Cenovus Energy – SAP Today…Not Your Grandfather’s SAP The Cenovus account team framed up and closed a $20M ACV Rise deal in 8 months by selling end to end integrated process, industry best practices, automation and AI, and user experience vs. selling just technology.
Published in 2024/25
Client Synopsis
What did they do?
Why did they do it?
• Headquartered in Calgary; develops, produces, refines, transports, and markets crude oil and natural gas in Canada and internationally. • Company operates through Oil Sands, Conventional, Offshore, Canadian Manufacturing, and U.S. Manufacturing segments. The Oil Sands segment develops and produces bitumen and heavy oil in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Assets include Foster Creek, Christina Lake, and Sunrise projects, as well as Lloydminster thermal and conventional heavy oil assets. • The Conventional segment holds natural gas liquids and natural gas assets primarily located in Elmworth-Wapiti, Kaybob-Edson, Clearwater, and Rainbow Lake operating in Alberta and British Columbia, as well as interests in various natural gas processing facilities. • The offshore segment engages in offshore operation, exploration, and development activities in China and the East Coast of Canada. • The Canadian Manufacturing segment comprises the owned and operated Lloydminster upgrading and asphalt refining complex, which converts heavy oil and bitumen into synthetic crude oil, diesel, asphalt, and other ancillary products, as well as owns and operates the Bruderheim crude-by-rail terminal and ethanol plants; and markets its production of its own and third-party products. • The U.S. Manufacturing segment includes the refining of crude oil to produce gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, and other products.
• In Jan 2023, along with their partners IBM and EY, Cenovus conducted a technology-agnostic assessment of their business processes across finance, supply chain, HR, and asset management, and articulated the following key decisions that need to be made by end of Jun 2023 in order to meet their July 2023 SI RFP, December 2023 program kick off, and January 2026 go-live deadlines:
• Cenovus received a mandate from their senior leadership team to transform the organization to support standardization, cross functional value, user experience, inorganic growth, and balanced optimization. Cost takeout / layoffs were not a driver. Cenovus is a highly acquisitive organization and they are setting themselves up for future acquisitions that can be tucked in efficiently and effectively.
S/4 Finance and Treasury (vs their current Kyriba) be used to enable Record to Report?
5 things that helped drive the strategy
S/4 Procurement and SC plus Ariba be used to enable Source to Pay?
• The team truly brought “ONE SAP” to the table leveraging resources across the Cenovus VAT, Canadian and NA pre - sales, NA and Global SCP, and Global product strategy and experience, in addition to senior leadership from Canada, the US and Germany. The team showed up as one team and delivered on our singular goal. • All of the presentation material/messaging, demos, posters, etc. were branded with the “SAP Today – not your grandparents SAP” message and tied to Cenovus’ program guiding principles. This resonated with Cenovus as senior leaders called it out a number of times and appreciated that we “listened to them and understand what is important”. • SAP’s new, integrated user experience was at the core of all of the process demos as this was hugely important to Cenovus. Every single demo, including the Keynotes, started with the custom built Cenovus Workzone page to showcase a central entry point and cohesive experience. This has NEVER BEEN DONE before and very much drove home the point that SAP is no longer your “Grandparents ERP”. • The asset management demo team hit it out of the park. Prior to the event, the Cenovus asset management team had no interest in any SAP solutions outside of core S/4 asset management. Focusing on an end to end process story vs individual solutions, the demo team was able to showcase core S/4 plus APM by running a live demo with a real-life compressor pump feeding early warnings with virtual sensors to APM. This demo has never been run live (outside of the product team) for a customer, but rather with pre-recorded videos. After a weekend crash course and successfully bringing this process to life, the demo team was excited to report that Cenovus is considering SAP’s full suite of asset management tools. • The HR demo team may have successfully convinced Cenovus to move from Workday to Success Factors in a matter of three days. For the first time in North America, a payroll demo was successfully run from an iPad while sitting comfortably in an armchair! This was to prove the point, that even in the most challenging of times (ie. Covid), you can run payroll and ensure your people are paid. In HR’s integration session, Cenovus gave our demo team a random “cost center” number which was used to create a new cost center live. The team timed this demo with a stopwatch, and the whole end-to-end demo took <90 seconds. This was a showstopper. Throughout the series of the HR demos, the team reported hearing things like “we need this, this is a no-brainer” and “wow, that is bad-ass”…
S/4 EAM plus DSC (vs their current Maximo instance) be used to enable Acquire to Retire? S/4 HR plus Success Factors (vs their current Workday instance) be used to enable Hire to Retire?
• In May 2023, Cenovus’ program leadership approached the SAP account team and asked them to plan and execute a “mini Sapphire” event to help Cenovus make the above decisions. The dates were set for June 6-8 in person in Calgary.
How SAP solved a problem for the customer?
• The SAP account team, in close partnership with Cenovus, pulled together a three-day event we jointly entitled: “SAP TODAY – Not your Grandparents SAP” with Cenovus’ program guiding principles (standardization, cross functional value, user experience, inorganic growth, balanced optimization) at the core of all of the presentations and demos. The three-day event was co-hosted by Jeff Hart, EVP and CFO of Cenovus, and Andy Canham, President of SAP Canada. We opened with a keynote presentation from Peter Maier who introduced SAP’s process focused solution portfolio reinforcing the message that industry verticalization is at our core; AI and ML is infused across our cross functional processes; and that we have a shiny, new integrated user experience. This was followed by a live demo from Phil Loewen and team who showcased an end to end, integrated process demo zeroing in on our new user experience and mobile capability. From there, the teams broke out and conducted their individual, end to end process demos across finance, supply chain, HR an asset management. These were all kicked off from a custom Cenovus Workzone entry point to reinforce the integrated user experience message. The event was concluded with a closing keynote including a live customizedWorkzone demo built specifically for Cenovus, and a presentation from Michael Golz who brought everything full circle and talked about how to make it all happen. By the end of June 2023, the account team was informed that we WON ALL 8 key application decision including S4, Ariba, DSC and Success Factors! By December 2023, a $20M ACV RISE + LOBs deal was signed in addition to a $25M cloud services deal.
Industry
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Energy
Region
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NA, Canada
MP Name
•
Lisa Caruso
The team involved: ( roles / names) • Managing Partner: Lisa Caruso; Account Director: Roger Piquette; Enterprise Customer Success Manager: Hoi Leung Chiu; Services Account Executive: Peterson d’Souza
Links to relevant documents • Please request from Lisa Caruso, Managing Partner
Reference: Y/N • N/A, just kicked off implementation in January 2024
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INTERNAL – SAP and Customers Only
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