October webinar — SAP IBP for maintenance, repair and operations
Plan Smarter. Operate Better. — Tuesday, October 20, 7:00am PT / 10:00am ET. A 30-minute Espresso Session on how SAP Integrated Business Planning for MRO helps utilities plan spare parts and workforce against planned maintenance: keeping parts available before an asset fails, cutting safety stock without adding supply risk, and lining up crews with the maintenance plan. Live demo and Q&A with Susanne Bottemanne and Navin Kumar Prasannam, SAP’s global industry solution experts for EAM in utilities. It is aimed at maintenance and asset managers, supply chain and inventory planners, and operations leads. Details are on our Utility Events page, and you can register here.
SAP for Utilities, San Antonio — and the wrap-up to follow
San Antonio packed 79 sessions into three days. Read together, the decks tell a clear story of where our community is and what we are all working on together. SAP brought agents that now have dates. Utilities brought migrations and clean-core discipline. And just as we have all been working on analytics for years, some utilities have started their own AI journeys.
What was on the agenda
All 79 sessions, by main theme:
- Running the platform (RISE, upgrades, operations, cost, security): 20
- Data foundations: 16
- SAP’s agents: 14, almost all presented by SAP
- Clean core: 9
- Field and asset operations: 8
- AI that utilities built themselves: 7, all presented by utilities
- Customer experience: 4
- Energy transition and DER: 1
Not everyone can be there, and nobody can be in every room. So after the conference we will post a wrap-up here, and in November we will run a webinar to reprise key sessions — the content worth hearing a second time, and the content most of us will miss because it runs against something else. The date will be posted on the Utility Events page and sent to the community as soon as it is set. If there is a session you are sorry to miss, or one you will want to see again, email me and tell me which one.
Sara Burke, PG&E: organizational change management across a workforce of nearly 60,000 employees and contractors.
Evan Prince, NiSource: running enterprise architecture with SAP LeanIX, connecting the business plan to the applications and integrations that deliver it.
Dates are still being set, so watch for the invitation.
Coming after the conference — Utility Voice article 11, the AI Q&A
What came back. Over nine articles, the Autonomous Enterprise series asked roughly fifty questions about AI in the SAP estate, and The Questions We Need Answered sorted them by who can actually answer them — only you, inside your own utility; only SAP; only we, for each other; and the one nobody has answered yet, where agent authority stops at the OT boundary. It asked each of us to bring one answer to San Antonio.
Article 11 is the follow-through. It will pull together the answers that come back during the conference, room by room, named or unnamed at each contributor’s discretion — and where a question came back empty, it will say so. A null result is still a finding, and that promise is what made the ask worth making. Some answers have started arriving already: SAP made TabPFN-3.5 Plus available in AI Core in mid-September, a partial answer to the licensing question article 10 raised about the Prior Labs models. Article 11 will also take in what SAP reports with its Q3 results on October 21. Look for it in November. If you pick up an answer in San Antonio, or you have one now, email it to me — it belongs in this piece. Keep the full list of questions handy.
In the Day 1 keynote, PPL CIO Dan Johnson showed how PPL has mapped the whole utility before pointing AI at it. One page holds four value streams (Customer, Field Operations, Grid Ops & Pipeline, and Enterprise), framed by end-to-end Safety and Meter-to-Cash processes. Meter-to-Cash alone breaks into eight domains, from meter data integrity and billing accuracy through revenue assurance, collections and regulatory controls. It is written in the utility’s own language, not a vendor’s. And at the base sits “Zero Ops”: an IT operating model meant to run with near-zero manual intervention and full governance. It was the most complete picture at the conference of what an “autonomous utility” actually has to cover.
Autonomous Enterprise:
SAP Utility Voice: The Questions We Need Answered – four rooms, one ask, before San Antonio.
The full list of questions, sorted by who can answer them.
SAP Utility Voice: The Meter Is On. Now Who Controls It? – what SAP’s new AI pricing actually asks of utilities.
SAP Utility Voice: Europe Certifies the Artifact – why your vendor’s certificate is not the thing you think it is.
SAP Utility Voice: The Accountability Gate – who owns the outcome when an AI agent acts.
SAP Utility Voice: Important Updates to the API Policy and the Audits you need to do now.
SAP Utility Voice: Strategic Agreements – What we all agree on.
SAP Utility Voice: The customer an agent sees.
SAP Utility Voice: The Data an agent reads.
ASUG Utility Voice: Who secures the Autonomous Enterprise
ASUG Utility Voice: A call to action for Utilities to influence SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise
The weekly DER digest keeps running — distributed energy research synthesised and published every Friday. Browse the digest archive here.
We now have weekly AI digest here that will be updated weekly.
Two other things worth bookmarking: our webinar library, which now runs to two years of sessions, and the topic subscription page if you would rather only hear about the areas you work in.
If you would like any of the recordings, or if something here is useful and you want to talk about it, email me at marc@utility.community.
Marc Rosson
Utility.Community
425-297-0133