SAP Build Apps Helped Improve High-Voltage Grid Maintenance in Germany
50Hertz, part of Elia Group, plays a crucial role in managing the high-voltage grid in the north and east of Germany, covering nearly one-third of the country’s infrastructure. As a transmission system operator, 50Hertz maintains a stable energy supply for the region while actively integrating renewable energy sources to support Germany’s ambitious energy transition plans.
With more than 1,500 employees at 50Hertz alone, the company has a well-defined digitalization strategy in place that focuses on sustaining a clean core system. To meet this objective, it chose to utilize the no-code tool, SAP Build Apps, which aids its transformation journey with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
50Hertz’s citizen developers implemented a mobile application for the company’s specialized maintenance electricians that significantly reduced both the manual effort and the risk of errors. This mobile application supports them by maintaining and calculating the master data of power circuits, which are represented in the SAP system as functional locations.
Why 50Hertz decided to use SAP Build Apps
In 2023, 50Hertz conducted an analysis of its plant maintenance processes. In summary, it concluded that it was time-consuming to create new entries in its plant maintenance system and fill in master and operational data. A lot of manual effort was invested in maintaining data in Excel files and value calculations for technical objects were prone to errors. Due to the complexity of the process, the responsibility for certain areas could only be shared between a few technicians.
After collaborating with the SAP AppHaus team in Berlin, the company identified a use case for its future accounting solution and evaluated different scenarios. Ultimately, the innovative capabilities of SAP Business Technology Platform convinced the 50Hertz expert team because the platform would allow them to scale up a new solution once it’s successfully piloted and rolled out across the entire corporation.
What’s more, in SAP Discovery Center, they discovered the “Keep the Core Clean Using SAP Build Apps with SAP S/4HANA” mission, which provides guidance and support with a repeatable actionable use case to solve exactly that. The analysis showed that SAP Build Apps could not only help enhance operational agility and speed responses to business requirements, it could also integrate seamlessly with existing SAP S/4HANA architecture.
Martin Glatzel, enterprise architect at SAP AppHaus Berlin, expressed his satisfaction with the collaboration with the 50Hertz team: “With only very limited support from our side, the 50Hertz citizen developers succeeded in using SAP Build Apps to solve their defined use case. Their four new apps will have an immense impact on the efficiency of the important high-voltage grid maintenance work in the future.”
What the maintenance apps improved
SAP Build Apps enabled the team of 50Hertz citizen developers to implement the new maintenance applications with very limited support from SAP. Today, they cover the following maintenance tasks:
- The electric circuit display app shows circuit attributes.
- The circuit section display app allows users to look for a specific circuit and select it. All circuit sections of the selected circuit are shown, and users can view corresponding attributes and characteristics.
- The circuit section adjusting app allows users to search for a specific circuit and select it. All circuit sections of the selected circuit are displayed, and users can modify corresponding attributes.
- The circuit section design app allows users to select a circuit and create a circuit section by entering and saving necessary requirements and attributes.
After rolling out the new apps to the specialized electricians, they have benefited in different ways, such as:
- About 15% shorter process duration for maintaining functional locations and a significant reduction in the use of both paper- and Excel-based process steps.
- 10% faster onboarding of new technicians because the app is very easy to use, leading to quick adoption by its end users, the specialized electricians.
- Intuitive search for technical locations based on historical data.
- Automatic calculation of business-critical numbers, thus improving accuracy significantly.
Looking back
Looking back, the 50Hertz team appreciates the opportunity to develop complex apps with SAP Build Apps in relatively short timeframes. Christian Salewsky and Desiree Possi, both working for the Maintenance Systems & Processes department at 50Hertz, shared about their experience: “While we still had to code at least to some extent in JavaScript and learn to keep track of all the different flows, the overall project experience was encouraging. The detailed product documentation allowed our team to grasp the basics quickly. Once we used the standard functionalities of SAP Build Apps, calculating electronic data became very simple. We found clear explanations of all the functions, and the tabular presentation of data was very helpful, too.”
Imke Vierjahn is communications lead at SAP AppHaus.
