Uniper: Driving success by simplifying planning processes across finance and controlling
Explore Uniper’s planning journey with SAP
International energy company Uniper SE reimagined manual year-end accruals by implementing the SAP Analytics Cloud solution for planning. With centrally managed data and digital planning and analytics capabilities, the company improved planning efficiency and accuracy, increasing its agility to respond to market shifts.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Utilities | Düsseldorf, Germany | ~7,500 employees |
person days saved from manual accruals planning activities each year.
business division report links automatically generated and shared.
digital audit trail for accruals process.
Head of Legal Cost Controlling and Accounting, Uniper SE
Reshaping planning with connected digital data and tools
Düsseldorf-based Uniper is a European energy company with global reach and activities in more than 40 countries. With approximately 7,400 employees, the company makes an important contribution to security of supply in Europe, particularly in its core markets of Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
Uniper’s operations encompass power generation in Europe, global energy trading, and a broad gas portfolio. Uniper procures gas—including liquefied natural gas (LNG)—and other energy sources on global markets. The company owns and operates gas storage facilities with a total capacity of more than seven billion cubic meters.
Uniper intends to be completely carbon-neutral by 2040. Uniper aims for its installed power-generating capacity to be more than 80% zero-carbon by the early 2030s.
In Uniper’s central cost controlling department, there was a substantial reliance on spreadsheets to prepare reports for its year-end accruals process, and that workload impacted around 80 customers in more than 40 different business departments. Looking to adapt its reporting style and systems to boost accuracy and efficiency, Uniper sought a new way to deliver granular reporting. Its goals included substituting manual workload, eliminating time-consuming e-mail exchanges, avoiding high risks of embedding errors, as well as setting and adding dedicated responsibilities.
Increasing planning efficiency and accuracy by automating processes
To meet its planning aspirations, Uniper made the decision to develop a proof of concept using SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, part of SAP Business Technology Platform. This cloud-based solution combines planning and reporting in one solution, offering fast and agile planning functionality and comprehensive collaboration options. Uniper also liked how it offers a simplified integration scenario with its existing SAP solution landscape.
As the organization has a strategic partnership with SAP MaxAttention services, rather than evaluating a number of solutions, Uniper decided that collaborating on a proof of concept was the most practical way to see how the planning capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud would meet its requirements.
Impressed by the potential demonstrated by the proof of concept against 20 different planning criteria, the team from Uniper looked to SAP MaxAttention to conduct fit-gap analyses and create additional proofs of concept for specific use cases. The year-end accruals processes of these prototypes demonstrated key functionality and showcased the capabilities of the solution to automatically generate the required modeling and reporting. With approval from key stakeholders across the business to adopt the solution, consultants from SAP managed the implementation.
Program Manager, SAP Data and Analytics, Uniper IT GmbH
Optimizing the speed, granularity, and accuracy of planning processes
For the cost controlling year-end accruals process, Uniper has replaced spreadsheet-based planning processes, improving the speed, granularity, and accuracy of reporting. The use of the planning capability in SAP Analytics Cloud has minimized the human effort required by two-thirds and streamlined the process to just three steps. This has saved Uniper around 20 workdays each year on manual accruals planning activities, allowing it to redirect employees to focus on providing strategic insights.
Developed and implemented by the cost controlling department, the solution has provided a significant benefit through the ability to centrally schedule specific reports and assign users to ease collaboration.
Christian Beckmann, business coordinator, Central Cost Controlling at Uniper, comments: “Another major advantage for us is having access to planning data in one place. This means we don’t have to manage multiple e-mails and 80 different spreadsheets and then compile reports. Instead, the representatives of the individual departments receive an e-mail with a link to the story detailing their department’s data in SAP Analytics Cloud for planning. They can fill out the accrual values and add comments in the story, and the planning values reside in the model. After the planning period is completed, the list of all accrual values is then exported as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and uploaded as a booking file to our SAP ERP application.”
Security provisions help ensure a user only gets access to the story in SAP Analytics Cloud that’s relevant to them. And rather than having to prepare the report, users simply click through to view relevant values and make changes or comments as necessary. All updates have a digital audit trail.
Uniper has also implemented a workflow for monthly accruals for the controlling department using a similar approach.
Extending the use of modern planning and analysis software
As Uniper continues to take advantage of SAP Analytics Cloud for monthly accruals and planning for IT controlling processes, the company is now looking to rebuild other financial planning solutions that are currently using legacy tools. The goal is to speed reporting and ease collaboration, reducing the need for manual input.