Sonnedix: Boosting renewable energy production and sustainable growth using next-generation cloud ERP
Replacing legacy systems with SAP Cloud ERP
Sustainable energy producer Sonnedix Power Holdings Limited streamlined its operations across 10 countries by replacing 13 legacy systems with an SAP Cloud ERP solution. With enhanced operational efficiency, faster month-end closing, and access to global insights, the company is now in a powerful position to deliver a continuous, reliable, and efficient supply of renewable energy to customers around the world.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Oil, gas, and energy | London, United Kingdom | 550 employees |
faster to execute month-end closing in the UK.
months to go live across 10 countries.
legal entities deployed in SAP Cloud ERP.
Group Financial Controller, Sonnedix Power Holdings Limited
Struggling to harness financial and operational data from multiple systems
Established in 2009, Sonnedix Power Holdings Limited is a leading international renewable energy producer focused on providing affordable green electricity. With over 15 years of sustainable growth, the company is known for developing, building, and operating renewable energy projects for the long term. In doing so, the fast-growing business has doubled operational generation capacity in the last three years.
Structuring its operations across 10 countries with 13 different ERP systems, its in-country processes varied across operating countries, impacting the consistency of its business flows as well as its ability to efficiently fulfill local regulations.
With a reliance on its finance team to manually identify, collate, and summarize data for reporting and decision-making, Sonnedix knew this additional layer of complexity inflated the already intricate operating requirements of the energy sector. Recognizing the finance team was large and inefficient relative to the business value it provided, Sonnedix decided the time was right to consolidate its operations in one global ERP solution.
Group Financial Controller, Sonnedix Power Holdings Limited
Focusing on operational excellence and globally aligned processes
To enable a unified source for transactional-level financial data, Sonnedix selected SAP Cloud ERP. Sam Packwood, group financial controller at Sonnedix, explains, “We had used SAP solutions in 2 of our 10 operating countries. We were impressed by the capability, scale, and connectivity provided by SAP Cloud ERP. The solution would give us real-time data processing and advanced analytics, allowing us to make informed decisions quickly.”
With SAP Cloud ERP, Sonnedix was able to adopt global business processes for procure to pay, order to cash, and record to report using best-practice workflows supported by SAP. It was also able to retire legacy finance and support systems and reduce complexity in its IT environment. The public cloud offering features automatic updates that keep the system current with the latest innovations and security enhancements. Additionally, SAP Business Technology Platform simplifies integration of SAP Cloud ERP with other cloud services and applications, fostering a more connected and agile business environment.
In terms of executing the transition, Sonnedix developed a detailed transitional model for each country. Supported by an internal project team blended with external consultants and a network of change agents and superusers across a global finance team, the company ran three phases of deployment across a 10-month period. This allowed the team to learn and improve the deployment model at each stage. User training was provided by the internal team to bridge the business process changes as well as the new functionality.
Following the successful deployment of SAP Cloud ERP, Sonnedix implemented the SAP Analytics Cloud solution as a management information layer for the whole organization, enabling extended planning and analysis.
Group Financial Controller, Sonnedix Power Holdings Limited
Lighting the way with SAP Cloud ERP
Sonnedix has successfully implemented SAP Cloud ERP as a single global instance across its operations in Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The adoption of SAP Cloud ERP has allowed the business to operate globally on uniform best-practice workflows with embedded system controls. Its finance teams are now able to provide reliable and relevant data and insights from a single system, harnessing global transactional-level detail in a way that was not possible previously. The structure of SAP data provides a foundation for analysis by various dimensions, including company code, cost and profit centers, and projects, making management reporting significantly quicker.
The company has already seen a faster month-end closing cycle, thanks to the reduction in manual effort and processing. Packwood comments, “We can now respond more quickly to senior-level financial queries, and the data is building to provide future global insights.”
By transitioning to SAP Cloud ERP, the company has been able to retire 13 legacy finance and support systems to date, greatly reducing the complexity of its IT footprint. Together, improvements from the project have helped Sonnedix reduce the operational cost for each unit of additional renewable energy generation. This, in turn, allows the company to be more cost competitive across its development portfolio and in bringing more renewable energy projects to fruition.
Packwood adds, “All these improvements are helping Sonnedix deliver our vision of providing sustainable, affordable electricity to our customers.”
Group Financial Controller, Sonnedix Power Holdings Limited
Maximizing business processes with AI capabilities
With SAP Cloud ERP, Sonnedix has built a future-ready business foundation, smoothing the way to adopting additional SAP offerings as business needs arise. This includes SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions.
The company is already taking advantage of the AI capabilities embedded in SAP Cloud ERP, such as invoice management automation through embedded optical character recognition. Sonnedix is also exploring how it can best deploy the Joule copilot to maximize its use of the solutions and facilitate a new level of onboarding and user adoption.