Contact Energy: Mitigating risk in budgeting and financial planning processes
Explore Contact’s journey with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning
Contact Energy is one of New Zealand’s largest energy retailers and generators. Their vision is to build a better “Aotearoa” (the Māori-language word for “New Zealand”) by leading the country’s decarbonization journey. It wanted to mitigate risk in its budgeting and financial planning processes so its finance team could make more-confident decisions. The SAP Analytics Cloud solution provides business intelligence and enterprise planning capabilities to this end.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Utilities | Wellington, New Zealand | >1,200 staff |
spreadsheets to zero spreadsheets with SAP Analytics Cloud.
seconds, from up to two to three days, to consolidate data for periodic budgeting.
General Manager – Wholesale Finance and Financial Control, Contact Energy Ltd.
Modernizing budgeting and financial planning to support business growth
Contact Energy Ltd. (Contact) is a leading energy generator, wholesaler, and retailer in New Zealand. With an estimated 585,000 customer connections across the country, it supplies electricity, gas, Internet, and telecommunications. Over its 25-year history, Contact has built a flexible and largely renewable portfolio of assets, operating 11 power stations and producing up to 85% of its electricity from renewable sources.
Contact’s financial budgeting in its enterprise processes to manage labor, capital expenditure, and operating expenses was risky and cumbersome. For example, more than 100 Microsoft Excel spreadsheets were manually populated with data from numerous sources, including the SAP ERP application and third-party payroll systems. This process was error prone and time consuming. And with an absence of tight controls, there was potential for sensitive financial data being exposed or leaked.
The company sought to modernize its budgeting and financial planning capabilities, primarily to mitigate risk in the processes but also to drive efficiency. It wanted to add more value to the C-suite with proactive insights and support for future initiatives, such as expanded scenario modeling. Contact wished to use technology smartly to support its finance department that is small by design. It also wanted to support the company as it continues to bring new products to market and improve both employee and customer experiences.
Enabling the business team with a cloud-based analytics solution
Contact chose the standard and professional editions of SAP Analytics Cloud for planning to support its budgeting and financial planning processes for several reasons. With data processing carried out in SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud, the company eliminated the 100-plus spreadsheets and manual data uploading and downloading. Replacing manual data consolidation with automated budget-planning capabilities means the relevant information is visible and “live” for modeling and scrutiny as part of the budget-setting process. And a financial planning overview is available at any time (see the figure).
SAP Analytics Cloud for planning supports both the scale and robustness demanded by Contact’s enterprise workloads and calculation complexity, and the solution natively integrates with its chart of accounts and work-breakdown structures. The solution can be implemented, run, and maintained by the finance team and the CFO. This was an important requirement because Contact wanted this team to be able to manage the software, adopt innovations, and influence the product road map. Independent of the IT department, the business team can now implement models, stories, and complex data actions, which are core elements of budgeting. The team can also prepare and issue templates for each budget planning round.
Finance has benefited from its involvement in the user community, contributing to the quarterly “customer influence requests” program that’s part of SAP Analytics Cloud. For example, the new optimized story experience integrates features for building unified stories and designing analytics applications. So, the team can create customized interactions and add custom logic with a variety of widgets, functionality, and scripting capabilities. It also had input into the capability for data action tracing, which allows the debugging of data actions directly within the design-time experience.
Contact worked with the Customer Success organization from SAP and a customer success partner from the Cloud Success Services group to establish and maintain a productive working relationship. This included setting up regular communication channels to proactively collaborate and promptly address issues. By efficiently channeling Contact’s feedback to the product management team at SAP, Customer Success helped improve the functionalities of SAP Analytics Cloud and contributed significantly to shaping the road map and enhancing the overall project success.
Creating a future-proof foundation for financial planning and budgeting
The major benefit of using SAP Analytics Cloud for planning at Contact is that it has mitigated risk in its financial budgeting processes, meaning that human error, security or data breaches, and data in silos are minimized. With business intelligence and enterprise planning capabilities, the cloud solution enables fast process execution by company management and delivers a foundation for the present and future.
There are also advantages from an IT perspective. As a user-friendly solution with native integration to SAP S/4HANA, the business team can build, manage, and maintain the solution without having to rely on the IT team. SAP Analytics Cloud has allowed Contact to modernize its budgeting and financial planning processes, allowing better and more-confident decision-making for the business. It serves as a future-proof solution, with areas such as advanced modeling and scenarios as well as predictive planning waiting to be explored.
Finance Systems Manager, Contact Energy Ltd.
Expanding the use of analytics and empowering continuous improvement
Having successfully moved from manual to automated budgeting processes in SAP Analytics Cloud, Contact’s finance department will continue to adopt innovations to pursue continuous process improvement. The company is hoping to avail itself of the predictive planning capability for SAP Analytics Cloud to enrich the process and allow the business team to explore “what if” scenarios. Thanks to the integration with SAP S/4HANA, the company will also investigate the use of the solution for business reporting. As Contact seeks to expand its business-led ownership of enterprise software, it’s considering employing SAP Ariba Procurement solutions.