In 2011 SAP posted an interesting video on YouTube presenting the solution for Upstream Oil and Gas companies based on Business Objects (BO).
In 2014 SAP and Accenture presented Upstream Operations Management (UOM) with Stephane Lauzon taking a world tour attending many SAP Oil and Gas events. Find just one example from the ASUG.
Accenture traditionally has a good position within Oil and Gas industry, even though losing some ground to IBM recently. Also Accenture is known for good marketing budget visible at any major airport, so SAP teaming up with Accenture has some good logic. What does not have logic from the market perspective is the Accenture claim to have exclusive know-how about UOM, neither that can be a long-term SAP interest to stick with a single vendor on important Oil and Gas market.
It looks like UOM is used to sell some other prerequisites, namely HANA. Is UOM a kind of Trojan horse to sell HANA, Business Objects, Lumira bundled with other latest technologies? It is a common catch of many IT companies to build latest products on top of their own latest products and therefore pushing the clients into “deep waters” by creating such dependencies, sometime with good reasons, but sometime unnecessary.
If you read through declared functionalities of UOM you might notice a functional overlap with SAP PRA (Product and Revenue Accounting), namely PRA Production and PRA Revenue Allocation. SAP PRA is a part of IS-Oil and is based on good old ECC, so no need for HANA or extra licenses cost. Quite often you can hear that PRA is designed for North American market, but that is just a relatively small part of functionality concerning legal output forms.
Does (PRA + BO) = (UOM – HANA)? That we do not know yet, since UOM functions in detail and technical documentation are hard to find in public access. But what we can expect for sure is a significant difference in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the ingredients on both sides of the equation. Moreover UOM probably cannot “fly” without HANA.
Stay tuned to SAP Expert for more updates and please contribute if you can shred more light on a subject.
SAP UOM is also on ECC so HANA is NOT required for it.