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Utility companies often need to analyze how consumers are using their Portal applications. This usage might be analyzed by different dimensions. One of the important dimensions is a channel.  Channel indicates where the requests are coming from: Mobile device, Web application, IVR (or Voice) ….e.t.c. An example of an analytical use case would be:

Jane is a customer service manager in a utility company. She uses channel usage analytics to get detailed information about how often end-consumers have created meter readings on a mobile device within a specific time period.

Here it is an information about what is available in SAP Multichannel Foundation for Utilities for a Utility customer to create analytical reports based on the channel information.

Reporting based on the SAP Gateway service.

There is a standard OData service for SAP Gateway usage:   /IWFND/USAGEEXTRACTOR. You can activate this service in your SAP GW system and get all the usages of OData service calls.

Consumer type attribute of this service contains user agent information.  User agent information is provided with all HTTP (web) requests.

Example of the Consumer Type (user agent) is:

It is a string which often contains information about device and the application which requested information from Web server. Based on SAP Gateway OData/IWFND/USAGEEXTRACTOR,  you can get your an analytic information if you map consumer type to the corresponding channel.

Reporting based on the existing BI content of IS-U and CRM.

SAP Multichannel Foundation for Utilities application offers the possibility to create more business relevant analytics. Two objects are used to record the activities/communication a consumer has using Multichannel Foundation. For the CRM system, interaction record is used. For the IS-U system, Business Partner Contact is used. Each time that a request to create/update data is triggered the system creates an Interaction Record (in CRM) or a Business Partner Contact (in IS-U).

  1. CRM system
    1. First Consumer Type (user agent) is mapped to internal channel codes and this channel code is saved with the CRM Interaction
      Record.  Customers can create their own channel codes and map consumer types (user agent) to them:
      • This mapping happens in the BAdIi for CRM:   CRM_IU_UMC_CHANNEL  
        Standard mapping provided by SAP is based on identification of the keyword(s) in the "User-Agent” string and mapped to a channel. For the example mentioned below, the identified channel code will be “Mobile Application” (UMM): <<User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B405 Or the following for iPhone>>
      • The logic of mapping is as following (respecting priority): If the system finds the keyword "Mobile", it will map to the channel "Mobile Application (UMM)"; if the system finds the keyword "Voice", it will map to the channel "Voice” (UMV); if the system finds the keyword "Mozilla", it will map to the channel "Web Application” (UMW).

    2. For CRM_UTILITIES_UMC OData service, when a majority of entities are updated/ created, a CRM Interaction Record is created in the back end system. This Interaction Record will contain channel information and will be shown on the CRM UI:
    3. Then for the Interaction Record you can use the following BI content to create your reporting:
    4. The channel code is mapped to the Category of the DataSource
  2. IS-U system
    1. Similar to the CRM system, in the IS-U system, Consumer Type (user agent) is mapped to internal channel codes and this channel code is saved with ISU Business Partner Contact objects.  Customers can create their own channel codes and map Consumer types (user agent) to them:
      • This mapping happens in the BAdI for ISU: ISU_UMC_CHANNEL
      • The standard mapping provided by SAP is the same as for CRM system and described in section 1.i.

    2. The same way for ERP_UTILITIES_UMC OData service, when majority of entities are updated/created, the ISU Business Partner Contact is created. Transactions for BP Contact in ISU systems are BCT1/BCT2/ BCT3.  Channel is a Contact Type.
    3. Then for the ISU Business Partner Contact,  customer can create a report using the following BI Content:
    4. The channel code is mapped to the Contact Type for the extracts as well: 

  3. You can use BI reports in different analytical tools. Also there is a possibility in SAP Gateway to create an OData service based on an existing BI report.
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