In this blog I will discuss about what do you mean by Intercompany and Data Exchange.
Let’s Consideration and Scenario where in your area Electricity is providing from various Supplier A, Supplier B , Supplier C, etc. Generally in deregulated market we have this option to choose the energy suppliers.
Deregulated in Utilities Market means where you will purchase the Electricity and then Supply to the Customers in short you will not generate the electricity you will purchase and then sell the electricity, where as Regulated in Utilities Market means generating electricity and distribution to the customers up to services you will give.
Deregulation of market has given consumers the freedom to choose their energy suppliers and to change the supplier if they are not satisfied with the services of the supplier they can leave the exciting supplier and choose a new supplier.
For Deregulated market it will not possible to manage lots of data of the customers keeping a track because lots of data will be shared between retailer and distributor. To help this SAP comes up a sub module called Intercompany Data Exchange {IDE}. This will helps to automates data between retailer and distributor in a deregulated market.
In IDE {Intercompany Data Exchange} will contain 3 main parts.
1. Grid.
2. Communication Control.
3. Process management.
Let’s understand one by one.
- Grid: It contains the generation of service and distribution of service to particular period.
For example a customer is on Supplier A with for 10 years and now want to switch to new Supplier i.e. Supplier B. This will help in technical way to understand which supplier had supplied in a particular range of Months or Years.
- Communication Control: The flow of data will be sending and receiving. In SAP it is possible with the help of IDOC’s.
- Process Management: Let’s a customer wants to update the Mobile number then retail supplier should update the info accordingly.
IDE process allows processing of multiple message formats, thus providing options for using the same system to support different markets scenario’s.
In short we can modify the details customer details, switching the customers to different provider, etc.
Thanks for reading the blog.
