UPGRADING TO SAP S/4HANA PUBLIC CLOUD
28 Aug 2026 by Thomas Evans
The Background
Top Energy is a community-owned electricity distribution business delivering sustainable
energy to Far North consumers. Originally established as the Bay of Islands Power Board and
later restructured during the deregulation of the electricity sector in the early 1990s, Top
Energy is now owned by a consumer trust on behalf of the local community.
The company owns and manages the electricity distribution network across the Far North,
serving around 35,000 ICPs over a large and sparsely populated geographic area. This long
rural network, combined with a relatively small customer base, creates a constant tension
between reliability, resilience and affordability. Every investment needs to be carefully
prioritised so that the people of the Far North continue to receive safe, reliable power at a fair
cost.
The Challange
By 2022, Top Energy was running a long-established, very stable SAP ECC system. Day-to-day operations were well supported, and the business had relatively few customisations. However, several factors were converging:
- SAP set a 2027 end-of-support deadline for ECC, making an upgrade path unavoidable.
- The incumbent global provider delivered support that became slow and impersonal, frequently
changing consultants and taking a long time to resolve issues. - Early proposals from that provider to move to S/4HANA, “literally doubled” the cost of other
options under consideration. - Top Energy required a cost-effective, modern solution that matched its size and user needs.
At the same time, the business wanted to maintain process continuity while positioning itself for a more automated, data-driven future. Any upgrade needed to protect historical data, minimise disruption, and avoid unnecessary complexity or custom build.
Choosing Realtech
Top Energy first heard about Realtech through a recommendation from another New Zealand
electricity distribution company facing similar support challenges. That peer had already
moved from a large global provider to Realtech and was reporting a much better support
experience.
After considering the usual options, staying with ECC longer, moving to a different ERP, or
upgrading SAP, Top Energy concluded that changing ERP vendor would not, in itself, solve the
real issues. As Cameron put it, “when you’ve been around these systems long enough, you
know they all do the same thing, plus or minus.”
Instead, the decision focused on:
- Selecting the right S/4HANA deployment model (public vs private cloud) for a small,
asset-intensive business. - Choosing a support and implementation partner that could offer continuity,
responsiveness and realistic pricing.
Given Top Energy’s relatively standard SAP use and limited internal resources, S/4HANA
Public Cloud emerged as the best fit. Realtech initially supported ECC, then led the
assessment and subsequent move to S/4HANA Public Cloud, along with SAP Datasphere for
historical reporting.
How Realtech helped
Stabilising and improving support
The first step was for Realtech to take over ECC support. Top Energy wanted a partner who
acted as an extension of their team, rather than a rotating group of unfamiliar consultants.
Realtech’s focused team provided Top Energy with a consistent set of consultants who learned
the environment and responded quickly to issues.
Support “was good, no complaints really, pretty quick to respond,” and generally easier to
work with than the large global provider Top Energy had left.
Defining the upgrade path
With ECC support stabilised and the 2027 deadline approaching, Realtech guided Top Energy in evaluating business needs and led the decision process to confirm that a move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP was the right strategic step.
- Realtech and Top Energy weighed private versus public cloud options, considering Top Energy’s size
and standard SAP footprint. - Their teams used SAP’s Digital Discovery Assessment (DDA) tools to assess the existing system and identify key areas for attention.
Although the DDA exercise was viewed more as “more of a box-ticking exercise” that did not fully anticipate some asset-heavy, maintenance-centric requirements, it confirmed a key advantage: Top Energy’s system had minimal customisation, making it a suitable candidate for S/4HANA Public Cloud.
Delivering the S/4HANA Public Cloud migration
Realtech played a pivotal role by leading a largely remote programme to move Top Energy
from ECC to S/4HANA Public Cloud. Key aspects included:
- Re-platforming core finance, asset management, and work management processes onto
S/4HANA Public Cloud. - Realtech introduced a scheduling add-on, which Top Energy had not fully leveraged in
ECC, aiming to improve planning and utilisation. - Realtech implemented SAP Datasphere to retain and cleanse historical ECC data,
enabling seamless reporting across old and new environments. - Realtech tackled functional differences between ECC and S/4HANA Public Cloud,
especially in maintenance versus service orders and timesheets, and designed
workarounds or alternative approaches where “like-for-like” wasn’t possible. - Realtech established APIs and began exploiting them to support future automation and
integration.
The project demanded a lot from everyone involved. Delivering a programme of this size with
a largely remote consulting team meant business owners relied heavily on the project team,
and a core group of specialists of the integration and migration workload.
To protect the team and ensure quality, the go-live date was proactively reset, giving space to
work through integration dependencies and SAP-related issues properly.
As a result, Realtech and Top Energy worked closely together to turn those challenges into
progress, resolving migration issues, clearing report backlogs, and successfully went live on the
agreed date and within budget.
Enabling AI and self-service reporting
Looking beyond the successful deployment of the core SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP, Realtech enabled Top Energy to explore and implement new SAP capabilities:
- They initially enabled Joule and embedded AI in test, planning to extend the se capabilities into production to support simple conversational scenarios such as “show me all my jobs due in the next month” and make life easier for infrequent SAP users.
- Self-service reporting: Leveraging SAP Datasphere, and S/4HANA Public Cloud datasets, so business
users gain timely, actionable insights for informed decision-making.