Uniper: Accelerating innovations in process automation from the plant to the field to HR through AI
Explore Uniper’s journey with SAP
From energy generation to trading and services, Uniper SE is a global energy powerhouse. Committed to digitalization, it uses SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to streamline enterprise operations to improve user experiences, increase process efficiency, and better respond to emerging business needs in a dynamic, challenging environment.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Utilities | Düsseldorf, Germany | ~7,500 employees |
productivity improvement for handling remote work requests.
lower risk related to HR compliance and double taxation.
improvement in search results accuracy for purchasers.
Head of Digital Enablement and Automation, Uniper SE
Supporting a sustainable future with innovative, efficient operations
Uniper SE is an international energy company with activities in more than 40 countries. The company makes an important contribution to supply energy security 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, and other energy sources for 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, and it aims for its installed power-generating capacity to be more than 80% zero carbon by 2030.
Part of Uniper’s commitment to energy efficiency and sustainability is a digitalization strategy. The company’s goal is to enhance existing IT investments with innovative cloud capabilities that enable streamlined and new processes from finance to plant operations, procurement, HR, and IT.
With so many systems and processes running across the enterprise IT landscape, accessibility and automation are central to this mission. So is a cloud-first approach that puts mobility and support for emerging business needs high on the list of innovation requirements.
Head of Digital Enablement and Automation, Uniper SE
Enabling more LoBs with AI and other intelligent technologies
To extend, automate, and innovate business processes across lines of business (LoBs), Uniper chose SAP BTP and leveraged the SAP MaxAttention program as part of the premium engagements portfolio of offerings from SAP Services and Support.
The unified infrastructure of SAP BTP allows the extension and integration of existing SAP business applications, including the SAP ERP application, SAP Ariba solutions, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions.
The journey began with Uniper’s “#saplab” initiative, a very close collaboration between SAP MaxAttention and Uniper IT to bring mobile apps to new LoBs. By combining SAP BTP with SAP Mobile Services and SAP Fiori apps, development teams can adapt apps from one LoB to another without creating new security protocols and infrastructure. Mobile apps are also streamlining plant maintenance, procurement, HR, and IT, allowing staff to manage things such as inspection reports, invoices and POs, and HR requests on the go.
Next on the agenda was process automation, with the goal of replacing manual, error-prone processes using AI, workflows, and business rules. In procurement, Uniper used the SAP Fiori design system to build an app for supplier evaluation. Another project focused on streamlining the delegation of authority (DoA) process with the SAP Build Process Automation solution to create requests for further processing in Uniper’s SAP governance, risk, and compliance solutions.
Uniper then created workflows to address entirely new business needs, such as the “GeoFlex” app that was built by teams from the SAP MaxAttention program and partner NGA Alight. Using capabilities in SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Build solutions on SAP BTP, the app allows employees to work outside their home country while avoiding the issue of complex double-taxation scenarios or causing compliance issues for Uniper.
On the back of this successful collaboration, Uniper continued to explore the automation of additional use cases with SAP Business AI, with the first project centered on innovating procurement practices. Previously, Uniper’s purchase requisition process was a predominantly manual practice, with the purchaser required to perform supplier and contracts checks and search catalogs to find the right items before a purchase order could be generated. In what the company calls the “Perfect Purchase Requisition” application, it used SAP Build Work Zone and the generative AI hub capability on SAP BTP with SAP HANA Cloud vector engine. This tool automatically validates and corrects purchase requisitions as an extension to SAP Ariba solutions, as illustrated in the diagram below.
HR Operations, Uniper SE
Recalibrating faster, easier, and more-compliant operations enterprise-wide
SAP Fiori apps are being used to further mobilize plant technicians and streamline maintenance tasks. Uniper plant technicians can now fill out reports from a smartphone or tablet, cutting the time needed for inspections by as much as half. Purchase requisitions are released from SAP ERP to apps for fulfillment and invoice verification, allowing procurement managers to review and complete invoice approvals from almost any device—reducing time to payment by 50%.
The DoA request process for supplier POs and invoicing is far more intuitive and has been reduced from five steps to just one. This has cut the time to process procurement requests by 80% and reduced the error rate from as much as 40% down to just 5%.
HR is also seeing huge benefits. Requesting and approving time off through a mobile app is a time-saver for everyone. In addition, the GeoFlex app has boosted the productivity of Uniper’s HR team, increasing their ability to handle 70% more global mobility requests in the same time. The app has also helped lower the risk of both compliance violations and double taxation issues by 25%. It’s also serving to make the company more desirable in today’s competitive workforce market.
In terms of using the AI-enabled “Perfect Purchase Requisition” application, Uniper has transformed the manual practices of the past. Once a purchase request has been made, an AI agent springs into action, performing semantic searches, making material group and supplier checks, and finding the specific contract before triggering the creation of a purchase order. All these actions are monitored by the purchasing department, reducing the time purchasers spend on finding the correct items, with the tool delivering a 95% improvement in search results accuracy.
There’s also been a huge increase in successful searches on the first attempt, with purchasers successful 85% of the time, reducing the time and effort they spend on multiple unsuccessful search attempts.
And given these process improvements and time savings, it’s no surprise that user adoption of the new tool is currently sitting at 95%, making it an important factor in overall procurement efficiency.
Head of Digital Enablement and Automation, Uniper SE
Continuing a partnership of process and business innovation
As Uniper’s long and trusted partnership with SAP continues, SAP BTP is set to play a significant role supporting process and business innovation well into the future.
SAP Build Process Automation is continually being used to enable more people in-house to support and accelerate digitalization efforts by allowing nontechnical users to automate business processes, workflows, and tasks without requiring IT support and coding.
And Uniper is using SAP Integration Suite to help ensure that all these new applications work together, easing the move to the cloud while also making it possible to maximize existing on-premise systems.
What’s more, with the success of its “Perfect Purchase Requisition” application, Uniper is currently exploring several other use cases for the generative AI hub capability on SAP BTP. Projects for recruiting, asset management, and chatbots are currently in development.