Wipro wins order from Saudi power firm

Indian IT bellwether Wipro Ltd Monday announced winning an order from Saudi Electricity Company to maintain its energy plant and distribution system across Saudi Arabia.

"Plant maintenance and project system functionality of the SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) will enable the power utility to have an integrated system for offering centralised and standardised processes across its plants in the kingdom," the global software major's Saudi subsidiary said in a statement here.

As the largest power utility in the Gulf region, Saudi Electricity firm serves around five million customers across the desert kingdom.

"Our IT solutions will ensure the utility's uptime of distribution networks, expense controls and effective utilisation of its assets," Wipro Arabia head Thomas George said on the occasion.

When implemented in the next 10 months, the bilingual (Arabic/English) solution will allow the Saudi utility to migrate data to ERP from digitised and manual systems.

"The ERP-based system is designed to enable the Saudi utility to serve customers better by increasing availability of assets due to increased uptime. The solution will help it bring the country onto a single platform to streamline daily operations and increase operational and financial efficiencies," George said.

The system will also provide the utility with visibility and planning capability for year-round maintenance activities, check slippage on maintenance schedules.

"We are partnering with the Saudi utility in this transformational initiative to enhance its effectiveness and competitiveness in the market by deploying the SAP ERP solution and delivering efficient IT services," George asserted.

Wipro's domain expertise and talent pool will support the utility to provide best-in-class-service to its customers.

"With the ERP-based solutions, we will scale our operations and seamlessly manage our distribution networks. Wipro's domain capability and technology-leadership will help us deliver cost-effective services and serve our large customer base in an efficient manner," Saudi Electric firm executive director Mohammad A Al-Nahari said in the statement.

With power consumption growing at an accelerated rate of eight percent per annum in the country, the utility believes the expansion will provide it an innovative platform to power the kingdom's growth in the future.