Total Direct Energie migrates SAP ECC (IS-U) and SAP CRM systems successfully to HANA

Total Direct Energie’s SAP landscape management challenge

Total Direct Energie's SAP^® production systems are large (ECC at 10TB, CRM at 6TB – 2019), and contain the data of millions of customers. Also, the data is growing fast, especially since the arrival of Linky meters (a proprietary smart-metering solution). It became extremely expensive to keep several full copies of Production in the non-productive landscape. However, Total Direct Energie needed data to enable the group's functional analysts, testers, trainers and consultants to access the data securely to support the production system.

The technical team looked for a solution to reduce the copy volume and speed up the copy process. The solution they selected was to migrate their SAP ECC and CRM from an Oracle database to an SAP HANA database to optimise infrastructure costs.

Why did Total Direct Energie choose to switch to HANA?

Total Direct Energie anticipated possible performance problems due to:

• sustained organic growth of more than 500,000 additional customer sites per year
• the merger of the Direct Energie, Total Spring and Total Energie Gaz customer databases.

They needed to optimise licensing costs:

• The ‘right timing’ meant that they had a six-month window before three years of an extremely busy IT roadmap
• The power of HANA would enable them to address new business needs, especially on Linky data
• The migration window was too short for S/4 Utilities, which needs a complex functional migration.

The solution: DSM for IS-U (SAP utilities)

The objective was to generate new non-production environments, with a reduced footprint, to limit the infrastructure cost of the various HANA systems. To create these new systems, Total Direct Energie chose Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) for IS-U from EPI-USE Labs, following the recommendations from their System Integrator partner, Codilog. The technical switchover of the database to HANA was entrusted to Oxya, which operates a number of projects in France with Data Sync Manager.

DSM for IS-U allows Utility companies with SAP systems to:

• create fully functional clients from a subset of production data
• preserve data integrity with the loading of transactional documents
• Reduced access means there is less for their business to review in the next UAR.
• select data by IS-U contract account, if needed
• have real data available, on demand and when required, for testing or problem resolution
• maintain data consistency

The result: Reduced footprint and cost, faster refreshes

Total Direct Energie now has the ability to:

• control its non-productive environments’ size and, therefore, its costs
• undertake faster and easier refreshes of non-productive environments
• copy individual contract accounts on demand for testing, bug analysis or user training purposes.

About Total Direct Energie

Total Direct Energie is France's third largest electricity and gas company. As part of the Total Group, it is the subsidiary that enables everyone to make savings in a responsible manner. At the heart of its strategy: innovation and customer satisfaction to offer reliable, affordable and clean energy to as many people as possible in order to participate in a more responsible energy future.

With 1.6 GW of production capacity, Total Direct Energie offers its 4.4 million individual and business customers competitive electricity and natural gas, as well as innovative services to help them optimise their consumption.