SAP application management for an IWPP cogeneration plant

Context

Ras Girtas Power Company is a joint venture between Qatar Electricity & Water Company, QatarEnergy and international investors including GDF Suez, Mitsui & Co, Chubu Electric Power and Shikoku Electric Power. The plant at Ras Laffan Industrial City entered commercial operation in 2011 and remains one of the largest co-generation facilities in the MENA Region.

For a plant this size the SAP landscape is not a back-office tool — it is the place where every work order, every spare, every roster and every finance movement comes together. The brief for the AMS partner is to make all of that feel invisible to the people running the plant.

Why cogeneration is a specific problem for AMS

Power and water from the same asset base means two regulated revenue streams driven off one maintenance programme, and a ledger structure that has to carry both without double-counting the maintenance cost. Work-order routing, cost object alignment and settlement across cost centres have to be exactly right every month, because unwinding a misallocation three months later is both expensive and visible to the regulator.

That shape pushes the AMS engagement toward tight, high-frequency contact with Operations and Maintenance rather than the slower project-style cadence that suits transactional landscapes. The team runs with daily stand-ups, weekly joint reviews with plant leadership and monthly service governance against defined availability KPIs.

What we deliver

A tiered application management service, calibrated to the plant’s availability targets rather than a generic ticket-counting SLA. The AMS tiers are built so Foundation holds the daily operations, Transformation absorbs upgrades without breaking Foundation, and Innovation — through our Innovation Hub — raises specific proposals for AI, automation and process improvement each quarter.

Plant maintenance on SAP

The Plant Maintenance service covers the full work-order lifecycle — notification, planning, scheduling, execution, confirmation and technical completion — across preventive, predictive and breakdown classes. Equipment master, functional location hierarchy and task-list standards are kept consistent so that maintenance strategy reviews actually mean something year over year.

Change-request work on PM is deliberately disciplined: enhancements land during scheduled plant outages, and every change carries a documented roll-back path. Over a long engagement that discipline is the difference between an incrementally better system and an incrementally scarier one.

Materials, HCM and finance

Materials management runs the spares cycle — reservation, consumption, stock transfer, procurement and inventory valuation — tuned for spare-parts patterns specific to rotating equipment. The HCM / HR service holds the roster, shift and payroll processes that let a plant that never stops staff itself without the compliance exposure that heavy shift work can carry.

Finance posts sit alongside — plant costing, work-order settlement, maintenance accruals — kept tight with Controlling so the month-end close does not stretch to accommodate issues that should have been caught at source.

Basis, security and uptime

The Basis service manages kernel, database and operating-system maintenance inside plant-outage windows and holds the role and authorisation model that keeps sensitive maintenance and finance transactions correctly segregated. Transport and change control run against a defined calendar; nothing goes to production outside an agreed window without an incident ticket to justify it.

Why it works

The engagement is governed by a single Customer Success Manager and a single Service Delivery Manager on our side, both continuous across contract cycles. The same people who scope a change are the ones who deliver it, which is why long-running operational issues get closed instead of being reinherited every renewal.

The Customer Success layer owns the roadmap conversation — the plant’s SAP landscape roadmap is reviewed and updated twice a year, so that the AMS service is not just reactive to the next ticket but also actively shaping what the next upgrade, the next Fiori rollout and the next automation opportunity look like.

What makes this engagement replicable

Three things carry across to similar IWPP, utility and asset-heavy mandates: availability-weighted SLA design, outage-aligned change discipline, and a CSM-led roadmap that keeps AMS honest about the “transformation” half of the contract. These are the parts of the model that transfer regardless of the specific equipment the plant happens to run.