Resource related billing with Custom Characteristics

Professional services business viz. IT/ITES, Engineering services and OEMs always process the T&M contracts. Customer demands the services based on quantity of hours expended my professionals / resources to deliver the complete / ongoing solution. Different organizations follows different way to execute this kind of contracts / orders, but when it really comes to billing of services rendered, in SAP almost everybody follows resource related billing.

Resource related billings helps to identify cost booked by resources in terms of hours booked, travel and living expenses, material, etc. Based on contract billing terms, billing request can create to raise customer invoice periodically.

I am not really going to talk about resource related billing configuration. I believe there is already enough information available about it. When we do configuration of DIP profile in ODP1 transaction, it’s really about defining material determination characteristics and criteria for the same. Most commonly used criteria is cost element. To segregate the dynamic item based on employee, period, currency, hours, object, etc, we need to define Summarization configuration. There are further settings for structuring to refine the DP91 or DP93 output.

Business case:

We recently successfully implemented professional service solution for one of world leading Organization for their professional service business. We implemented standard resource related billing process with respect to sales order and project.

The major hurdle we faced when business demanded to have billing request (Intent of billing) output in weeks. Business wanted to have billing request time sheet details with respect to weeks. Standard DIP profile provides the summarization with respect to various characteristics, and one of that is period. We tried to determine the weeks in period with custom enhancement, but the issue we faced when we reject or postpone open quantity. Since what we understood is SAP takes out postpone or rejected quantity based on first in first out (may be very vague term). So we gave up of doing any enhancement to determine hours which we are billing based on period.

Solution:

We used user exit AD010003 to add custom characteristics. With this enhancement we added week as new characteristic in DIP profile (ODP1). The characteristic week checks the document postings dates same as period. We configured the week as characteristic relevant with summarization (uncheck NoSummerrization). With this enhancement we got billing request output with week segregation.