Introducing S/4HANA Utilities for Customer Management (S4CRM)
Simplification is one of the key mottos of SAP S/4HANA, some people even say that its first letter is one of reasons behind the “S” in the product name .Today I would like to introduce you to one of the major elements of simplification within what SAP S/4HANA offers to the utilities industry. Let me explain more:
SAP S/4HANA for Customer Management (S4CRM) is a simplified version of SAP CRM embedded into SAP’s digital core powered by HANA. Technically you can install it as an add-on on top of S/4HANA, SAP’s digital core – which means that S4CRM tables will be part of the S/4HANA database scheme. Hence no middleware is required to replicate data between S/4HANA (including IS-U) and S4CRM – resulting in a simplified system landscape which you can run at a lower total cost of ownership. With S4CRM, SAP intends to harmonize the ERP (IS-U) data model with CRM for Utilities, starting with the business partner and contract account in the first release and continuing with further entities in the subsequent versions.
Moreover with S4CRM release 1.0 (released to customers since end of February 2018), SAP has embedded the CRM Interaction Center into S/4HANA, serving as a central entry point for customer service specialists. Note that S4CRM comes with a new “Belize” UI theme, offering a delightful SAP Fiori user experience as well for in the Interaction Center. For the utilities industry, SAP delivers a new business role S4_UT_IC covering 45+ typical business process steps of a utility company – with more to come in the subsequent releases of course:
To summarize SAP S/4HANA Utilities for Customer Management is a key element of SAP’s S/4HANA roadmap for the utilities industry, allowing utility companies to safeguard their past investments into SAP CRM for Utilities in a simplified system landscape.
If you are interested in more technical details about S/4HANA for Customer Management, you might want to read as well https://blogs.sap.com/2018/02/28/s4hana-for-customer-management-1.0-introduction-from-technical-point-of-view/
Hello Michael,
Thanks for this interesting blog.
I would like to ask a question about product modeling in S/4 Hana Customer Management.
Today, in CRM for Utilities on premise, product modeling is done using PMU and BRF+.
How will that work in S/4 Customer Management ? Is it the same modelisation? Can we keep the existing datamodel from our system to the new system? Or we need to configure the product again with a new data model?
Thanks a lot for your explanation,
Anaïs
Hello Anais,
Thanks for your feedback and your question. I am afraid product modeling for utilities is not (yet) part of S/4HANA 1809, however part of the product roadmap for future releases (starting 1909). Note that because of master data harmonization, the underlying data model in S/4HANA is different compared to CRM 7, for details see e.g. https://blogs.sap.com/2018/03/02/create-mass-products-by-code-in-s4hana-for-customer-management/ Unfortunately, at this point in time, we are not ready to share details re. product modeling specific to the utilities industries – but please stay tuned for further news during the year of 2019.
Best regards and a happy new year,
Michael
Hello Anais,
As stated in my recent blog https://blogs.sap.com/2019/09/25/s4hana-utilities-for-customer-management-s4crm-redesigned-sales-contract-management-for-utilities/, S/4HANA 1909 makes use of the powerful and flexible material master to define utility products. Product managers can also make use of external system to define this products, and translate them into S/4HANA Utilities master data using the new Utilities Product Integration Layer.
Best regards,
Michael
Where could I find more information about the license cost?
There are two editions available for SAP S/4HANA Utilities for customer management: the Enterprise edition and Basic CIC0 edition. please see here for details about difference https://help.sap.com/viewer/021b182b0c47416c8fafed67ebfd78a9/1909.000/en-US/200a3303c4fe498a8823f8ac015a7a63.htm.