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Explaining Utilities Product Integration Layer Energy Product within SAP S/4HANA Utilities

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to identify the steps involved in creating and utilizing a Utilities Product Integration Layer Energy Product within SAP S/4HANA Utilities

Architecture

Diagram depicting an overview of SAP S/4HANA Utilities with various components. Top row shows CRM Salesforce, SAP Sales & Service, Self-service Solutions, and Sales Channel. Central component is Customer Order Integration with SD-Order as a prerequisite. Left side covers Customer Service and Sales including a new Service Management successor, network topic for external system connections, Customer Engagement with process framework, and IC Agent Desk successor. Right side covers Product and Contract Integration with Sales Product View, Product Mapping, Classification and Configuration, and UPIL Process Integration. Bottom section has Billing Product View with Billing Rules for Energy Billing, Invoice Creation, and Invoicing & Payment Processing under the IS-U system.

For energy products, the customer creates a so-called "UPIL Energy Product," which is already used for creating a sales contract. The Utilities Product Integration Layer (UPIL) (IS-U-BI-PI) component provides an interface that allows raw material products defined in an external, business-friendly tool to be automatically transferred into the billing master data of SAP S/4HANA Utilities.

Information in the customer-defined material characteristics includes, for example:

Contract start date
Serial number of the electricity meter
Contract duration: 24 months

APIs

UPIL OData APIs: Information published on the SAP website offers an interface through which an external system can access product data. To accommodate customer self-service use cases, MCF OData APIs provide an interface for integration with the utility industry sales contract in Customer Engagement for processes such as "Start a new contract," "End contract," and "Change product."

API for creating a customer order (including configuration): Customer Order (A2A): Information published on the SAP website.

Product Creation and Customizing

A reference product serves as a reusable template upon which one or more utility products are defined. A class for attributes required for creating the utility industry sales contract is added to the reference product during customization. Before defining a new utility product, tariffs, billing schema, operands, and tariff type, you must meet the requirements.

In SAP S/4HANA Utilities, each utility product is created as a material from SAP Material Management (MM). SAP MM material characteristics are used to store the values for product attributes. UPIL customization defines the mapping of the reference product's attributes (characteristics) to the utility industry operands used in the underlying billing schema.

Product Integration

A utility product is sold by creating a new sales contract for the utility industry in customer engagement. Subsequently, a utility contract is also created. During the execution of sales contract management processes such as contract start/end, product integration is responsible for executing the standard logic to update the tariff type in the installation and to update the installation facts. Custom logic can be used to influence standard behavior, such as updating meter/device facts and determining how product attribute values are interpreted and assigned as installation facts.

Application

Diagram depicting the integration of a Product Manager App with SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Commerce Cloud for product integration packages. It shows the flow from Utilities and Non-Commodity Product Integration Packages through the SAP API Business Hub, covering Setup of Billing Master Data, Price Simulation, Contract Setup, and Standard Integration processes. The energy billing and order processing systems include SAP S/4HANA Utilities IS-U, SAP Subscription Billing, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, while non-energy billing uses SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Subscription Billing.

The Utilities Product Integration Layer (UPIL) (IS-U-BI-PI) component provides an interface for automating the transfer of raw material products defined in an external, business-friendly tool into the billing master data of SAP S/4HANA Utilities. The UPIL framework allows for flexible mapping between tariff operands in SAP S/4HANA Utilities and the attributes of externally defined raw material products. Through this mapping, a product manager can automate the creation of raw material products with fees, discounts, and other product attributes. When setting up a contract, the product attributes are prepared for IS-U billing.

UPIL includes the following main components:

Product Integration Layer. For more information, see Utilities Product Integration Layer.
Definition of the Utility Product (raw material product). For more information, see Utility Product and Reference Product.
Management of Utility Industry Sales Contracts.

To set up UPIL, an administrator performs a one-time setup that includes the following steps:

Prepare billing master data
Define reference product
Customizing for a reference product
Configure a scenario for invoice simulation

To use UPIL, a product manager creates utility products and optionally simulates the billing of products. The reference product data, customization, and utility product data are then transported. Sales representatives sell the finalized products in external applications or in SAP S/4HANA Utilities for customer management.

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