Wipro Arabia, a subsidiary of India’s giant IT firm Wipro, has won a contract from Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) for implementing and rolling out plant maintenance and project system functionality. This will help ensure expense controls and effective utilization of assets for the SEC at a time when power consumption in the Kingdom is growing at an accelerated rate of eight percent per annum.

“With this Wipro-SEC deal, we will be able to scale up our operations in a significant way and seamlessly manage our distribution networks,” said Mohammad A. Al-Nahari, SEC’s program executive director, while speaking on this occasion. He said that Wipro’s deep domain capability and technology-leadership will help us deliver cost-effective services and serve our large customer base in an efficient manner.

He said that the SEC contract with Wipro will expand the existing footprint of SAP solution. “As part of the contract, Wipro will implement and rollout the plant maintenance and project system functionality of the SAP ERP application for SEC’s distribution business line across the Kingdom.” No financial details were disclosed.

The SAP ERP-based system is expected to go live in the next 10 months. “Wipro traditionally had a strong position in the utilities space in the global market, and this will allow us to further strengthen our leadership in this space in the Kingdom,” said Wipro Arabia General Manager and Head Thomas George, while speaking about the new contract.

George said that the deployment will help SEC to methodically migrate existing data from current digitized and manually maintained systems to SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. In addition, the solution will help SEC to streamline day-to-day operations and increase operational and financial efficiencies.

Ahmed Al-Faifi, managing director, SAP Saudi Arabia, said the decision by SEC to expand its existing footprint of SAP ERP with the implementation of the asset management processes will help further strengthen the ability of the power utility company to achieve cost savings and operational efficiencies. Today, the SEC is the largest power utility company in the Middle East serving about five million customers in the Kingdom.