Outdated: SAP Subscription Billing for configuration, pricing & measuring subscriptions with SAP Business ByDesign

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Discontinuing Integration between SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Subscription Billing

SAP will discontinue the support for the CPI-based integration between SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Subscription Billing. The integration content available on the SAP API Business Hub is deprecated and will be removed with the 2305 release. In case there is a business requirement, partners can offer an integration by leveraging the public APIs for both SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Subscription Billing.

Across all industries and countries companies are extending their business models by adding subscription options for their products and services. This allows customers to consume them in a completely different way. Some of the reasons for going into subscription-based business models are:

• Digital products are rising e.g. Media, Streaming, Games, Digital Marketing…
• Software is eating hardware e.g. Smartphone apps replace devices like CD player, scanner, GPS…
• Service is eating material sales e.g. Print-on-demand, Textile Management, Fleet Management…
• Ownership of hardware is less important e.g. SaaS, Carsharing, …

Unfortunately the configuration, pricing and usage measuring of subscription based services tends to be complex. We all see this with our good old newspaper subscription which offers since ages options like “daily”, “weekend-only”, “first-month-free”, etc. but suddenly also includes “full”, “limited” or “pay-per-view” online versions.

With SAP Business ByDesign and it’s built-in standard webservice interfaces you can quickly integrate any kind of solution which manages the configuration, pricing and quote process for such a subscription based business model.

If you want it simpler and without integration you can also implement subscription models with the built-in customer contract management which will be doing the invoicing and allow monitoring based on customer invoice schedules.

In the demo below we have been connecting SAP Subscription Billing (aka Hybris Revenue Cloud) to ByDesign using out of the box integration flows of SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI):

The demo shows only how to support intangible products without confirmation and delivery e.g. Postage, Software, Streaming, Lettershop. But of course it can be extended to support delivery of materials and service confirmation by a service employee by using the various other interfaces (e.g.sales order) that ByDesign provides out-of-the-box.

To implement the scenario and to run it on your ByD system you have to do the following steps.

1.Setup the SAP Subscription Billing System

Main step after you have received your tenant is the configuration of the subscription and its price determination with with a rate plan. In the demo we have setup a rather simple model with setup fee, recurring charge and block pricing. You can of course setup way more complex models.

2. Configure integration using SAP CPI standard integration

Since our 1902 release you only need to configure the predefined integration flows of SAP CPI (e.g. set host names and credentials). You find the standard integration flows and it’s documentation on the SAP API Business Hub.

Here you see more:

The full documentation on how to configure SAP CPI integration flows can be found under “Documents” in SAP CPI.

SAP CPI provides not only access to the standard integration flows but also provides all other SAP Business ByDesign interfaces and it’s documentation. With this system integrators can find and understand the scope of most important ByDesign interfaces and integrate them to extend the standard and build a custom scenario

That means adding more integrations e.g. for sales orders or product data replication is possible as well.

3. Trigger invoicing in SAP Business ByDesign

The creation of the invoice requests in ByD is using the well known standard Manage Customer Invoice Requests webservice and is triggered and monitored by the SAP CPI middleware.

Here you can find more details in the SAP Business ByDesign PartnerEdge Collaboration Jam (login required)

Here is a list of helpful documents which provide more details on how to use the open interfaces of SAP Business ByDesign:

• How to monitor subscription business with invoice scheduled in SAP Business ByDesign Cloud ERP
• SAP API Business Hub SAP Business ByDesign and Subscription Billing integration flows.
• What are the most important commerce integration user stories and flows?
• How to configure Commerce and Point-of-Sales-Transaction interfaces?
• Which are the standard integration scenarios overall?
• What are the most important webservices for webshop/commerce integration?
• List of all ByDesign integration interfaces (Webservice APIs)

An overview on SAP Business ByDesign Customer Engagement can be found here.