Integrating SAP Subscription Order Management (Agreement Tables)

The SAP Subscription and Order Management module covers the process step "Manage Subscriptions" and includes several key capabilities. These include the ability to manage customer and partner master data, define products and product bundles, capture subscription orders, distribute and fulfill orders, manage subscription contracts, oversee master agreements, and administer partner revenue share agreements.

SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute covers the process step "Collect Usage" and includes the following features: batch and real-time processing, collection and transformation of raw transactions, validation, error capture, alerts, and alarms, aggregation and correlation of data, data enrichment, audit functionality, and policy management.

SAP Convergent Charging implements the process step "Price and Charge" and offers a range of capabilities including service pricing and modeling, one-time, recurring, and usage charges, online and offline charging, partner revenue share calculation, online account balance management, and the management of prepaid balances and allowances.

While covering the process step "Bill and Settle", SAP Convergent Invoicing includes various capabilities such as managing billable and consumption items, triggering rating, creating billing plans, aggregating billing, managing invoices including preliminary invoicing and discounts, handling revenue share and partner payment statements. Additionally, it also supports Revenue Recognition for unbilled and deferred billable items and complies with IFRS15 / ASC606 regulations.

The SAP Customer Financial Management module in SAP S/4HANA is responsible for the processes "Handle Payments", "Manage Credit and Collections", and "Provide Customer Care". It implements various capabilities including a single combined AR and AP subledger, managing incoming and outgoing payments, payment deferrals and installment plans, cash desk operations, digital payments integration, dunning and collections, charge and interest calculation, integration with external collection agencies, credit management, security deposits, handling doubtful entries, individual value adjustments, and write-offs, financial customer care, promise to pay, and dispute management.

Product modeling enables you to create and manage subscription products, physical goods, and product bundles. It provides a flexible offering to customers along with the ability to manage attributes, discounts, charges, and billing cycles. The integration with SAP Convergent Charging is used for mapping and charge plans.

In Subscription Order Management, products can be either physical goods (such as a laptop) or services. You use subscription products to subscribe to such services, especially if the service is modeled as a pay-per-use model.

A subscription product provides specific attributes and settings for leveraging payment models using recurring fees and consumption-based fees (or a pay-per-use payment model). You may use subscription products to define the following:

• Subscriptions to services with a payment model of recurring fees and consumption-based fees (pay-per-use).
• One-time services, like an activation or a change fee (one-off fees).
• Physical goods, such as a PC.
• Bundles modeling sales bundles or contract bundles.

You can group different types of products, such as subscription and physical products, services, or service contract items, into product bundles to provide a flexible offering to customers. For more information about this, refer to Product Bundles.

The product master (also known as material master) provides you with all information for the products your company purchases or sells. It is the central source from which product-specific data can be retrieved. For subscription products, you can manage the terms of duration, billing cycles, discounts, and charges, among other core attributes. You maintain the product master via the Manage Product Master Data app or the respective APIs.

However, not all product data required for subscription processing can be maintained in a product master, especially in the context of cross-catalog mapping to connect to SAP Convergent Charging. You also use it to assign discount or charge keys that are used and processed in Convergent Invoicing, using the subscription product-specific data object. You maintain the subscription product-specific data using the Manage Subscription Product-Specific Data app.

These applications can be accessed through the SAP Fiori Launchpad in the Subscription Product Master Data Group.

Industry Examples:

• Product REC_LICENSE: A recurring product for the license fee of software.
• Product SCR_CLOUD_SEL_SERV: Cloud Selection Services offering CPU, RAM, and Bandwidth Storage including a subscription fee and usage rating for B2B processes.

Cross Catalog Mapping allows you to map product catalogs across systems, in order to assign subscription products to product-like entities from the end-to-end system landscape. The product data from other systems is imported and maintained together with the subscription product. By enriching the imported data and defining mapping rules with these components and its sub-components, a mapping between the subscription product and the specific product view of the external product representation is completed. Information needed in billing, provisioning, or other systems is gathered using the mapping rules defined in Cross-Catalog Mapping.

Status and time-dependent versioning of the mapping supports adaptation to changes of the product during its lifecycle, such as price changes for new or existing customers, changes in provisioning, billing systems, or marketing activities. By mapping multiple remote entities to a single subscription product, and adjusting the mapping rules for each, it is possible to build more complex products.

Cross Catalog Mapping is the mechanism used to integrate the pricing algorithm defined in the rating catalog to the subscription product. It is possible to define tables (mapping or range tables) or parameters that can later be redefined in the Subscription Order.

Industry Examples:

1. Product SCR_CLOUD_SEL_SERV: Assignment of charge plan for consumption:

   CHP_00_CLOUD_SERVICE_V01 and charge plan for recurring fee

   CHP_00_CLOUD_RECURRING_V01

2. Assign charge plans to telecommunication product for SMS, calls, internet, and monthly recurring fee.

With Product Models, it is possible to configure a product which allows the user/customer to choose from a number of options when ordering the product.

• The product contains a number of characteristics (attributes).
• The user/customer selects a value for each characteristic.
• Some characteristic values can also be selected automatically by predefined rules.
• Product components are selected automatically by rules, based on the chosen characteristic values.

Technical Resources are the (typically unique) identifiers of a contract that are used in SAP Convergent Charging to identify the contract for rating and charging. In the product, an "assignment schema" is assigned. The assignment schema contains one or more Technical Resource types (for example, one phone number and one SIM card ID).

The Cross Catalog Mapping maps the product view to the rating view.

The focus of the BRIM solution is to provide a charge plan catalog in SAP Convergent Charging with an integration to the commercial products in SAP Subscription Order Management.

The provisioning system owns the technical view of a product. SAP Subscription Order Management combines the commercial view of a product with its rating view.

A subscription order is a special sales order that you can use to sell products or product bundles that consist of subscriptions to services (usage-based charges, recurring and one-time charges) and physical goods.

A subscription order interacts in the following way with the SAP Convergent Charging tables assigned in the cross-catalog mapping of a subscription product:

• The default table defined in the cross catalog mapping of the product is copied as the default table in the subscription order item. If an object-specific table (re-defined or assigned) is defined in the product, it is copied as a default table into the subscription order item.
• An assigned table can be a table from the Convergent Charging standard catalog or a table from the subscriber account assigned in the subscription order.
• If a re-defined table is created in the subscription order, it is stored in the SAP Convergent Charging system for the subscriber account. You can change the contents of a re-defined table.

The process steps in subscriber mapping table creation are as follows:

Prerequisite: A business partner with role MKK was already distributed to SAP Convergent Charging as a subscriber account.

• Step (1): Create a subscription order with a subscription product (1a). A SAP Convergent Charging mapping table is used as a reference for usage prices (1b).
• Step (2): Optionally, configure the product, for example, with service level agreement or other parameters. The subscription product has an assigned mapping table or range table according to the cross catalog mapping.
• Step (3): Re-define assigned mapping table or range table in SAP Subscription Order Management.
• Step (4): A new subscriber mapping table with reference to the subscriber account representing the contract partner of the subscription order is created via a web service call.
• Step (5): The cross catalog mapping for a subscription contract includes assigned technical resources, parameters (with tables), and counters.
• Step (6): A usage data record (6a) is rated with a subscriber mapping table look-up (6b).

The process steps in agreement-mapping table creation are as follows:

1. Create a master agreement with a subscription product (1a). A SAP Convergent Charging mapping table is used as a reference for usage prices (1b).
2. Optionally, configure the product in the master agreement.
3. Re-define assigned mapping table or range table in SAP Subscription Order Management for customer specific prices negotiated in master agreement.

   Master agreements are distributed to SAP Convergent Invoicing only, and not to SAP Convergent Charging.

4. A new agreement table is created via a web service call.
5. A subscription order with a reference to a master agreement is created.
6. The cross-catalog mapping for a subscription contract includes assigned technical resources, parameters (with tables), and counters.
7. A usage data record (7a) is rated with an agreement mapping table look-up (7b).

In SAP Subscription Order Management, recurring fees can be managed as standard conditions, and these conditions are automatically replicated to SAP Convergent Charging. Any changes made to these conditions in SAP Subscription Order Management will automatically update the entries in SAP Convergent Charging. However, any changes made to the records in SAP Convergent Charging will not be reflected in SAP Subscription Order Management.

To ensure proper replication of conditions from SAP Subscription Order Management to SAP Convergent Charging, specific mapping table classes must be present in SAP Convergent Charging. These mapping table classes must meet certain requirements, and it should be noted that all character strings are considered case-sensitive unless otherwise specified:

• The mapping table class has to be named Price Table.
• The first input column of the table has to be named price.key with a data type of String.
• The second input column has to be named currency with a data type of Currency.
• The only output column has to be named amount with a data type of Number.

Any deviation from these requirements might lead to the replication mechanism to fail!

SAP does not provide the Price Table mapping table class. It must be manually created as part of the configuration process.

Agreement tables are used to store the condition data in SAP Convergent Charging. The standard replication mechanism of SAP Subscription Order Management performs the following mapping when transferring the data to SAP Convergent Charging via a SOAP Web Service call:

In SAP Subscription Order Management, utilizing standard conditions enables the price of a subscription order item to be shown on the screens during order creation. This necessitates that no alterations to the prices are made in the Convergent Charging system prior to their application during runtime, as SAP Subscription Order Management would not have visibility of such adjustments.

For SAP Subscription Order Management to utilize conditions for your product, the conditions must first be established and linked to the product within SAP Subscription Order Management. You have the option to use either regular conditions or variant conditions. These conditions are managed in relation to the specific products / materials that they pertain to. Once the conditions are set up, they are automatically transferred to SAP Convergent Charging. Each product in SAP Subscription Order Management has a corresponding agreement table in SAP Convergent Charging, with the table's name matching the product's name as defined in SAP Subscription Order Management.

With a regular condition, only one price can be assigned to your pricing plan during product design. This aligns with the base fee in our business model, which will be applied regardless of the product configuration.

During the design phase, the PSMB condition type can be assigned statically to the charge plan in the cross-catalog mapping. This allows the system to recognize the need to retrieve that condition whenever the charge plan is activated in a contract:

Variant conditions offer increased flexibility, allowing for dynamic selection of the appropriate condition based on specific characteristics in the product model. Each additional fee associated with the silver, gold, and platinum service levels are assigned a variant condition and identified with a variant key:

Both condition types (regular and variant conditions) are replicated to SAP Convergent Charging once they have been created in SAP Subscription Order Management for the product.

The product model in SAP Subscription Order Management includes the information about which condition should be applied to each of the configurable service level agreements (SLAs).

In the cross-catalog mapping, every pricing plan is linked to all variant conditions with the prefix "VAR." The system will automatically determine which variant condition to utilize, and assign the parameter "KEY" based on the chosen variant condition.