50Hertz, part of the International EIIA Group, operates the maximum voltage network in the north and east of Germany and thus covers almost a third of the country’s infrastructure. As a transmission system operator, 50Hertz ensures a stable energy supply for the region and integrates renewable energies into its power grid to support the ambitious energy transition plans that Germany pursues.

With more than 1,500 employees at 50Hertz alone, the company pursues a clearly defined digitization strategy that aims at the Clean-Core ideal as possible no modifications to the SAP core. In order to achieve this goal and to support your own business transformation, 50hertz, the low code development environment, decided SAP build apps To use the basis on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) builds up.

The Citizen Developer from 50hertz implemented a mobile application for the company’s maintenance electricians. With this app, both manual effort and the risk of errors significantly reduce. This mobile application supports you by maintaining and calculating the master data of circuits, which are presented in the SAP system as technical places.

Why 50Hertz decided for SAP Build Apps

In 2023, 50Hertz carried out an analysis of his maintenance processes. In summary, it was said that the creation of new entries in the maintenance system and the entry of regular and operating data were time-consuming. Data in Excel files were maintained under great effort, and value calculations for technical objects were prone to errors. Due to the complexity of the process, responsibility for certain areas could only be divided between a few technicians.

After working with the SAP Apphaus team in Berlin, the company determined an application for its future accounting solution and rated various scenarios. Ultimately, the innovative functions of the SAP Business Technology Platform convinced the 50Hertz expert team. Because the platform enables you to scale a new solution as soon as it has been successfully piloted and introduced throughout the company.

In addition, they discovered the mission in the SAP Discovery Center “Keep the Core Clean Using Sap Build Apps with SAP S/4HANA“, Which offers help and support with a repeatable, implementable application to solve exactly this problem. The analysis showed that SAP Build apps not only help to improve the flexibility in processes and to react faster to business requirements, but also can be integrated seamlessly into the existing SAP-S/4HANA architecture.

Martin Glatzel, Enterprise Architect at SAP Apphaus Berlin, was satisfied with the cooperation with the 50Hertz team: “With little support from our site, the Citizen Developer from 50hertz was able to use the SAP Build apps to solve their defined application. In the future, their four new apps will have an immense effect on the efficiency of the important maintenance on the high-voltage network.”

SAP Build apps made it possible for the Citizen Developer team from 50Hertz to implement the new maintenance applications. Very little support from SAP was necessary. The following maintenance tasks are now covered with the new apps:

• With the app Electric Circuit display circuits and their attributes can be displayed.
• Circuit section display helps to search for a certain circuit. All sections are then displayed for the selected circuit, as well as the corresponding attributes and features.
• With Circuit Section Adjusting All circuit sections can be displayed for the selected circuits. The users can then change the corresponding attributes.
• Circuit Section Design helps users select a circuit and create a circuit section by entering and saving the required requirements and attributes.

Since the new apps have been introduced by the specialized electricians, they benefit in different ways, for example:

• About 15 % shorter process duration for the maintenance of functional locations and a significant reduction in the use of paper-bound and Excel-based process steps
• 10 % faster onboarding of new technicians because the app is very user -friendly and is quickly accepted by the end users, the specialized electricians
• Intuitive search for technical locations based on historical data
• Automatic calculation of business -critical numbers, which significantly improves the accuracy

Look back

In retrospect, the 50th team estimates the opportunity to develop complex apps with SAP Build apps in a relatively short time. Christian Salewsky and Desiree Possi work at 50Hertz in the Maintance Systems & Processes department. They summarized their experiences as follows: “Although we – at least to a certain extent – still had to program and learn to see the different processes in JavaScript, the project was an encouraging experience. The detailed product documentation made it possible for our team to understand the basics quickly. As soon as we used the standard functions of the SAP build, the calculation of electronic data was very easy. Functions, and the tabular representation of the data was very helpful. ”

Imke Vierjahn is SAP Apphaus Communications Lead at SAP Apphaus.