SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management and Utilities – Case 1: Maintenance contract using rating

In my introduction post I described the flexible possibilities of integration between BRIM (CI more in particular) and Utilities.  Over the next few weeks, I will show some demo use cases I created for customers to highlight the flexibility of BRM.

The first case is a customer that has signed a maintenance contract with the supplier.  Each time a maintenance is executed, the company will charge 50€ to the customer.

To focus on the rating part, I will not integrate the invoice with a commodity (ISU) invoice, it will be sent separately using CI to the customer.  First you will some interesting customizing snippets, and then you will find some screens of the end to end process.

Customizing Snippets

Consumption Class

Everything starts with defining a consumption class.  A consumption class is used to create a rateable item.  Once the rating is done, this will generate a Billable Item which can be used for CI Billing. A list of interfaces are available to enhance the consumption items to your desired needs.   Some interfaces that I find interesting are:

• Usage Period: to indicate the period for which the consumption item took place
• Payment Reference: this adds specific fields that can be used to show a specific payment reference on the invoice resulting from this consumption item
• Service Types: this can be used to enhance the derivation of the account assignment for the general ledger.

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Rating Groups

Using different rating groups, you can define one rating group for all your billable item classes that require the same way of treatment.  The most important things you can define:

• Extensions at each step in the rating process
• The rating function module itself. You can:
  • Create your own
  • FKK_BIX_RATING_EVENT_30_SD: Use this one for SD rating (provided by SAP)
  • FKK_BIX_RATING_EVENT_30_CC: Use tis one for CC rating (provided by SAP)
• Field criteria for parallel processing
• Grouping Variants for automatic grouping
• Optional: The TARGET billing process if you want to do integrated billing. This way, directly a billing document will be created using the billable items.

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Price Scheme

To perform the rating, you must define this in customizing.  This includes the setup of conditions, access sequence, condition types and a calculation procedure. A good example of a basic setup provided by SAP you can find in the following OSS Note

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Demo screens

Provider contract

The provider contract is the agreement between the client and you to have the maintenance contract.  A more simple version is the partner agreement, which is based on the provider contract but contains less options.  Both can be created via:

• CRM
• Subscription Order Management
• An external interface
• Transactions FP_VT1 and FP_PV1

In my example, I use a simple partner agreement with one article which is priced at 50,00 € per piece.

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Consumption Item

In my example, via an external interface I receive the confirmation of the hired operator that they have executed one maintenance for this customer.  Hence, one rateable consumption item becomes visible in the system.

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This can also be shown via Fiori Apps:

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Now I can display the consumption items in detail AND I can execute the rating:

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Billing and Invoicing

Once this is done, a billing document exists already.  This is because in the rating group I chose to set a default target process to directly generate a billing document for the billable item that was created. As a final step, I can now invoice the process, and the invoice is automatically posted in FICA.  All these steps that were done individually during this demo have a parallel processing equivalent.

The billing document

The invoice document

The PDF invoice snippet

This wraps up the first case of BRIM handling. We started with a rateable item and created an invoice in a few steps. Do not hesitate to share your ideas in the comments!