The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited
The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited (Towngas) has been one of Hong Kong's leading utilities for 138 years, supplying town gas as well as providing maintenance and inspection services to over 1.2 million households and businesses locally.

Looking for improvement

With an operating system developed back in the 1970s, Towngas increasingly operated under a restricted and fragmented environment. This had incurred rising overhead costs and created inefficiencies. Accordingly, Towngas decided to re-engineer its business processes with the aim of improving competitiveness and the level of customer satisfaction. And information technology was chosen as the enabler of this objective.

SAP - the best in the industry

After careful examination of various vendors in the market, Towngas finally chose SAP's enterprise software solution, which not only offers a high degree of data integration but also supports its strategic technology platform, Microsoft Windows NT, allowing it to standardize on that single platform and eliminate cross-platform issues.

Exploiting existing expertise - consultants were key to success

To date, SAP's consultants implement eight SAP modules for Towngas -- Financials, Controlling, Materials Management, Sales and Distribution, Treasury, Asset Management, Plant Maintenance and Project System.

"With a project of this sheer size and utility-specific nature, you can't afford to get it wrong and that means you need the best advice available." said Mr. Lee, Chief Information Officer of Towngas. "That's why we went straight to SAP, not a third party."

Tangible improvements with SAP enterprise software solution

The SAP project has substantially increased order processing and MIS management efficiency at Towngas and there is every indication that the company will recoup all of its costs within two years of going live.

"In fact, the new SAP environment is returning about 50 percent of the project costs annually in the form of savings. Productivity is also up by more than 10 percent year-on-year, which has in turn made the company more competitive and raised the level of customer satisfaction." said Mr. Lee.

Facing the future with confidence

While the results to-date have been impressive, Towngas' business redevelopment program has not finished, nor have its plans for SAP systems. For example, the company is in the process of implementing SAP's Human Resources module that will enable the company to become compliant with Hong Kong's Mandatory Provident Fund. The module will also provide an enterprise-wide HR Intranet for employees to use and offer managers to access such tools as competency models and skill inventories.