Colbún performs S/4HANA Upgrade project on Rise

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We present the SAP S/4HANA and BW/4HANA Upgrade project on RISE with SAP in Azure, from the hand of those responsible in Colbún, one of the leading energy companies in South America.

Colbún S.A. is a Chilean company dedicated to the generation and commercialization of electricity and the provision of energy solutions. It has 27 power plants in Chile and Peru, more than 1,000 workers and an installed capacity of close to 4,000 MW. It has a 13 % share of the Chilean market and is currently working to double its size by 2030 with 100 % renewable energies, offering energy solutions that help the sustainability of its customers. For this reason, the company is actively seeking opportunities to grow in Green Hydrogen and water treatment.

As we told you in the article Colbún and the advantages of having a single SAP service provider (SAP AMS), in an interview with Claudio Gutiérrez, head of Corporate Systems at Colbún, SAP is its main corporate platform, on which all financial, accounting, logistics, purchasing, maintenance, project management, human resources, billing, commercial, etc. processes are supported. Among the SAP solutions they have S/4 HANA, I-SU, SuccessFactors, Employee Central Payroll, PO/CPI, Concur, Ariba, IAG, etc. Their platform was in SAP HEC, and they migrated to SAP RISE. Novis has been since 2020 the partner in charge of technical and functional continuity of their SAP solutions, on both platforms.

The innovation that Colbún needs to comply with its Strategy 2030 requires a flexible and powerful platform. Therefore, in 2023, the company decided to upgrade the SAP S/4HANA system version, as it was already incompatible with the new requirements.

On Colbún’s side, this project was led by two people:

Claudio Tejos, head of Corporate Systems, Information Technology Management, who was the functional leader of the project. His tasks mainly included managing all the impact that the change would have on users, reviewing the project plan and user testing.

Eduardo Cortés, SAP IT Infrastructure specialist, also from Colbún’s IT Management, was the technical leader. He oversaw all the infrastructure required for the operation of the project and the technical activities necessary to coordinate with the companies participating in the project.

From left to rigth: Claudio Tejos and Eduardo Cortés.

Reasons for doing the S/4HANA Upgrade project.

Claudio Tejos points out: “It has been about 3 or 4 years since we had done an upgrade. We had several initiatives stopped for this reason, such as the connection with SAP Ariba. We needed to be updated to support the new business strategies.

The objective of this project was to reduce the technological obsolescence gap of Colbún’s SAP systems, for which the SAP S/4 HANA and SAP BW/4 HANA version was updated, to maintain operational continuity and to be able to grow in a sustained manner. Novis is our SAP partner, their consultants provide support and maintenance to our users, they are very validated internally”.

Eduardo Cortés indicates in turn, “this was a very transversal and visible project in Colbún. We evaluated several options and selected Novis not only because they presented the best proposal, but also because we were already working with them, and we trusted in the great experience of their team of consultants and their knowledge of our internal systems. In addition, Novis had experience in SAP S4HANA migrations”.

Project details

The project proposed by Novis included:

• S/4HANA upgraded from version v1809 to version 2022 SP1..
• Upgrade of BW/4HANA to version 2021 SP4.
• Upgrade of systems hosted and managed by SAP ECS.

The proposed solution was a technical upgrade project, for both systems, which included all technical and functional consulting, as well as:

• The technical upgrade tasks that are not executed by SAP.
• The interaction with SAP for the coordinated execution of the tasks.
• Functional corrections required for the systems to continue operating as they were.
• Support for testing and test monitoring.
• The modules included in the functional scope are all those currently implemented, except IS-U.
• Developments (Z).

How was it developed and what was the result of the project?

Claudio Tejos adds “it was a very challenging project, the most complex was the first month of planning, when we coordinated the work commitments to achieve synergy between the six companies and more than 100 people involved.

The knowledge and experience of the Novis team shows when there are errors, and they can quickly find the solution. We were very satisfied, this project ended successfully, and we were recognized internally.

In the coming years we expect to do annual upgrade processes. We are looking for tools for test automation, to demand less time from our business users”.

For his part, Eduardo Cortés emphasizes “at the beginning of the project we were all a bit tense because of the challenge. The knowledge of Novis consultants was a great contribution. It is a consolidated team, you can see that they have been working together for a long time, which made the development of the project with them very smooth. Novis was also in charge of the relationship with SAP.

When we were in the testing stage, we were pleasantly surprised that we had a very low error rate, around 3% in more than 3,000 user tests.

For the project, our approach was to first do just the upgrade and then do stabilization, and only then start with the innovation issues. It took us three months and now we are already doing the innovation projects.”

This is part of the project team. From left to rigth:

1. Felipe Soto: Logistics Systems Manager
2. Jorge Castro: IT Project Manager
3. Juan Alarcón Ramírez: IT Infrastructure Manager
4. Claudio Tejos: Head of Corporate Systems
5. Eduardo Cortés: IT Infrastructure Technical Leader
6. Luis Jiménez: BI Consultant

If you would like to know more about Novis services, we invite you to contact us.
Article by Gilda Valderrama, Novis Newsletter Editor.