South African power utility firm Eskom has been awarded the prestigious Advanced Centre of Expertise (COE) certification making it the first company in the continent to receive the much coveted award.
Eskom’s partnership with Systems, Applications and Products (SAP), has enhanced its operations over the past decade. SAP, based in Germany is the leading global enterprise software solution provider.
According to Eskom’s Acting Chief Information Officer and Divisional Executive, Sean Maritz, SAP has made a significant impact on the utility’s operations over the last ten years.
“With the introduction of SAP, we have seen a huge reduction in system outages due to the improvement in their internal processes.
“We have had a 15% improvement in our internal IT ratings which has led to reduced outage experience by due to the increased levels of accurate and immediate data in our systems,” said Maritz.
With the new certification, Eskom has since integrated IT systems quality management in place therefore making way for complete transparency to the challenges and issues faced by the organization.
The SAP certification conveyed a level of commitment to quality above all and highlighted Eskom’s commitment to ensure sustainability in the long term, the executive said.
“The process really helped in securing a deeper understanding of how every action impacts other areas of the business, the economy and not to mention the people that live and work within South Africa,” Maritz added.
Eskom will hence concentrate on further improvement of the organization’s IT systems, including additional business processes and improving the quality of the existing processes.
“Our partnership with SAP has helped in demonstrating our mature ITC environment and that effectively harnessed technology can change the playing field.
The certification further offers skills development benefits for our team as learners and interns can easily get employment owing to their exposure to the highest possible levels of SAP-optimized processes”
The Managing Director of SAP, Brett Parker, said that their joint decision with Eskom to pursue the achievement of the Advanced Centre of Expertise certification started over four years ago.
“We commend Eskom’s efforts towards the achievement of Advanced Centre of Expertise, a first in the African continent. We aim to achieve even greater success in the future by taking our collaboration to the next level,” Parker said.
