THE BEST RUN BUSINESSES RUN SAP

360-Degree Insight – The Key to Success
Siemens Energy Sector delivers cutting-edge products for the oil and gas industry as well as for power generation, transmission, and distribution. These products include Energy Management Suite (EMS) SPPA-M3000, a state-of-the-art software solution designed to help power-generation companies around the globe master real-world challenges.

These industries have to run their facilities as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible – while ensuring high standards of safety, availability, and eco-friendliness. To deliver on all counts, they need rapid, reliable insight into relevant data across their plant fleets. But visibility is often hampered by disconnects between technical systems and enterprise asset management solutions. As a result, gathering and disseminating information takes considerable time and effort – and there is little transparency into fleetwide costs and runtime performance.

Closing the gap between plant and back-end systems is not easy. Typically, if power-plant operators want to link heterogeneous technical systems to enterprise applications, they have to develop a large number of custom interfaces. This approach not only makes it difficult to implement end-to-end solutions; it is also prohibitively expensive and time consuming.

SAP NetWeaver CE – The Right Tools for the Job
Energy Management Suite solves these problems by tightly integrating disparate systems at a price Siemens’ customers can afford. To develop the solution, Siemens Energy Sector deployed SAP NetWeaver CE. Building on the Eclipse open-source software framework, this state-of-the-art composition environment can be customized quickly to help developers complete their projects – boosting the capability of developers to rapidly create new business processes. SAP NetWeaver CE includes a full-fledged development infrastructure that greatly simplifies the building, deployment, and life-cycle management of composite applications. Moreover, the composition environment is fully compatible with the latest Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE ) 5, for enhanced performance.

“Our business-performance monitoring functionality provides a tailored, role-based view of megawatts generated and associated costs. In the past, this information had to be aggregated manually – which could take weeks.”
-Thomas Dürr, Product Manager for Energy Management Suite, Energy Sector, Siemens AG
Accelerating Development and Increasing Productivity
Prior to the project, Siemens Energy Sector was working with an earlier version of SAP NetWeaver CE. To tool up for the ambitious Energy Management Suite development effort, IT specialists decided to move to the latest release. “We upgraded SAP NetWeaver CE in order to tap into improved features, including the new versions of Eclipse and Java EE,” states Ulrich Schneider, development project manager for Siemens Energy Sector. “These enhancements give us a lot of additional options, simplify many tasks, and reduce time to market.”

And the upgrade has paid dividends: The model-based approach supported by SAP NetWeaver CE enables Siemens’ developers to work significantly faster than with conventional coding. “By allowing us to model applications and providing the framework for generating code, SAP NetWeaver CE greatly increases our product quality. And it allows us to implement more customer benefits in the same development time,” says Schneider.

Built-In Support for Open Standards
Another plus is that SAP NetWeaver CE enables the integration of non-SAP and SAP® solutions, including the SAP NetWeaver Portal component. “Many of our customers use SAP software,” says Schneider. “Energy Management Suite has to mesh with solutions from multiple vendors. So we need a development environment that supports open standards and service-oriented architecture as well as tight integration with back-end SAP applications. SAP NetWeaver CE delivers all of this – plus the comprehensive tool kit our developers need.”

Developers have leveraged SAP NetWeaver CE to create open standards–based composite applications that link SAP and non-SAP enterprise asset management solutions with Microsoft .NET systems used to run power plants. These composite applications have to consume services within the plant environment and expose their own Web services for consumption by other solutions. This was achieved by generating models in SAP NetWeaver CE that can be used with Microsoft .NE T and with services created using the SAP Composite Application Framework (SAP CAF) tool.

End-to-End Workflow and a Familiar User Interface
One of the Energy Management Suite modules developed in this way is an electronic shift log, which records all relevant data from plant shifts. It replaces traditional paper-based documentation with a single, end-to-end workflow – enhancing visibility and streamlining planning. Built using SAP NetWeaver CE, the shift log uses data from technical systems and back-end enterprise asset management software. It not only stores its own data, it also initiates plant maintenance requests and fault alerts in the power-generation company’s plant-maintenance software. Siemens Energy Sector experts created the business objects and database support for the composite application using the model-driven approach supported by SAP CAF.

The electronic log provides employees with role-based access to information via an intuitive user interface. “Developing an interface that would allow staff to quickly and easily navigate through complex current and historical data was a real challenge,” says Schneider. “But the Web Dynpro development environment included with SAP NetWeaver CE enabled us to achieve our goals.” And that’s good news for end users, as Thomas Dürr, product manager for EMS at Siemens Energy Sector, explains. “Although it is not actually an integral part of an SAP solution, our portal-based shift log has the familiar look and feel of SAP applications – so staff require very little training.”

Bridging the Gap Between Disparate Systems
Energy Management Suite modules leverage open standards and service oriented architecture to deliver greater transparency in a number of ways. “One module integrates master data from plant control systems and enterprise asset management solutions. This allows the current status of technical equipment to be displayed on the same screen as plant maintenance tasks,” explains Dürr.

Energy Management Suite also supports decision makers. Sophisticated monitoring software consolidates data from plant systems with information on costs from back-end applications, enabling senior managers to keep tabs on key technical and commercial figures across their entire fleet in near-real time – something that was formerly impossible. Dürr cites one example of this approach: “Our business-performance monitoring functionality provides a tailored, role-based view of megawatts generated and associated costs. In the past, this information had to be aggregated manually – which could take weeks.”

Time and Cost Savings for Plant Operators
Using development tools from SAP,Siemens Energy Sector has created a cutting-edge product geared to the needs of today’s power-generation companies. Energy Management Suite delivers the flexibility needed to weave together heterogeneous systems and processes – and that is due in no small measure to the support for open standards and service-oriented architecture provided by SAP NetWeaver CE. The Web services implemented via the composition environment have not only resulted in a tightly integrated, end-to-end solution. They also make for much faster installation than approaches based on application programming interfaces – saving end customers considerable time and money.

Power-plant operators have been quick to recognize the benefits of Energy Management Suite, which has been deployed across the globe – and the results speak for themselves. “Some customers are telling us that they have been able to generate an additional 50 megawatts a year thanks to central monitoring,” says Dürr.

More Benefits to Come
And power-generation companies are not the only winners. Going forward, Siemens Energy Sector will continue to leverage its new composition environment to quickly and efficiently develop new functionality. “We’re continuing to use SAP NetWeaver CE to build new applications for the suite,” says Schneider. “And we’ll soon be launching a new module that allows customers to create and monitor maintenance strategies using information from technical systems and back-end software.”

“Energy Management Suite has to mesh with solutions from multiple vendors. So we need a development environment that supports open standards and service-oriented architecture as well as tight integration with back-end SAP applications. SAP NetWeaver CE delivers all of this – plus the comprehensive tool kit our developers need.”
-Ulrich Schneider, Development Project Manager, Energy Sector, Siemens AG

www.sap.com/contactsap

50 093 004 (09/01) ©2009 by SAP AG. All rights reserved. SAP, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, Duet, PartnerEdge, ByDesign, SAP Business ByDesign, and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects S.A. in the United States and in other countries. Business Objects is an SAP company. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serves informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.

These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials are provided by SAP AG and its affiliated companies (“SAP Group”) for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP Group products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.