Arizona Electric Power Cooperative Makes Safe Passage to SAP

Arizona Electric Power Cooperative Makes Safe Passage to SAP
Mid-Market Energy Supplier Creates More Flexible Enterprise with SAP


BENSON, Ariz. - March 14, 2006 - — SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, Inc. (AEPCO), a not-for-profit electric cooperative providing energy to communities across the Southwest, joins a growing list of companies that are using the SAP Safe Passage program—a tailored package of applications, technology and incentives—to migrate to SAP, the world’s leading and most experienced business software solution provider.

Using mySAP™ ERP, SAP’s market-leading enterprise resource planning solution, AEPCO and its sister cooperatives—Sierra Southwest Cooperative Services, Inc. (Sierra) and Southwest Transmission Cooperative, Inc. (SWTC)—will consolidate approximately 100 disparate legacy systems onto a single, integrated platform, streamlining business processes for improved usability across its three cooperative organizations. This move will aid in the modernization of internal systems and help AEPCO preserve its intellectual property.

“We realized the need to modernize our business processes and move to a more streamlined and integrated approach in order to increase enterprise visibility in our internal operations,” said Lee Anne Wilfert, CIO of Sierra. “SAP was the natural choice—it offered a complete, flexible, enterprise-wide, integrated solution and the reassurance of knowing we were partnering with a stable vendor that could support us for the long term.”

AEPCO values its employees and all that they bring to the business. By standardizing business processes on a single, integrated, enterprise platform, AEPCO will be able to preserve the valuable working knowledge, trade secrets, networking contacts and customer information that resides in each employee’s head. By transferring this knowledge to a place where it can be stored, shared and accessed by the entire company—from employees at the electric generation plant site to the boardroom—AEPCO will be able to save time and money on training new employees, decrease the drain on company knowledge resources and increase productivity among workers.

“We are dedicated to building and maintaining a strong relationship with AEPCO as the company undergoes this significant business transformation,” said Bill McDermott, president and CEO, SAP Americas. “The SAP Safe Passage program gives companies an affordable way to protect their current investments, ease integration with the SAP NetWeaver® platform and begin the process of innovating their businesses today.”