Insights

Paul Comlay

Delivery Director, Bluefin Solutions
Utilities

What can SAP HANA do for the telecommunications and utilities industries?

As the introduction of faster microprocessors, RAM/disk/solid state memory, broadband and so on, has steadily increased the performance of PC's and computers in general, the more and more things we find for them to do. Examples of this continuing trend could be improvement in productivity by cramming more into a day by completing tasks faster or, by increasing efficiency and effectiveness by performing ever more complex tasks within a time critical environment. One constant in life is that time is finite and has value which can be is measured in multiple ways. For businesses this could be being first to market with a solution or product, or identifying trends which open the doors to competitive advantage.  

In highly competitive service industry environments, like Telecommunications and Utilities, organisations deal with millions of demanding customers who continue to expect more for less as well as immediate availability of service at any time of day or night. These customers are also easier swayed and can switch their loyalties with relative ease. Therefore, speed in all forms of business decision making is of the essence, e.g. decisions regarding infrastructure development and rollout, the development of new product offerings and services, or the management of campaigns and promotions which target offers to customers, especially those in danger of moving to a competitor. The fact is, all companies do this and the more successful ones are better at it than others.

What can SAP HANA offer?

With SAP HANA the rules of the game have suddenly changed. In its rawest sense SAP HANA could be construed as nothing more than a database package that is faster than the competition. However, when the performance improvement is of the order of 100 to 10,000 times faster than the competition, it doesn't take long to realise that this step change in performance could have a reciprocal step change effect in decision making across the company, potentially resulting in the redesign of business processes and organisations.
 
Computing tasks that were previously completed as a batch process and took 12 to 24 hours can now be completed in real-time within a matter of seconds or minutes. The implications of this for a services company, is broad and varied. It wouldn't surprise me if a Telecommunications company used this technology in its front office environment to empower its call centres to derive and offer specific, uniquely tailored service contracts in real-time to high valued customers.

Deeper customer profiling and segmentation could be carried out resulting in unique service bundled offerings for smaller, tighter groups of customers who collectively are 'sticky' - i.e. university campus students and groups. 

With the rollout of smart meters, electricity companies will be able to collect customer consumption data every 15 minutes or so, rather than once a month (as is the current norm). With this data they can then better segment their customer base and derive and offer new targeted service plans that align more closely with their respective consumption rates.

And why stop there? In some markets around the world where Utilities deliver Telco, Electricity, water and waste services, customers could be offered real-time tailored service contracts based on their projected consumption (calculated from the very latest data) of a bundle of what are dissimilar services.
 
What is clear is that a step change maker such as SAP HANA can enable existing organisations to do things it presently but extremely faster. However, more forward adventurous or forward thinking organisations can achieve an even greater step-change by reviewing and redesigning IT business processes and potentially the organisational structure as well. With this in mind, the fast moving and highly flexible and responsive services sector is ideally placed to exploit this technology to the full.