Uniper: Shifting payroll into the cloud by harnessing RISE with SAP
Rapid delivery of modern payroll in the cloud
Uniper aims to play a central role in pivoting Germany’s energy strategy to become more secure and sustainable. To support the green energy transition, Uniper plans to grow its workforce significantly in the next two years—and its HR must be able to scale. With a payroll system nearing end-of-life, Uniper had just one year to find a new platform.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Utilities | Düsseldorf, Germany | 7,400 employees |
Months to successfully migrate complex payroll into the cloud
Employees onboarded across the globe
Disruption for employees during the payroll migration
Head of HR & HSSE IT, Uniper IT GmbH
Green transition requires HR growth
As one of the world’s largest energy companies, Uniper generates power across Europe and trades energy worldwide. In 2023, Uniper published its new strategy, focusing on accelerating the energy transition in its key markets, balancing greener energy and ensuring energy security.
“The energy crisis has shifted the priorities of the energy system and highlighted the need to accelerate the energy transition – also for us,” says Hartmut Führing, Head of HR & HSSE IT at Uniper IT GmbH. “As a result, our performance over the past two years has been outstanding. Our financial results have been excellent, and we have delivered projects that previously seemed impossible—such as building a new liquefied natural gas terminal in less than a year.”
Uniper is now planning to invest €8 billion in a green energy transformation by 2030. This will involve adding to its hydro, solar, and wind power assets, as well as potentially converting existing gas power plants to green gases such as hydrogen and biomethane. To fuel this transition, the company will need to expand its workforce significantly, and aims to hire a large number of additional employees over the next two years.
For the most part, Uniper’s HR department is already well-prepared to support this transformation. It has adopted modern, cloud-based SAP SuccessFactors solutions for most of its core HR functions, such as employee records, compensation, learning, performance and goals, and succession and development. The HR team is also working on building up a state-of-the-art hiring process by leveraging embedded AI functionality with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting.
Payroll, however, was an outlier. The company’s payroll system was still running on premises in a third-party data center. Führing explains: “IT and digitalization are deeply embedded in Uniper’s transfomation strategy. It’s essential to invest in the most modern technologies that enable rapid adoption, which means cloud is central. We wanted the same level of agility in our payroll platform that we already had from our other cloud-based applications.”
RISE with SAP offered a solution, but the clock was ticking. “We had less than a year to deliver, and we had no fallback,” says Führing. “If we couldn’t deliver on this project, there was real risk of disruption for 7,400 employees across the globe.”
Head of HR IT, Uniper IT GmbH
Four transformations in one step
The short deadline for replacing Uniper’s payroll system was not the only challenge for the company’s HR IT team—it was also a highly complex project from a technical perspective.
The existing payroll application had been running for almost 30 years and had accumulated many customizations to support Uniper’s unique requirements, so it couldn’t be replaced with an off-the-shelf solution. Moreover, it was built on outdated software and ran on-premises in a third-party data center—making it much more difficult to manage than Uniper’s other modern, cloud-based IT solutions.
“To modernize our payroll systems, we had to complete four transformations in one step,” says Jörg Behrens, Head of HR IT at Uniper IT GmbH. “First, we had to exit the existing data center and find a new hosting platform. Second, we had to upgrade our application to run on SAP Payroll Processing, private cloud edition. Third, we had to migrate our database from Oracle to SAP HANA Cloud. And finally, we wanted to shift to a single service provider for the entire technology stack.”
When the HR IT team discussed these requirements with SAP, the way forward became clear. The RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution would provide a smooth pathway for application modernization and migration to a highly secure private cloud platform—with SAP providing both infrastructure and application support.
“We knew that we were the first SAP customer doing this transition in one step and receiving the SAP Cloud Application Services and RISE with SAP service for SAP HCM for SAP S/4HANA,” says Führing. “Being the first is always a risk, but we were confident in our team. And with the project team from SAP, supported by SAP MaxAttention services from SAP Services and Support, we delivered the project successfully in just nine months.”
Head of HR IT, Uniper IT GmbH
Successful delivery in just nine months
Despite the complexity of the project and the inevitable unexpected challenges that arose during the implementation, the dedication and commitment of the Uniper and SAP team ensured a successful delivery for 7,400 employees across three countries, comfortably within the tight deadline.
“For months we were in a situation where everything was on the critical path,” says Führing. “Any delay would mean pushing back the go-live, which was not possible due to business process needs. So, we had to react immediately whenever an issue arose. Being in a fire-fighting mode with two or three escalations per week was exhausting, but our project team were real heroes. Before we started, several experts told me that we would never be able to complete a project of this complexity in less than two years. But the One Team spirit of HR, IT, SAP and our partner EPI-USE, empowered us to deliver a fully working system in just nine months.”
The first payroll process with the application running on the private cloud edition of SAP Payroll Processing went smoothly, ensuring thousands of employees received their correct salaries without issues. “It was so seamless that most employees had no idea that anything had changed,” says Behrens. “The only feedback we had from our colleagues was that ‘it’s so fast!’”
With the payroll application hosted on the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution, Uniper benefits from enterprise-class security and cloud flexibility, while ensuring that all its HR data remains within the European Union—a key requirement for compliance.
Selecting RISE with SAP also means that Uniper now has a single provider for both infrastructure and application support. “With SAP as our support provider, we are confident that the quality of service delivery will improve significantly,” says Behrens.
Head of HR & HSSE IT, Uniper IT GmbH
Looking to the future with AI and analytics
Due to the complexity of the existing payroll application and the extreme time pressure on delivery of a working system, the project team had no bandwidth to introduce new features or process improvements. However, now that the new solution is up and running, HR IT is already planning its next steps.
“The system is flexible enough to allow for innovation at the right pace for our organization,” says Behrens. “That means we can continuously simplify and standardize our processes over time. For example, we can bring our payroll application closer to our other SAP SuccessFactors solutions to improve HR analytics. And already, the SAP HANA database is making reporting easier and faster.”
Führing concludes: “With RISE for SAP, the future is bright for HR IT at Uniper. We’re eager to harness SAP Business Technology Platform to accelerate the development of new processes, and we are pleased to see that SAP is investing in creating standard workflows for HR that we can use as templates. We are also excited about reducing time-to-hire by adopting AI for job profiling and candidate matching with our SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solution, as well as AI-assisted learning recommendations in SAP SuccessFactors Learning for tailored talent training.”