helped with the implementation.

• Limited customization of SAP ChaRM .

• Project team consisting of ‘influencers’ from different teams helped significantly .

SAP ChaRM - What Went Well

• Solution rolled out in phases so that team members could feel more confident. Went live from low transport volume systems to High volume systems.

• Dual SAP transport systems are utilized for the transport management during Cutover and stabilization period with the help of Change Advisory Board for smooth Transition.

• Process established for communicating, tracking ,empowering and resolving issues.

SAP ChaRM Risk Mitigations

• Project Management – This was much larger than expected due to involvement and coordination between multiple teams.

• Security - Security development and role mapping was more complex than anticipated.

SAP ChaRM lessons learned

SAP ChaRM Transaction Types & Roles

SAP Documents Description

Request for Change Unit of Change

Normal Change Planned Transports

Urgent Change Emergency Transports

Roles Description

Requestor Change Initiator

Developer Implements Changes

Technology Operations Tester Validates changes

Business Operations Tester Validates changes

Business Operations Approver Business Approval

Technology Operations Approver IT Approval for migration to Production

Questions

FOLLOW US

Thank you for your time Follow us on at @ASUG365