— Reference
IRMA Implementation at innogy SE
Display of the Development of Provisions and Accruals in the Energy Sector
Compatibility in a Heterogeneous SAP System Landscape
Initial Situation
To make the provision and accrual processes more transparent, streamlined and efficient, the RWE Group (formerly including innogy SE) set up a project to implement a standard software solving these issues. The tool had to be compatible with the heterogeneous SAP environment in addition to the demanding requirements of the provisioning process in the energy sector, such as the calculation of future price and cost increases and interest effects over long terms. The software sets a corporate standard for the master data management of provisions, the posting procedure and the accounting standard-specific parameters for the calculations.
Challenges
Provisions in the energy sector are highly complex due to the range of maturities (from short-term to long-term maturities of 100 years) and the resulting need for future price and cost increase and interest calculations. Besides, the RWE Group wants to automate the recording of expert valuations on pension provisions (by external actuaries), the details of which had to be entered manually in the past.
The major national operating companies participated in the first phase of the IRMA implementation project to determine the catalogue of requirements of all possible processing cases as comprehensive as possible. The number of project participants was accordingly high. Also, it was necessary to unify the approaches of the individual companies which had already proven themselves in practice for decades into one overall process.
Project Course
Parallel to the reorganization of the RWE Group (foundation and IPO of innogy SE), the project team consisting of IKOR consultants and RWE/innogy employees from various functional departments started their work. The first project phase was about the inventory and analysis of the current provision basis. The second phase took care of particular scenarios, such as the nuclear energy and mining provisions as well as the catalogue of requirements for the processing of pension provisions, for which a technical interface had to be set up in each case.
IRMA's scope of functionalities already covered a vast majority of RWEs requirements and was supplemented by further mutually defined developments. The technical developments went hand in hand with the harmonization of workflows. The IKOR developers decided on an extensive optimization of the planning component of IRMA and created a product extension from which many customers now benefit.
Result
As of March 2017, following the majorly national operating companies of the RWE Group (including innogy SE) involved in the first project phase, a large number of the German companies are now connected to IRMA. The roll-out in the Netherlands was finalized successfully as well as the UK roll-out.
All provisions are automatically processed in one system. The processing is now company-wide streamlined and standardized, transparency has been established, and the results are comparable, especially for auditors.
Contact Person
Miklós Hegybiró
Managing Director
IKOR Products GmbH
info-products@ikor.one
+49 40 8199442-0
Harald Westermann
Project Manager & Crew Lead IRMA
IKOR Products GmbH
info-products@ikor.one
+49 40 8199442-0