For organizations operating in highly regulated environments, modernization requires more than adopting new technology. Security, compliance, resilience, and mission requirements have to be considered from the start. SAP NS2 helps organizations securely adopt SAP cloud solutions while maintaining the control and protection required for mission-critical operations.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) put that approach into practice as it modernized its financial foundation with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition deployed by SAP NS2. In this article originally published by ASUG, TVA leaders share how they navigated the technology, security, and organizational change behind the transformation, along with lessons learned that can help other organizations preparing for their own modernization journey.
Editor’s note: SAP product and deployment terminology has been updated for accuracy.
For the Tennessee Valley Authority, moving to a new enterprise resource planning system was never going to be simple.
TVA, after all, isn’t just any utility. As a federal corporation and one of the largest public power providers in the country, it operates under a set of regulatory and security requirements that narrow the field of available technology options considerably. When leadership decided to retire a 15-year-old legacy system and modernize its financial infrastructure, whatever they moved to had to be self-sufficient enough that a loss of public internet access wouldn’t bring operations to a halt.
That requirement led TVA to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition deployed by SAP NS2 — and to a multiyear implementation that touched every corner of the organization before going live on January 1, 2026. After a rollout that reshaped how the organization thinks about change, the TVA team will take the stage at SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG, in San Antonio on Oct. 7, with lessons from an implementation that was as much about people as it was about technology.
It was, by any measure, an ambitious undertaking.
Starting with the vision
Before a single RFP went out, TVA spent roughly a year in what the team called the “Discovery Phase,” mapping out what a future-state system should look like, identifying digital opportunities, and establishing the guiding principles that would govern design decisions throughout the project. The RFP went out in the fall of 2022. Getting from there to go-live took just over three years.
The push to modernize started at the top. TVA’s CFO had a vision for a new financial platform, and IT leadership had a parallel mandate to move applications to the cloud and position the organization to take advantage of new technologies without constantly maintaining aging infrastructure. As the program grew in scope, it evolved structurally. What started as a finance-led project eventually expanded to include operations, adding project-level sponsorship from outside the finance organization.
Ashley Williams
Change at this scale has the potential to unsettle even the most prepared organizations. But TVA’s executive alignment gave the program somewhere to land when resistance came. “If we had not had that support from the top — ruffling feathers because change impacts everyone’s process — we really would not have been able to make the transformation that we did,” said Ashley Williams, Director of Financial System Strategy in Corporate Accounting.
Getting everyone on board
Any finance transformation is also a people project. And at an organization with 11,000 employees and another 10,000 contractors, TVA’s implementation required substantial change management.
Katie Downs, Senior Program Manager of Financial Change Management, and her team approached change management in a deliberate and sequenced fashion: they started with finance, making sure those teams understood what was coming before anyone else did. From there, they moved outward to IT, then to operations, project management, HR, and supply chain.
“What works for one stakeholder group isn’t going to work for another,” Downs said. “Because this was such a big change, we really just had to hit it from multiple different angles.”
Early on, Downs’s team took Williams and project sponsor Charla Hodges on a series of virtual roadshows — sessions that walked leadership teams across the enterprise through what was coming, gave them talking points, and prepared them to engage their own people.
“We wanted to make sure that leadership was informed, that they had talking points, that they knew how we were going to engage their teams,” Downs said.
To gauge whether any of it was landing, TVA ran five change readiness assessments throughout the project — measuring not just whether people had received communications, but whether they understood what was changing and felt prepared for it.
Katie Downs
Central to the effort was a two-track change champion network, one within finance and one spanning the broader enterprise. Champions met approximately every six weeks, receiving updates they could carry back to their teams.
To keep that network motivated, the team gamified participation. Champions could earn points for attending sessions, bringing colleagues along, and answering questions in meetings. The program was called “Tour de Finance” — a nod to the CFO’s passion for cycling — and let champions compete against each other throughout the project.
“People could earn miles every time they participated in a challenge,” Downs said. “It was fun to see the progress.”
Training for finance users was intensive, with lengthy instructor-led sessions that employees had to complete before gaining system access. The project management community received separate training on boundary systems, including Copperleaf C55, TVA’s portfolio management system, where GL structure changes affected how cost information was displayed and interpreted.
“Everybody in the enterprise was impacted, to some degree,” Downs said.
Why SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition
For most organizations migrating to SAP, the choice of deployment environment comes down to cost and flexibility. For TVA, federal law was also part of the equation.
As a public entity, TVA is governed by the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and must operate within a FedRAMP-certified environment. More critically, TVA needed a system it could reach even under a scenario where it was cut off from the public internet entirely.
“If there’s a mandate from the president that says you have to follow X, Y, and Z, and you have to shut down, or there’s something where you can’t be connected to the internet, we could still get to this system,” said Zach Eubanks, Senior Manager of Delivery Enablement.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition deployed by SAP NS2 runs on AWS GovCloud but connects to TVA’s network via a Transit Gateway attachment that doesn’t touch the public internet. “Technically it lives on our network,” Eubanks said, “even though the servers live on AWS GovCloud.”
The tradeoff is real. In a commercial SAP environment, updates and new releases are available almost immediately. In the SAP NS2 deployment of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, security reviews mean new features can take six months to a year to become available.
TVA also implemented SAP’s GRC module for governance, risk, and compliance, automating user provisioning and access management and enforcing segregation of duties across the system.
“For us, that was big,” Eubanks said. “Just to make sure as we provision, we keep things aligned.”
The finance transformation
At the center of the finance work was a complete overhaul of TVA’s general ledger. Moving to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition meant rebuilding the chart of accounts from scratch in a way that satisfied multiple reporting requirements simultaneously.
As a subsidiary of the federal government, TVA must produce U.S. Standard General Ledger reporting. It also benchmarks the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) chart of accounts standard common across the utilities industry.
“We designed our chart of accounts to, behind the scenes, map our primary GL to those secondary ledgers,” Williams said — a significant departure from their previous system, where different sets of books and a long, complicated GL string had been the norm.
Treasury was rebuilt entirely. Accounts receivable was overhauled. A legacy cash management system that had operated outside the ERP was retired and replaced with the S/4 treasury module.
TVA also used the transition to introduce sales orders into its non-power billing workflow, serving a customer base of more than 1,500 entities — government agencies, campgrounds, and marinas throughout the Tennessee Valley — that purchase services from TVA other than power itself.
For all of it, master data had to be migrated and transformed.
“All of that had to be loaded into the system,” Williams said, “and some of that had to be translated to S/4 speak.”
One lesson surfaced early in design: TVA’s ecosystem was larger than anyone had mapped.
“We thought we had about 20 boundary systems until we looked under the hood, and it doubled,” Williams said.
What they wish they had known
Eubanks’s top recommendation for organizations earlier in their SAP journey? Ask for a Phase Zero.
TVA came to SAP with no prior SAP experience. A Phase Zero engagement — a structured period of pre-implementation assessment and environment preparation — would have helped the team understand what they were getting into before they were under the pressure of a live program.
“We heard about it when we were in design, a year and a half later,” Eubanks said. “And we’re like, ‘wish we would have had that.’”
Standing up the AWS GovCloud environment and its network connections in roughly eight weeks, with no prior experience, was doable, “but man, was it stressful,” he said.
For Downs, the lesson was simpler but harder to act on in the heat of a large program: keep communications tighter.
“We wanted people to know what we knew,” she said. “But I think sometimes we overcomplicated it, and people can only take in so much information at a time.”
Ashley Williams
Williams’s broader advice returned to where the program began.
“Establish your executive leadership support early on,” she said. “When the rubber meets the road and it gets hard, they’re going to have to use some of their political clout, and you need their support going in.”
Williams also pointed to something less tactical: personal relationships built before the hard moments arrive.
“When things get tense and you’re tired and stressed and maybe not showing up as your normal best, people are more likely to give you grace because they understand your intent,” she said.
Interested in learning more?
Attendees at SAP for Utilities, Presented by ASUG, can hear more from the TVA team firsthand. Williams, and Eubanks will present “Modernizing the Foundation: Tennessee Valley Authority’s ERP Transformation on NS2” on Oct. 7, 2026, with a particular focus on the security requirements and organizational change work that made this implementation unlike most.
