Gruppo CAP Cuts Invoice Processing Time by 50% Using AWS for SAP

Gruppo CAP operates 40 wastewater treatment plants and manages more than 6,000 kilometers of water and sewage networks across 133 municipalities around Milan. For invoicing and billing management, the utility has used a custom-developed, in-house solution built on a third-party vendor’s database for nearly 20 years. However, updating the database and software was becoming increasingly difficult—and managing some tasks on the system occasionally required employees to ask for support from the organization’s IT department, which made work time-consuming. Many of Gruppo CAP’s billing staff requested a switch to SAP, a more widely used billing tool with capabilities that the in-house software did not provide.

As a public sector organization, Gruppo CAP put out a request for proposals. The utility chose to work with a system integrator that recommended AWS for RISE with SAP, which businesses can use to increase agility and modernize processes by migrating their billing functions to the cloud.

After learning more about the capabilities of AWS for RISE with SAP, Gruppo CAP chose to pursue a transformation on AWS, which it had been using for other services for more than a decade. The utility concluded that AWS met its requirements to host the new billing systems in Italy. At the time, AWS was also the provider that offered a near-zero recovery time objective. “Most of our applications are running on AWS, so we preferred an AWS solution,” says Tiziana Lorefice, digital factory manager at Gruppo CAP. “We were very happy to be one of the first utilities in Europe to start using AWS for RISE with SAP.”

Gruppo CAP began by assessing its internal invoicing, collections, and settlement processes to understand its existing operations and identify what capabilities it needed to add or improve. After developing a clear vision of its requirements, the utility began working with the system integrator and teams from AWS to develop a custom billing environment using AWS for RISE with SAP. The utility’s teams spent several months documenting requirements and building blueprints for how SAP would be incorporated into the business and the many other systems it relied on.

The complex project involved a review of more than 70 processes across 30 systems, along with around 154 workflows and 15 system integration vendors. “There was a substantial change in working methods for our employees because they were used to software that had been created for their specific requirements,” says Fulvio Giacomazzi, application delivery manager at Gruppo CAP.

After the new SAP infrastructure was designed and built on AWS, Gruppo CAP ran business simulations to test the system. The utility also conducted user acceptance tests and began providing training for the employees who would be using the system. The next step was to migrate the actual invoicing data from the on-premises infrastructure to AWS for SAP—the proven cloud to innovate with virtually any SAP workload. Then, Gruppo CAP conducted data quality testing to validate whether the system would perform as planned. A little over 1 year after beginning the project, Gruppo CAP went live on AWS for RISE with SAP.

The new cloud infrastructure included an SAP Business Technology Platform with embedded artificial intelligence and other innovations that were designed to streamline testing, reduce risks, speed up business processes, and increase efficiency. Risk mitigation was a key element of the new system, especially given the business-critical nature of the billing system. The cloud solution also simplified development by providing sandbox environments where applications could be tested more thoroughly in the cloud before deployment.

Since the new SAP system went live, Gruppo CAP has shortened the time it takes to generate invoices by 50 percent. The utility can also invoice customers every 2 months instead of every 6 months. The new billing system also streamlines billing, so if customers have multiple residences, all their information is combined into one statement—making their bills more straightforward to understand and manage. This move decreases individual bills and improves the utility’s cash flow. “When customers received more detailed invoices, they used to call and ask about all those details,” says Lorefice. “Now, the process is simpler, and our employees can give answers that are much clearer for the customer.”

In addition, the security features of the SAP system have been enhanced and downtime has been reduced compared with the previous on-premises software. As Gruppo CAP moves forward, the utility will continue to add more capabilities to the SAP system to automate even more of its manual processes.