Mobility as a Service (MaaS) – How is it changing the future of Transportation?

Time is not so far when customer-centric options like self-driving cars, carpooling, people opting for greener options and choosing public transport, etc. will take over, and owning a car will be rare. This is what the future of transportation certainly looks like. The concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) makes it even more clear and certain.

In the past few years, a huge shift from using personally owned cars to choosing public transportation or using mobility as a service has been noticed. The current way of traveling from let us say point A to point B has changed and is transforming and shaping up the whole ecosystem of individual mobility.  Not only will be the entire transportation industry will be affected by it, but other sectors including health care, energy, media, insurance etc. will have the impact. These industries should reevaluate and opt for more advanced solutions to create value in this emerging environment.

What is Mobility as a Service (MaaS)?

Mobility as a Service also commonly referred to as MaaS is a customer-centric platform for individuals to use as a mode of transportation. This is an on-demand, real-time platform which basically includes a different combination of transport methods like a car and bike sharing, taxis, and car rentals/leases, and it offers its customers everything that is essential for an effortless traveling experience. Right from the user’s travel plan to payments, all this is included in MaaS.

To choose this service, all you have to do is to take a subscription of the application and you will have the access to available vehicles like car, bike, any public transport pass for the chosen time period depending on your convenience.  If we talk about further details, it has smart mobility options including various modes of transportation for the ecological and social benefit are also playing a huge role in reducing harmful emissions, cleaning the air pollution, and proving better road safety. 

Benefits of Mobility as a Service?

New age service Maas offers various advantages including – 

  • Effortless and smart route planning — Maas offers real-time route planning for the users. it helps them in planning their journeys which might require using multiple transport methods based on the route they choose, with the help of smart suggestions drawn from their particular preferences.
  • Personalisation for best user-experience – MaaS is known for being offered as a completely personalized service. This creates a unique bonding between the users and the transport service provider. With the help of big data, it provides two-way communication and frequent customer feedback because of which MaaS systems have become the greatest customer-focused transportation platform of today
  • Easy payment choices — There are various different methods through which the MaaS users can pay for transportation which includes phones, smartwatches, and bank cards, flexibly before or after their journey, or also on a subscription basis.

What were the typical city transport billing platform challenges?

  • Multiple Booking Platforms – Leading to difficulty in creating bundles, limited integrated view of the customer, poor adaptability to multiple business models and not easy to grow partner ecosystem
  • Revenue Leakage – Manual processes, no single view of the customer, no streamlined order to cash process, limited Automation of business processes, higher Days of Outstanding.
  • Customer Experience – Needs to be enhanced, consistence and contextual
  • Limited Scalability – Bundles as well as combining various billing stream will lead to a massive increase in transaction volumes as well as business rules complexity
  • Visibility – Limited visibility (for business) of customer booking various commute options

How MaaS -Mobility as a Service and SAP BRIM together can be a game-changer?

The digital economy has completely changed the way how customers use to buy and engaged in the same service earlier. The subscription-based model has opened several options for the customers thus making the complete process hassle-free.

The Digital Economy has enabled new services â€Ķ and changed the way customers buy

   

Iteration is based on customer behavior that includes price per month, per use, volume tiers, minimum commits, freemium, per outcome, etc.

SAP BRIM – Advanced Billing Platform for City Transport

  • Account Registration
    • Register customer account
    • Add credit card details
  • Journey Planning (Purchase)
    • Check routes and possible legs of the journey
    • Buy rides/journeys in advance
  • Journey: Tap-In & Tap-Out
    • Every journey start and end are recorded by NFC, Proximity Sensor Bluetooth devices using the phone
    • Separate events are clubbed together to record the journeys for charging
    • Digital Presentment
    • Responsive and Integrated Reporting / Customer-Centric Statements and Forms
    • The customer receives a statement on mail for monthly usage
  • PayG Payment –Fair Price Promise
    • Flexible Billing/Invoicing and Payment process
    • End of the day all PayG charges are collated and payment run deducted the total from Credit card Service Charging
    • Flexible Business Logic for Services Charging
    • If the ride is already purchased that entitlement is used otherwise the charge is calculated for Pay

How Acuiti Labs can help?

Acuiti Labs is transforming the travel industry via the use of SAP BRIM and excellent customer experience-driven mobile apps.

We have innovated the travel of an individual who is using their own vehicle or using public transport to make it account-based pay rather than individual transactions.

These apps and BRIM platforms are designed to operate in any country or city with minor changes. This will significantly accelerate the adoption of account and relationship-based travel.

Acuiti Labs is an SAP Silver Partner offering an accelerated implementation service for SAP BRIM, Subscription Billing, Entitlement management, and more. Our experience and competency in ‘mobility as a service’ market could provide a complete road map for the businesses that are looking for transformation and adoption of a new way of mobility. Our billing and other SAP Services can help you in changing the way you consume mobility by integrating all forms of transport, including local bicycle services, ride-hailing, car-sharing, and a lot more. Contact us for more details.

Role of SAP Billing / SAP BRIM in Transforming Tolling Business

Transformation of tolling business with SAP Billing / SAP BRIM Solutions – Tolling is generally an amount, or a fee paid to access any road, bridge, or tunnel and the revenue generated by this is utilized for maintenance, construction, and/or other such operations

Toll Business can be simply understood as a way to deal with transportation challenges and provides a positive impact on freight transport in several ways. The toll in many ways has been benefiting society without placing an excruciating financial burden on the entire transport system. The advantages the toll business offer include improved transport efficiency increased revenue for the public budget and reduced external costs of road vehicles.

There is numerous research that has time and again proved that tolls can positively impact transportation in several ways. Below are a few examples –

  1. Improved Transport Efficiency – With the road tolls being introduced, empty headings have been seen to decline. Additionally, tolls are also helping in reducing the vehicle km required for transportation as trucks are improving loading rates because of the pricing pressure.
  2. An affordable choice, without impacting consumers’ prices – In most of the industries the range of transportation cost is between 1% to 5% of the total production cost which is comparatively low, and the accumulated statistics will not show any significant effect.
  3. Significant contributions to transport sector funding comes from the toll revenue – This is true that money that comes from toll revenue is one of the major sources of funding that the transport sector earns.

How Tolling business can help in reducing the worldwide challenge of traffic Congestion?

The increased number of vehicles on road is certainly the cause of massive traffic jams during peak hours in many parts of the world.  Managing the traffic congestion problem on a high scale would not only be a sign of relief to the economies of various countries across the globe but, this would also be helpful for sustained productivity and competitiveness.

A report by the UK government suggests that congestion may cost the economy of England ÂĢ22 B a year in lost time by 2015. The U.S Transportation Institute said in 2011 that the cost of congestion is more than $120 billion, nearly $820 for every commuter in the U.S. World’s record traffic jam in China, Hebei province, was 110 km long during 12 days in August 2010.

There are three main purposes of road pricing and tolling among these tolling is utilized to generate revenues. The other two important reasons include congestion or value pricing which helps in managing demand and environmental pricing to reduce environmental impacts.

E-Tolling System – What is E-tolling and what are its advantages:

E-tolling or Electronic tolling collection (ETC) is a wireless means of automatically collecting the usage fee or toll charges from the vehicles using toll roads, HOV lanes, toll bridges, and toll tunnels, etc. without requiring any action or stopping by the driver. This not only is time-saving but also keeps the entire process of toll collection transparent. Electronic tolling is also cheaper when compared to a staffed toll booth as it does not require manual processing and it helps in reducing transaction costs for both government and private road owners.

Advantages of E-Tolling –

  1. No stopping of vehicles at a toll booth
  2. Time-saving
  3. The reduced traffic congestion problem
  4. Can save gallons of gasoline every year
  5. Efficient, safe, and secure

Evolution of Business Models and Non-toll Revenue. Transformation of tolling business with SAP Billing –

Toll pricing models have been evolved the most in the past few years. With the evolution and several new innovations, it has become more complex with customers demanding loyalty benefits, discounts, and vouchers. Especially the customers who own a large number of vehicles, deal with a lot of such task forces, and have to take similar journeys several times.

Tolling charges vary depending on what time of the day the trip was taken. How many travelers are there in a car, total distance covered, or even customer’s residence? The payment itself could be prepaid (wallet based), postpaid (Bank settlement) or hybrid model. Also, taxes could depend on the type of vehicles to subsidize electrical vehicles.

Besides the pricing and billing complexities in Toll itself, tolling companies have a lot of avenues to grow the non-toll business and get additional revenue. The same vehicle cards which are being used for Toll could be used for paying for fuel, parking, E-vehicle charging, hiring bikes, and car wash services.

Challenges Faced by Tolling Business

  • Road transport accounts for around 16% of global man-made CO2 emissions. Also, the number of crashes subsequently increases due to congested roads.
  • Tolling business deals with a lot of administrative tasks and paperwork which becomes quite a headache if not managed with the help of proper dedicated solution
  • Juggling between too many transponders and navigating the customer service maze

Role of SAP BRIM Solution in Toll Collecting –

Transformation of tolling business with SAP Billing is super easy with Acuiti Labs!

Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (BRIM) solution under the hood comprises of various different solution components that are pre-integrated in a suite. The Customer, Products Master and Order, Contract Management is handled in the Subscription Order Management (SOM) component that allows new customers to register, along with their e-tag information. On the tolling plaza where the vehicle information is actually captured by tolling operational systems which will then pass that on to Convergent Mediation which allows data massaging and validation.

SAP BRIM Platform can orchestrate information to downstream systems or can couple separate events together like vehicle entry and exist events received from two different toll points on the same route. Convergent charging takes care of the complex rating and charging logic and find out whom to charge and how much to charge for the journey. Finally, Convergent Invoicing can handle billing, invoicing, and settlement processes with banks and postings to subledgers.

Tolling Systems – Open versus Closed

In the closed tolling system, the vehicle is tracked both at entry and exit points. While in the open system toll plazas or charging booths are charging points for the applicable road section.

Customer Journey

The customer journey begins right from the moment when he/she either purchases a card or e-tag from the store and registers it along with the vehicle registration details. Customers can then top-up their card/e-tag using banking services like bank mobile app or ATM. Now when the customer makes a toll-applicable journey, based on a closed or open toll system the toll plaza will record the details or his card/e-tag verifying them against the vehicle plate number to detect any fraud.

These details will then be fed through Convergent Mediation where there will be further validations like multiple journeys on the same path in very short amount of time or improbable time difference between entry and exit timestamps recorded. Once the event data is validated it is rated by the Charging system to create billing items (records) of transactions. These transaction records/items are aggregated to be shared with the customer and the bank for any applicable settlements later. To minimize credit exposure it may very well happen that the entry point registers the vehicle entry and reserves or block some amount on customers’ e-tag accounts and at the exit point the charges are calculated and the e-tag balance is either deducted immediately or send to the bank for settlements.

Advantages of Using SAP BRIM –

  • Simplified Customer interactions
  • Meeting real-time expectations
  • Real-time insight for true customer 360-degree view
  • Increase Transparency and efficiency 
  • Real-time Execution for context-sensitive offerings
  • Improved Customer engagement
  • Innovative pricing and Bundles
  • Consolidated Billing to manage credit and collection efficiently
  • Handles hybrid payments

While now you already know what role SAP BRIM plays in managing toll business efficiently than ever, it also important to get a holistic view of some other advancements offered by SAP solutions to its customers and how Acuiti Labs could be the most suitable choice for you –

Business Responsiveness – SAP BRIM offers Innovative pricing model, charging and billing models and also opens up a smart revenue stream that are personalized for your B2B offerings and you get a chance to know your customers better and thus can offer customized solutions to them.

Efficient Revenue Management – SAP Solutions could be the best choice when you are looking forward to increasing customer satisfaction and improve financial performance with a converged view of a customer account, receivables, payables, and disputes.

The flexibility of Deployment – Get the flexibility of deploying complete, integrated customer care and next-gen billing system with SAP Billing Solutions or choose to deploy in smaller implantable steps for targeted incremental value. You get the freedom of doing it the way you wish to choose!

How Acuiti Labs can be the right digital partner for the transformation of tolling business with SAP Billing?

Acuiti Labs’ can help in the transformation of the tolling business with SAP Billing solution and efficiently handles the issues that toll businesses are currently facing.  We can manage the toll Industry pain points and also support potential future growth avenues. Contact us for the digital transformation of your tolling industry today!

Transformation of Media and Entertainment Industry using SAP BRIM Solution

What is the need of SAP BRIM Solution for the Media and entertainment industry today? This industry has evolved rapidly over the past few years and has become the early adopters of technology. The evolution of the industry has led to a more subscription-based economy with a healthy dose of usage-based charging. Easy and flexible options to watch movies or their favorite shows which is now at their fingertip with the online streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Video, Hotstar, and the list goes on. The need to modernize and adopt a digital transformation-based approach has become imperative for the industry old timers to match with the new technology based streaming platforms.

Releasing movies on the conventional theaters and cinema houses is now being challenged by the new streaming platforms. There is a big shift in the revenue model for movie makers. More and more movie makers and studios are now releasing content directly on the streaming platforms making the traditional model close to obsolete.  Along with this the consumer expectations have changed considerably. They are now looking at pure subscription of their desired bundles or pay per use or a combination of the two. They are no longer willing to be tied to the conventional media content delivery, where the choice was driven by the media service providers.

Imperatives of Media and Entertainment World today –

Consumers of media are now the millennials whose expectations are completely different from yester years. The viewing habits and demands are very technology driven. It is very important to understand that the combination of new digital distribution modalities and evolution of customer’s consumption habits. This is continuously challenging the traditional Media and Entertainment business model. It has already been considered the start of a sweeping transformation that will continue to reshape the entire Media and Entertainment ecosystem.

We cannot ignore the unyielding competition as far as the media and entertainment industry is concerned, with even the biggest of industry players battling for the eyeballs of the viewers and subscribers. The media companies that will rapidly identify and react to the evolving requirements and consumption patterns of the end-users will survive in this rate race.

The rapid growth in advanced technologies has been the single biggest factor behind this resurgence. The same advancement in technologies has also created the commonly witnessed enlightening shifts. The audience now have understood their power and have become more demanding. Gone is the time when they use to adjust their daily routine, to the availability or airing of the content. Content providers are wrapping up their broadcasting and publishing as per the requirement and convenience of the customers. With the growing completion amongst the streaming platforms, the companies have become more customer-centric over time.

When at any given point people can exchange notes with each other about any of the newly launch media content by the means of several social media websites like YouTube or Instagram or review sites, the death or survival of any published or broadcast content can be decided in seconds.

One thing is obvious; consumers are more liberal and are keen to exercise greater choices and express personal freedoms as far as media & entertainment are concerned. Along with independence, consumption has also significantly gone up. This has led to a double-edged challenge for the content providers, greater opportunities, and much higher risks. In the era of technology shifts, it is imperative that only those media and entertainment entities that enable themselves rapidly, identify and act on this tectonic shift in the consumer mindset will survive and indeed thrive.

In summary, challenges faced by Media and Entertainment Industry –

Knowing the fact that the media and entertainment industry is witnessing massive transformation at the moment, it is also reacting by working towards improving the customer experience. Nevertheless, here are some major challenges that are being faced by this industry.
1. Higher Customer Expectations – The customers are expecting the various media and entertainment providers to deliver choice, convenience, and value, all these wrapped inside personalized and customized experiences that should be available on-demand and on a cross-platform basis which should also include limited advertising and strong data protection.

2. Adaption of new realities – Growing competition for viewers and advertisers, combined with ongoing declines in subscribers, has become quite a cause for topline media and entertainment business owners to relook at the new realities and adapt them for being all-time better. All that Media and Entertainment industry requires is a new level of operational superiority — the kind of strategic expense reduction that provides short-term results and long-term efficiencies.

3. Constant desire of customers for something new and unique – Speaking about the traditional Media and Entertainment model, creativity, distribution, and monetization were direct. It was common for consumers to be passive and wait for content that was made available at a time prescribed by others. Digitalization has changed the face of the world and that has reduced the need of an intermediary, that is more atomized, yet a bit complex and, above all, lively. As mentioned earlier, Media and Entertainment consumers are more inspired and demanding. Their expectations are rather high on being able to control how the content, products or services should be delivered to them. This behavior and expectations have been fueled by personalized experiences across their daily life, right from mobility and financial services to communications and indeed entertainment.

4. Mitigation of Cyber risks – Huge amount of data is being created every minute as a result of millions of clicks, views, and downloads. This data offers media and entertainment companies a real competitive advantage, however, this same data is a real threat for them as it acts as a magnet for cybercriminals. Companies need to have a better plan in place in order to deal with any cybersecurity issue.

5. Race to deliver the best content – The rapid growth in video creation and distribution platforms and a consistent rise in engagement metrics, subscription fees, advertising revenue or a combination of all of these together have created an intensely competitive landscape for developing and acquiring the best content.

With so much content available across many distribution alternatives, Media and entertainment businesses are forced to think of innovative strategies to deliver more compelling programs for their consumers to watch. AI and machine learning technologies can be leveraged by these companies to dissect viewing patterns from multiple perspectives to build personalized recommendations into consumers’ digital interaction.

Role of SAP in changing the face of Media and Entertainment Industry

The content offered by media and entertainment industry plays a crucial role in customer satisfaction, SAP S/4 HANA and the cloud platform can help in streamlining and personalizing the content as per the taste of the Audience. SAP S/4 HANA has collaborated with SAP Cloud Platform and is facilitating the media houses to digitize and innovate their business models.

Here are a few points that can help in understanding the role of SAP in media and entertainment industries

Creating New Cloud-Based Multipurpose Applications

The SAP Cloud based platform is helping media companies to build new cloud-based mobile applications rapidly which can in turn help them for the next-generation audience, that are more technology driven and are always hooked online through their mobile devices.

Bundling

Many new media companies are opting for bundling service offered by SAP. Product bundling feature enables them to easily create complex and personalized product offerings of digital goods and services for their customers. With the help of this feature you can also offer flexible pricing and availability rules based on the customer selection

Packaging

In this competitive world of new digital a reality, SAP S/4HANA can help your deal with all packaging requirements efficiently.

Monthly Subscription Billing

SAP Subscription Billing solution can help your business with a simplified, automated approach to billing and ordering processes to help you create and monetize new offers quickly and effectively which can also be chosen on the Subscription basis.

Customer Experience

SAP Billing Services can help your company in delivering better customer experience by providing transparency and flexible billing choices. It can help you in managing huge number of users with ease and also keep a track of user-based charging.

SAP innovative software solutions remain the game changer when it comes to targeting the right audience, dealing with customer problems, establishing better connections with them, and a lot more.

Speaking about the facts, as per SAP’s official website, near about 83% of the media-based companies listed in Forbes Global 2000 are SAP customers, 74 % of radio and TV broadcasting content worldwide is produced by SAP customers and 90 % of the printers and publishers in the Forbes Global 2000 are SAP customers.

SAP’s easy approach to solve to your specific your specific media business requirements –

  • SAP’s intelligent technologies optimizes the overall experience of your customers. Move a step ahead by increasing the transparency of end-to-end processes and leverage real-world awareness which involves consumers, talent, and also business to business (B2B) partners get more innovative.
  • SAP innovative solutions can help you in unlocking business values and potential with digital technology. Get an all new approach to content delivery by connecting innovative technologies with integrated business solutions and get more closer to creating an intelligent enterprise

SAP CX to improve Customer Experience –

With a lot of new options coming up in the market so promptly, it is quite a task for businesses to win customer’s trust and keep it intact in the long run. These fascinating options for the customers are capable enough to drag their complete focus away from you. SAP Customer Experience is one of the best solutions to make each step of your customers journey count. Understand their intentions, interact frequently to show that you care, offer them complete support at each step of their journey. This is how SAP helps you in providing the best of customer service.

SAP BRIM Solution to improve customer experience – Example of the Use-case

The role of SAP  BRIM solution for the media and entertainment industry can be clearly understood with the help of an example of the use-case where the primary requirement was to improve the customer experience. 

Business challenges –

In this use case, the media and entertainment industry wanted a system to deal with:

  • Product bundling and pricing,
  • Manage subscriptions
  • Manage offers efficiently
  • Single billing for subscription and consumption events

They required a provision that can offer the customers bundled product with a lot of unique options for them and a robust OTC process that includes quotation approval.

What SAP Innovative solutions were used to deal with the above-mentioned challenges –

SAP BRIM Solutions can significantly reduce manual efforts and operational cost by offering support for businesses that deal with subscription models. A few SAP BRIM solutions that are involved in this process includes SAP CX C4C, Commerce, Data Mediation, SAP BRIM and Subscription Billing.

Depending on your business goals, SAP BRIM solutions are implemented which helps the businesses understand the scenario of getting numerous advantages for both customers and business itself.

 SAP BRIM Solution Architecture for Media and Entertainment Industry

Benefits

After implementing SAP BRIM solution, the end user was provided with a highly scalable and high-performance SAP CX Integrated solution along with a 360° view of customer records to accelerate collections processes and improve customer service. The business also gets the benefit of provision of performing usage and recurring based billing.

How Acuiti Labs can help –

Acuiti Labs is a UK based SAP Silver Partner and offers innovate solutions like BRIM, Subscription Billing, CPQ, C4C and more. Business growth or improving customer relationships, we can help you with customized solutions for all your requirements. We can help you in accelerating implementation time, reducing risks, reducing manual processes, enhancing sales activities, improved customer interactions and moreover, get you ready for your digital journey with our SAP based solutions.

Looking for a comprehensive Sales Performance Management System? How can SAP Commissions help?

SAP Commissions is a simple yet very effective way to improve and align sales performance management according to your business goals. Already chosen by many successful businesses, this is a new age end-to-end solution to deal with business requirements and helps in streamlining incentive compensation management, distribution process, approvals, and workflow, it also helps in reducing overhead and maximising plan effectiveness.

Grow revenue, meet business goals and keep your sales team motivated with SAP Commissions. This innovative solution allows you to create, optimize and deliver incentive compensation plans and align sale behaviors to maximise profits while gaining the transparency to increase commissions ROI and remove errors. No matter you are dealing with direct sales force or indirect sales force, this solution can easily manage a complete incentive compensation process for you right from sales order to payment.

SAP Commissions is designed in a way that it fits perfectly into your business process and brings in the agility to meet the rapidly changing market scenario. While using this for your business you can eliminate the commission errors, align sales to your business goals, and monitor your expenses wisely that are specifically assigned for compensation budget.

If you are also looking for a simple way to deliver transparent incentives in an agile manner and get your sales team fully aligned with your business goals, SAP Commissions is for you! Powerful and fully customisable dashboards and prepackaged reports with SAP Commissions make sales performance management process even faster, accurate, and transparent.

SAP Sales Performance Management with SAP commissions

Below are the key features that will help you understand how Sales performance management can be best done along with SAP Commissions:

1. Execute your Sales Plan in a better way

This is the best way to align all your compensation plans in one place which is also a great advantage for sales representatives and sales managers. SAP Commissions comes with complete transparency and allows the sales reps to have visibility about the payouts and performances, in a way that they can have a proper understanding about commission plans and raise compensation disputes, see detailed compensation statements and performance metrics and forecast income at their convenience, anytime, anywhere and on any device.

2. Easy integration with the back-end systems

Best part about using SAP commissions for sales performance management is that it can easily be integrated with major and most frequently used latest platforms like CRM, ERP, HR systems etc. where the integration can be done both at data level and at the processing level. So, you can easily enjoy the real-time data insights and have the flexibility to execute business processes across different systems without worrying about worrying about logging manually, every time.

3. Ease of one-click Traceability

This solution comes with complete audit trail visibility & traceability for Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance. Get complete details of audit logs on each of the available screens as information is tracked from time to time and it has all the records about which changes are done, who did the changes and when these changes are done. Sales reps can easily trace any payout amount back to the originating sales transaction just with the ease of one-click traceability.

4. Precise and Built-in Crediting

SAP Commissions allows you to easily and precisely process any complex split; so that any number of direct or indirect payees, that could be across internal and external hierarchies can be credited with being delayed.

This is a robust built-in crediting engine, that you can credit over complex roles, relationships, and numerous functions with the help of simple drag-and-drop actions.

5. Quick Settlements of Compensation Disputes

Every business understands the pain of resolving compensation disputes as the process is not only time consuming, but also can also have a lot of errors to be resolved. SAP Commissions can be very helpful in resolving the compensation disputes quickly and precisely. This not only reduces the number of errors and disputes a business might have to deal with but also simply and smartly deals with disputes as and when they occur.

Who should opt for SAP Commissions?

Businesses that are looking forward to enhancing their sales performance management can opt for SAP Commissions. Visit our SAP Commissions page and learn more about this solution. Also, get in touch to have a brief understanding of SAP Consulting Services that we offer.

Data Protection Regulations – How SAP Marketing Cloud can help Marketers?

In the era of ubiquitous computing where even your home appliances can contact the service centers and open a maintenance request on your behalf, data of all sorts is getting generated in gargantuan proportions. This might sound like a boon to businesses and marketers as it provides a lot of data and information to be fed into analytics engines and generate valuable insights into most sought after KPIs like customer behavior and loyalty management. However, this boon also comes with significant responsibilities for maintaining the sanctity and privacy of this data which might be personally identifiable information of your customers as well as employees. In the wrong hands it can prove to be very damaging for the customers and in turn to the reputation of the companies who store such data. Regulators and governments have also identified the importance and the risks of such data leaks. Be it instances of customers of financial institutions losing huge amounts or alleged attempts of social engineering, are everyday news.

In such a scenario, the regulations that were created in the past like the Data Protection Directive of 1995 from the European union was created before companies like Google and Facebook came into existence. Law makers and governments soon recognized the fact and brought in new laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as recently as May 2018. If we specifically look at the GDPR, there are some significant enhancements over its predecessor, which includes but is not limited to:Transparency of data collection and utilization.

  • Transparency of data collection and utilization.
  • Easy access for an individual to their data and the right to be forgotten.
  • Audit trail to identify how and when a consent was given by an individual.
  • Mandatory breach notification.
  • Independent role of a Data Protection Officer for companies above a certain threshold size and that process personal data.
  • Consent of parents for processing a minor’s data

There are hefty fines to the tunes of millions or a significant fraction of a business’s turnover in case it fails to adhere to these provisions. These provisions help to enhance the data protection levels but also increases the challenges for businesses and their marketing teams. In such a scenario the responsibility of the data management and marketing tools increases manifolds.

How SAP C/4 HANA Marketing Cloud address these challenges and help marketers?

As the name suggests, SAP C/4 HANA Marketing cloud is referred to as the fourth generation CX product from SAP and incorporates multiple tools and techniques to address the regulatory challenges. Let’s take a look at some of the important features that make SAP Marketing Cloud one the most attractive solution in regards to resolving above mentioned challenges:

1. Marketing Permissions Settings: The permissions settings control whether explicit permission of the contact/individual is required or an implicit permission can be assumed unless the contact opts out of the marketing communications. These permissions can also determine how much and what data can be stored from inbound channels of marketing communication including social media channels. These permission settings are based on the communication direction, country and the communication media used. However, there is a caveat here, these permission settings will be overridden by the explicit opt in/out by the contact/customer. Any unspecific setting is overridden by a specific one. Importantly these explicit permissions can also be imported via CSV uploads or OData services.

Below are the 2 types based on the communication direction:

A. Inbound Marketing Permission settings – These settings allow the business to decide how they listen to the customer data on various communication mediums and the country to which the individual belongs. Below screenshot shows the setting details.

Depending on the country, the communication media used for the inbound communication the permission can be set.

  • No value in the permission fields means ‘No Restrictions’ on storing data.
  • ‘1’ means contact interaction details can be stored but not the personally identifiable data. This disables any engagement possibilities with the contact but the interaction data can be used for analytics purpose.
  • ‘2’ indicates the data cannot be stored in any form at all and has to be discarded.

Below flowchart illustration will further clarify the concept:

B. Outbound Marketing Permissions – These settings allow businesses to validate if an explicit opt-in is required to send marketing communication based on country and communication media. Below screenshot shows the setting details. If ‘type of consent’ is selected as ‘E’ it means explicit opt in is required and ‘I’ implies that implicit permission can be assumed to send communication.

2. Subscriptions: Subscriptions allow marketers to store data related to the interests of a contact. A contact/customer can subscribe to newsletters, etc. and receive communication from the company.
3. Contact Profile – Permission Marketing Tab: One of the very important point in most of the data regulations is transparency of data collection and audit trail of how and when consent was given. This has been achieved by providing visibility to marketers on the Permission Marketing tab where they can view all the marketing permissions given by the contact/customer as well as all the subscriptions data.

Marketers can see if the opt-in was given explicitly or implicitly assumed by switching to the table view in this screen. As seen in the screenshot, the human figure on the opt-in illustrates that its explicit.

4. Double Opt-ins: Double opt-in can be enabled to send confirmation emails to a contact/customer when they sign up or sign out of a newsletter/subscription. It can be of two types viz. email opt-in or opt-out and newsletter opt-in or opt-out. Email formats with confirmation links can be created in the in-built content studio. Double opt-ins make the process of gathering and storing data more transparent.
5. Global Suppression Rules: By defining these rules, marketers can exclude contacts from communications based on contact’s previous interactions or campaign data. Contacts get excluded from campaign execution if they meet the criteria defined in the suppression rules.
6. Communication Category Limit: This feature defined in the communication category setup helps the marketers set limit on the number of times a contact is communicated in a given period of type using that communication media.

Summary

Now that we have seen all the components of the marketing permission and opt-ins individually it’s time to summarize and see how these fit in and work together. We will also see where do these features fit into the marketing cycle. Below process flow gives a better idea.

All the enumerated features and their seamless integration makes SAP C/4 HANA Marketing Cloud an ideal option for organizations to manage their end to end marketing needs. In conclusion, I believe, data regulations are going to be more stringent in coming times as newer and advanced threats emerge but with a robust and exhaustive solution like SAP C/4 HANA Marketing Cloud will prove to be a marketer’s first choice.

SAP CPQ integration with SAP CLM: Why this is a better idea for your business?

SAP CPQ is one of the best sales configuration systems that any business can use to ease the complexity of selling solutions that feature multifaced combinations. Choosing CPQ can streamline and automate the selling process so that you deliver a solution that perfectly matches the requirement of your customers.

SAP CPQ is designed with a purpose that can help users to automate and accelerate the sales cycle. While combining products, there is a possibility that you might have to deal with product combination complexities. Simplify this entire process with the help of robust configuration tools that SAP CPQ provides and give your user the advantage of defining component requirements, analyzing functional specification, combing various solution components, and settling interdependencies.

Why CPQ and CLM could be better together?

Enhanced sales, better customer experience, quick processing of deals and minimised errors, these are a few basics required by a sales team in any big or small business. CPQ is the most trusted and efficient system to deal with sales-related problems and provide quick and accurate quotes to the customers with the help of which error-prone and time-consuming processes of sifting through multiple spreadsheets can be avoided.
Automating the complete sales process, including the contract, is another added advantage when it comes to improving the sales cycle. The pace of business is growing faster than ever and businesses in this situation cannot afford to experience any kind of delay in deal/contract finalization. And here’s when CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) makes your task easy and provides complete surety to the sales reps so that they do not face any difficulty during the legal steps’ finalization.
There are a lot of companies today that have already realised the importance of Contract Lifecycle Management for the business growth and moreover has understood that it is not just record-keeping system but CLM Software’s combination with CPQ system can be the best choice to get you one step closer to your revenue goals
Here are 5 major reasons that show why SAP CPQ integration with CLM is a good idea for businesses today –

1. Helps in Closing Contracts/Deals faster

The complicated manual process of contract finalization demands the sales team to wrap up the legal formalities which indeed are time-consuming and also carry the risk of losing the deal as the customers can lose patience and step back due to frustration.
While at the same time, the automated process guarantees a smooth and quick deal processing where sales reps have the freedom to:

  • Easily create contracts with the help of self-service wizards and templates.
  • Import third-party contracts.
  • Get the advantage of automated approval escalation.
  • Negotiate contracts with the help of pre-approved clause library.
  • Get a collaborative workspace that enables real-time tracking of all redlines plus version control

The reason why a CLM solution streamlines and speeds up the contract process is its parallel cloud presence that gives the flexibility of contract reviewing to multiple approvers at the same time.

2. Enhances Sales Experience

The Sales reps, instead of focusing more and more on the selling process, are required to indulge in the manual process of preparing proposals and contracts for customers. This affects the overall sales of the organization and also demotivates the sales team. Using CLM and CPQ together enhances the sales experience by allowing the reps to speed the entire process from the quote to closing the deal with a signed contract. It gives reps a streamlined and easier way to interact with legal teams and the deal desk. They can focus on selling and driving more revenue.

3. Generate for revenue by never missing renewals

The combination of CPQ and CLM is very helpful for the sales reps as through it they can receive email notifications of contract milestones, renewals, expiration dates, etc. well in advance. You will not need any extra process for the renewals as with this combination all the required information remains at the fingertips and can be easily processed whenever the contract is requiring renewal. This facilitates the sales reps to:

  • To take action ensuring contracts are renewed correctly
  • Follow-ups on upsell suggestions are provided by an AI-enabled CPQ

All this process saves a lot of time and manual efforts which in turn generates more revenue for the business.

4. Boost the overall productivity of your business

Reaching your revenue goals and increasing the productivity of your business is a lot easier with the combination of CPQ and CLM. The SAP CPQ integration with SAP CLM not only simplifies the sales process, but it is also helpful in minimizing the total amount of time that a legal team might take to wrap the entire contract process.
Store all your contracts in a single online repository with the help of which you can have complete visibility and version control to keep a track of each step. You won’t require different applications for different processes like contract creation, negotiation, renewal, etc. and all this can be done with the combination of CPQ and CLM.

5. Offer Better Customer Experience

Deliver optimal customer expertise by providing accurate and quick services with this advanced combination of SAP CPQ and CLM. Avoid any misunderstandings that might occur when working without an automated tool and speed up the entire process by opting for this new online platform. Do not let small manual mistakes and confusions ruin your reputation in front of your valuable customers. When you choose SAP CPQ integration with CLM, you not only choose it for offering the perfect and accurate quote to your customer but also give them the flexibility of being updated with the complete contract processing through this advanced and straightforward integrated system offered by SAP.

Apart from CPQ, CLM can be integrated with –

SAP C4C

The combination of C4C with CLM allows businesses to manage contracts and quote negotiations more efficiently! This happens because a new CLM tab is added to C4C just after the integration is done thus giving the users the privilege of switching between both the applications (CLM and C4C) without having to log in again and again. Other settings such as Contract status check and permissions etc. are configured in CLM just the way it is done in CPQ.

Salesforce

CLM’s integration with Salesforce can help businesses in leveraging CRM data in making informed decisions and managing contract negotiations efficiently. While using this combination, your sales team can easily manage all the related activities through a single dedicated platform thus simplifying the entire workflow for them.

Netsuite

while used along CLM, Netsuite can help users in utilising the guided selling capabilities that are provided by the ERP solution. This integration is also most helpful in streamlining the entire contract management process for the businesses.

DocuSign

CLM and DocuSign integration cut downs the unnecessary costs that you might be spending on printing, scanning, and copying paper documents and enables a completely electronic workflow. This automated system collects information, and sign contracts online with electronic devices like your computer or mobile phone and speeds up the process.

Adobe Sign

Speed up the workflow, manage contracts efficiently, offer clear and full reporting compliance by integrating CLM with Adobe Sign. This combination allows businesses to securely automate workflows and sign contracts online electronic devices like computers, laptop or mobile phones. As an administrator, you can integrate and set up Adobe Sign with CLM and add the e-signature capability by signing an agreement.

How Acuiti Labs can be your best choice for integrating CPQ with CLM?

Acuiti Labs is an UK based SAP Silver partner with expertise in SAP’s latest technologies including Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Cloud for Customer (C4C), Contract Life-cycle Management (CLM), SAP Billing (BRIM), SAP Subscription Billing, and more. We have already deployed several SAP solutions successfully with Global Clientele and have also created a system with the help which you can easily go for SAP CPQ integration with SAP CLM.

Contact us to get more details about how Acuiti Labs can be your best partner in getting CPQ integrated with CLM and making your businesses process a lot more seamless and quicker.

Best SAP Innovations Witnessed by various industries in 2019, What has 2020 got for you?

SAP is the new age technology and calling it as one of the most intelligent, yet simplified technology of the last decade couldn’t be wrong! From digitally transforming a lot of businesses to giving them an entirely new face for the customers, SAP has truly been a technology that has changed the business game for many in the past years.

As 2020 is already here, many businesses involved in big data spaces are eager to understand and grab upon the next set of SAP Innovations and latest technology trends that this new year has got in for them. Measures to achieve organisation’s bigger goals, transforming and redefining business strategies to offer significantly better customer experience, and focusing on the latest trends to remain ahead of the competitors are a few points that every business promises to follow while at the starting of a new year. 2020 is no different when it comes to enhancing the business and following the latest tech trends.

Another thing that remains static, is the focus on innovation. These innovations could be in the form of anything like launching a new product, or a solution, or it could also be a service. The businesses that will keep innovation as their primary focus in 2020, will flourish and here is when SAP’s latest tech trends are going to help you!

Role of SAP Innovations to fulfill Customer Demands

Customers are evolving over the period of time and so are their expectations. This has somehow created a virtual world of outgrown competition with which every business is dealing in reality. If you are looking for a solution to solve the most complex business problems and want to bring your company’s vision to life, SAP’s innovative solutions can help you. Many businesses are already taking advantage of SAP’s offerings and had achieved the greatest goals through unique and leading-edge software innovations. In 2020, it’s your turn to collaborate with SAP to provide a unique experience to your customers right from discovery to delivery.

Industries that have been benefited with SAP innovations in 2019:

SAP’s latest tech trends and innovations had already helped many organizations in bringing their vision to life and transformed the way they use to deal with their business problems.

Get Benefited from SAP’s experts who have built over 4000 innovative solutions for more than 1500 clients across the range industries including:

1. Health Care

The American Society of Clinical Oncology is shaping the future of cancer care by providing individualised solution. With the help of big data stored in the cloud, people can easily access it and use it to create personalised evidence-based treatment plans which will further result in better patient care.

2. Agriculture

In agriculture, ‘Stara’ – which is a farm equipment manufacturer is reimagining its ecosystem and fundamentally changing its business models with the exceptional solutions by SAP that are helping to digitally connect ‘the internet of things across people, plants and machines. These innovations are helping the company realise its goals in a better way.

3. Transportation

Trenitalia, a high-speed rail company is using a tailored, dynamic magnets management SAP solution that harnesses the internet of things to analyse censored data from trains in real-time. Now customers enjoy better service and the company is saving 8-10% cost annually

4. Retail

A retailer company, Tata CLiQ launched the first of its kind ‘phygital’ marketplace with SAP Hybris Solution to combine the Physical and Digital world. Now, the customers are enjoying seamless omnichannel shopping experience that is personalized so that they feel special every time they visit or buy from here.

5. Entertainment:

Cirque du Soleil, has revolutionized its fan experience by investing in an interactive mobile app. This app is creating a more impressive fan experience.

Make your innovations real with SAP innovative solutions. Now, it is your turn to best utilize these and let your business bloom in 2020. Bring your concepts to life with high value, individualised solutions built by SAP experts.

SAP Tech Trends and Predictions for 2020

1. Big Data

Big Data is the huge collaborated data that we deal with almost every day in our lives. This data keeps flowing and moving from one computer to another computer or devices like mobile or machine sensors. With the use of the right big data tools, your organization can easily manage, store, and analyse this data and get valuable insights that were earlier impossible to imagine.

Big Data can play a vital role in transforming the decision-making ability of you your business with the help of technologies like in-memory data management, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. Big data solutions for SAP can easily manage your various data landscape – across data warehouses, data lakes, and databases – with perfect to use on-premise and Big Data cloud solutions.

With the use of SAP HANA, you can easily transform the way you deal with the business challenges and get the responsiveness and processing power to make the most out of new opportunities.

2. Machine Learning

Machine learning is a smart technology that educates the computers to perform tasks in a desired way through learning from data – instead of getting it done to explicit programming.

Through the collaboration done with top universities in the world, SAP is all set to explore the more futuristic choices of machine learning and expand the technology for businesses. This collaboration will help SAP in focusing on a lot of different machine learning research topics and work on resolving open AI challenges in various industries.

3. Cloud Computing

Cloud computing can be simply defined as the process of delivering the applications, platforms, data storage, operating systems, and other computing resources over the Internet instead of doing it over on-premise infrastructure.

Businesses like yours can be benefited by choosing the cloud solution as by doing so you don’t need to make direct investments in hardware or IT staff, but get a subscription to the computing resource based on your requirement and pay the amount only for what you use.

These are three main SAP innovations cloud deployment options from which you can choose the best fit for your business requirement – public, private, or hybrid cloud. SAP promises to provide the most secure cloud platform that is maintained with the highest quality standards so that your data is safest.

4. The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things can be defined as a network of physical objects like vehicles, objects, machines, home appliances etc. that use sensors & APIs to connect and exchange data over the Internet.

5. Blockchain

Unlock the potential to revolutionize the way your business currently operates with Blockchain technology. Blockchain is based on distributed ledger technology, which securely records information across a peer-to-peer network. Join SAP Blockchain group and stay ahead of the competition. Easy communicating and networking with peers, staying updated with the latest industry trends and knowledge from speakers and SAP experts are a few best advantages that any business will be able to take while using Blockchain.

6. Digital Transformation

A fundamental rethinking of customer experience, business models, and operations is what digital transformation is all about. Any business that chooses digital transformation automatically chooses new ways to deliver value to the customers, generate better revenue, and improve efficiency.

Now or later, every business will eventually have to opt for digital transformation. A few businesses are under pressure to go for digital transformation and built a strong clientele, while there are others that are looking forward to it and moving ahead with slowly. Are you among those businesses that need to be transformed digitally in 2020?

Customer Satisfaction remains the primary goal for businesses in 2020 too –

Just like 2019, 2020 will also be a year for businesses that will keep their primary focus on Customer Satisfaction. The market will be dominated by the businesses that will understand the customer requirements better than ever before and offer them exactly what they need, even before they know they need that.

Innovation and success of your business success go hand in hand and thus SAP innovations are going to play a vital role in defining the success rate of business growth in 2020.

All that you need to learn about SAP S/4HANA and its deployment options

SAP S/4HANA is SAP’s next-generation business suite which is specially designed to run on SAP HANA. S/4HANA was launched in February 2015 and is the fourth business suite version that came after SAP R/3. It is the only unique business suit that is compatible with SAP HANA system at its backend and just because of this unique feature, SAP has replaced the old SAP ECC/ERP system with SAP HANA. Still, S/4 HANA is based around its successor i.e. ECC (ERP Control Center) solution and considers it as its core technology. SAP S/4 HANA can also be known as the latest Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution with following special features.

  1. Streamlined data
  2. Easy to understand tool designing
  3. Agile and easy to use
  4. Capable of performing complex calculations
  5. Capable of handling huge data
  6. On-premise or on-cloud deployment
  7. Can also be deployed as a hybrid system

S/4 HANA is super-fast when it comes to the retrieval and processing of data in real-time. This is because it doesn’t support batch processing for its data and follows the smarter method. As it works on real-time analytics, you can use it to process and analyse information from the Internet of Things (IoT) or big data sources.

It is very important to understand that SAP S/4HANA has played an essential role in the digital transformation of many businesses that are also SAP customers. This post will help you in understanding that why the SAP HANA Cloud Platform is similarly essential for organisations who have not yet taken-up a cloud strategy.

Next Generation, Real-time ERP Business Suite – SAP S/4HANA

Are you ready to transform your business with SAP S/4HANA which is today ‘s most advanced real-time ERP business suite? With SAP S/4 HANA you can change your organisation’s digital transformation challenges into brand-new opportunities. It allows you to be more flexible for trying out new business models, speeds up the development process, and facilitates collaboration. And thanks to core SAP HANA database with the help of which SAP S/4HANA enables real-time analytics and is able support quick decision making.

We are all aware of the pace with which the industry is growing and this has subsequently increased the demands on ERP systems. There is huge competition and to stay ahead speed, agility, and the ability to innovate has become a must. SAP S/4HANA is an SAP’s perfect innovation to deal with all such needs. This is undoubtedly a next-generation business suite to form the digital core of a modern business by blending connected business processes with a single source of truth and an instinctive user experience.

Streamline and Modernize your Business with SAP S/4HANA –

  • Take actions and plan in real time: SAP HANA Database is all that you need to enable plan and take actions in real time and if you use this you will no longer need batch processing.
  • Flexibility to adapt business models: Be connected with people, necessary devices and also business networks, so that you can flexibly adapt your business models as per the changing market conditions and latest trends.
  • Improve the decision-making ability:On the basis of reliable data provided through a single source of truth, the informed decision making is improved. Leverage predictive analytics & also what-if analyses that can be of great help to optimize your planning processes.
  • Boost productivity:Flexible user interface, clear and personalized dashboards to represent business insights and role-based interfaces boosts the user productivity and at the same time minimizes the requirement of training sessions.

SAP HANA Deployment options – Choose from them wisely

First and the most important aspect of choosing the right deployment option is to thoroughly understand the business requirement and then you can quickly and seamlessly go ahead choosing the appropriate deployment option that not only fits into your business requirement but also falls within the budget.

Depending on your budget and need, SAP S/4 HANA’s deployment options can be distributed into following major categories –

1. Public Cloud – When you choose cloud as a deployment option for your business, your deployment is managed in an SAP data center. All you need to do is to just pay a certain amount to the service provider and everything will be managed by them. As SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a common platform, you will have reduced control over it, and you cannot customise it. However, the positive part of choosing SAP S/4HANA Cloud deployment option is that, you will be always have the benefits of your using latest and updated features as Cloud deployment option automatically updates on a quarterly basis.
2. On-Premise – Have full control on the environment by choosing on-premise deployment option. Here, all you have to do is to buy SAP S/4HANA, install it and then run it way you want. Customize it to use it as per your requirements. But with privileges, there comes a few responsibilities too. While you go for this option you have to be responsible for maintaining and taking care of any upgrades and updates. You also have to take the agreement for the annual innovation cycle that provides you with the option of upgrading and updating once in a year.
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – This is considered as the most basic form of cloud computing service. Choosing this deployment option can be easily explained with an example of renting a car. While you rent a car, you get similar services as you get when you own a car apart from taking care of hardware material and maintenance of the vehicle. So, with IaaS you will not have to worry about maintenance as it also works as a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) model and mostly hosted through a hyperscale cloud provider like Amazon Web Services. However, while you avoid the high preliminary expenses of buying the technology, IaaS actually doesn’t always work out as the most cost-effective option.
4. Private Cloud – One of the best SAP S/4HANA deployment option to choose for your business is the private cloud. This is delivered in the form of managed service. Its’s like you own the cloud but the trained technology experts perform the activities for you. When you select private cloud deployment you get the privilege of merging the advantages of on-premise deployment with those of the cloud. So, a few benefits of using private cloud includes –

  • Quick innovation
  • Latest capabilities and features
  • greater flexibility
  • lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
  • Release management
  • 24/7 Consultation option
  • On-time optimisation services

All the four deployment options explained above have their own importance, but it is you who have to decide what suits your business reequipment better. We at Acuiti Labs can guide you through the process of choosing most appropriate deployment option and can also help you with one. We are UK based SAP Silver Partner and are also certified SAP hosting and cloud services partner. We offer both On-Premise and Cloud Edition for SAP S/4HANA, through which you get complete flexibility to choose system and service package combinations.
This specialty allows you to scale in two dimensions:

  1. Database size
  2. Service level

And these added scalability options allow you to change your SAP S/4HANA deployment based on the changing requirements.
Contact us for more information about our SAP S/4HANA deployment options and other SAP services and solutions.

SAP Billing (BRIM) Accelerator: AcuitiPay Modern simplified Billing& Invoicing for Connected Cars

SAP Billing and Revenue Innovations Management (SAP BRIM or aka Hybris Billing) has undoubtedly brought a revolutionary change in traditional billing method. It’s been designed with a purpose of simplifying the complex and high-volume billing and invoicing processes by combining multiple different streams to generate a single bill as an output. Not only simplifying, but SAP BRIM has helped in making the complete billing process more transparent, flexible, agile and highly efficient. It also allows for very effective revenue management processes.

Key Benefits of choosing SAP BRIM for your Business

There are various benefits of using SAP BRIM including Cloud deployment, innovating business model, supporting subscription and usage-based model and offering multisided revenue models for partners. Apart from these, below are some more benefits of using it for your business –

  1. All new experience of selling services instead of products – Let your customer get the advantage of booking or buying a service and pay only on usage-basis instead paying a huge upfront amount for the product. What if you get the same car on the subscription basis? and only pay for the service you use. Yes, this is now possible and also easy to manage subscriptions and usage-based billing with SAP BRIM. Now you can buy any product as a service like car, mobile, etc.
  2. Easy Business model operationalization : While you use SAP BRIM, it’s really easy for you to enable any form or combination of business model, whether it is prepaid, pay-as-you-go on any other. All this will be an automated invoicing and accounting process that will be smartly handled by BRIM.
  3. Ability to scale business models that are capable of supporting and handling high-volume processing: Another smart functionality of SAP BRIM is the ability to manage business models that can support high-volume processing. It can easily support IoT (Internet of Things) and other connected devices with high-volume, automated, and transparent processing across usage-event and financial postings.

SAP Billing (BRIM) Accelerators –

Acuiti Labs have developed several accelerators based on the SAP Billing or SAP BRIM platform. They are designed to provide businesses with industry specific solution that allows easy and quick adoption of the overall billing solution. By using SAP BRIM accelerators your business can reduce the workload and speed up the implementation process as the complete billing cycle is automated and precise. Moreover, you get an opportunity to see the billing process in action for your own industry before you commit.

Why choose SAP BRIM accelerator for your business?

SAP’s automated billing service BRIM is being widely chosen by businesses and it has surely turned out to be the game changer. Many big and small business have improved their billing and invoicing procedure with the help SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management and these accelerators have now became the integral part of a lot of growing businesses around the world. These points below can clearly help you in understanding that how SAP BRIM accelerators works and manages the billing flow effortlessly:

  1. Order Management on the basis of Subscription: The SAP Billing process ensures quick delivery and accurate billing. It also automates the billing cycles, extensions, updates and renewals making it even more flexible for the businesses. Tasks like managing invoicing hierarchies, specialised catalogs, and shared credit are also done separately under SAP Billing process only.
  2. Collecting, upgrading and managing events on usage base: Apart from managing the subscription, SAP BRIM also manages data that is collected on usage basis. It captures, updates, and combines usage and event data for further processing required for pricing and charging. Another advantage of using BRIM is that it provides complete support to increasing volumes of usage data with unlimited scalability.
  3. Flexible and quick charging based on your business models: Build and offer both subscription, and usage-based pricing models that are also customer-centric. Create, manage and execute allowances and entitlements with complete flexibility and most importantly you are allowed to seamlessly integrate your current digital environment with supporting APIs.
  4. Merged Invoicing for all the offered services : The best way to enhance customer satisfaction and minimising customer queries is to provide them with clear and accurate invoicing. This is what SAP billing does for you. It combines billing information from various areas and partners into a single, precise and accurate report as an output.
  5. Create and Manage Documentation Flexibly: With SAP BRIM you have complete flexibility of managing, creating and personalising business communications both in digital and hard-copy formats. You also get an option of customizing messages, formats, bills, invoices, and receipts.

SAP BRIM Accelerator by Acuiti Labs – AcuitiPay

AcuitiPay is a powerful SAP BRIM accelerator owned by Acuiti Labs and it is world’s first dedicated end-to-end payment, billing, subscription and data management platform for connected vehicle. Capable of working with partners from the automotive, telecom, and insurance industries (among others), AcuitiPay is a complete package designed to help the drivers and brings together all the services that they need into one easy-to-use platform.

Following are the services you can choose while using the AcuitiPay:

  1. Fuel and charging
  2. Maintenance and repairs
  3. Roadside/ accidents
  4. Wi-Fi and streaming media
  5. Food and Beverages
  6. Parking and Tolls
  7. Insurance
  8. Vehicle Accessories
  9. Vehicle Financing & Leasing

AcuitiPay revs up the ease and convenience of its connected vehicle platform by using SAP Technology

With SAP BRIM, AcuitiPay enables:

  1. Integrate innovative services from third-party providers into the AcuitiPay platform.
  2. Enable quick, convenient, one-click payment for services, making driver’s life easier
  3. Generate a single bill for all vehicle services, from parking to in-car entertainment.
  4. Consolidate billing and invoicing process from partners and third-party providers into a single system.
  5. Onboard partners’ existing services, offerings, and loyalty programs seamlessly
  6. Manage numerous recurring subscriptions with ease
  7. Deliver billing information and driver data to partners reliably and securely
  8. Simplify revenue management significantly
  9. Reduce deployment time of new connected car services from months to weeks.

Acuitipay Overview

  • World Class Billing and Subscription Management solution – The solution that is used by AcuitiPay is developed with the latest SAP technologies. AcuitiPay is robust, secure and fully transaction platform that is developed as cloud service.
  • Powerful SAP foundation customized for Automotive application
    • Same products used by apple to power iTunes
    • Multiple access point web, mobile and dashboard
    • Supports multiple billing types including consumption-based charging
  • High volume, real-time transaction processing and revenue distribution – Initial build to support 10 million customers
  • Multinational – AcuitiPay can be used with different languages, territory, currency, taxation, e-invoicing, reporting, regulation etc.
  • Single sign-on “Marketplace” Experience
    • Many merchants, single customer interface, one account
    • Simplified management of customers and payment information
  • Multiple transaction types that can handled with AcuitiPay
    • Subscriptions and Bundling
    • Consumption based charging
    • Digital and physical products
  • Simplified product management
    • Direct control of products and pricing
    • Web interface or integration to existing systems
  • Compatible with all existing enterprise system
    • Modern/Legacy
    • ERP, Billing, CRM, Marketing, e-Commerce
  • Custom/Localized UI – Country /Division / Brand / Vehicle
  • Easily Integrated with all Eco-system services
    • Parking
    • Insurance
    • Roadside Assistance
  • Revenue sharing and revenue distribution

What are the various Scenarios of AcuitiPay –

  • User Registration
  • Card Registration
  • Product Catalogue
  • Product Bundle
  • Price management
  • Rating and charging
  • Usage-based changing
  • Detailed Billing
  • Invoicing
  • Payments
  • Cancellation and changes
  • GDPR Compliance
  • Credit management
  • Partner Share
  • Bank Reconciliation
  • Handling Customer disputes

Various Scenarios of Subscription Management with AcuitiPay

  1. Fixed product fixed charge
  2. Product with free period
  3. Variable period with variable price
  4. Service combination with Variable free period and price bundle
  5. Fixed charge plus consumption surcharge
  6. Carry forwards – Fixed charge minus unused amount pro-rata
  7. Payment Notification
  8. Cancellations
  9. Upgrade downgrade of the product
  10. Change in configuration
  11. Subscription extension
  12. Deferred revenue for annual subscriptions
  13. Addition of free service to existing subscription

Opportunities and Challenges and Learn how AcuitiPay help –

  • American drivers spend an average of 51 minutes/day in the car and 73% of drivers used smartphones, tablets or other devices to make purchases from vehicles in 2018
  • $230 Billion (8% growth over 2017)
  • Commuters value speed and efficiency and want to get the most out of their driving experiences
  • The winners in the market for on-demand mobile commerce / services will make payments seamless, ubiquitous, “frictionless” and global
  • It is critical to aggregate all payment options and avenues in one place
  • it is very easy to compromise a weak payment eco-system architecture without the right technologies.

Now count on your driving experience with AcuitiPay as by choosing this you have the freedom choose numerous services that you might need during your journey without even worrying about the manual calculations and billings.

Get ready for the Hassle-free ride with AcuitiPay. Contact us for more details

Also learn about our other accelerators and products.

SAP Entitlement Management – Benefits and Key Features

Given the constantly evolving technological landscape and the fast-paced nature of businesses, it’s crucial for businesses to be equipped to handle any complexity that may arise. This is where SAP Entitlement Management comes in as an indispensable tool for businesses. It enables businesses to manage entitlements in a streamlined and automated manner, resulting in a superior customer experience, greater flexibility, and improved outcomes for all stakeholders involved.

As a business, it’s crucial to understand that delivering the product or software to customers doesn’t mark the end of a transaction. There’s more to it than just that. Rather, businesses today have entered a new era of selling where new experiences are being introduced to the market and the customers rapidly. Subscriptions, bundling, and embedding software/services together with the products are being provided by businesses so that the customers get better and more attractive deals.

Gone are the days when companies had their focused only on physical products. Today, businesses believe in offering ‘usage rights where they do not rely merely on the initial sale, but on the ongoing relationship with the customer and their satisfaction even after delivering the physical product to them. But understanding and managing what the customer is entitled to is not an easy task as each of these products can have one or more entitlements that might require tracking and potential adjustments throughout their life cycles. Here is when SAP Entitlement Management comes into the picture!

What is SAP Entitlement Management?

SAP Entitlement Management is intended to abridge the entitlement management processes and operations in a way that the requirements of rapidly growing and increasingly complex businesses are streamlined and automated, to deliver better customer experience. 

With SAP Entitlement management, you can create innovative and advanced business models and solution bundles to meet the requirements of the all the time more smarter customers. This includes entitlement modeling, managing workflows, integration, life-cycle management, reporting, and monitoring etc. Here’s how SAP Entitlement Management supports intellectual business scenarios: 

Entitlement-intellectual business scenarios

Key Features –

Entitlement Modeling – This feature can help businesses in freely defining their new entitlement models and assigning entitlement models to offerings. Not only this, but it also helps in maintaining custom sets of attributes like business categories, rights, distribution channels and geo-location etc. 

Integration and Migration Support – Can be integrated with S/4 HANA on-premise order management and can also utilise migration support tools to start the implementation. SAP entitlement management provides you a special set of API services that can be integrated with other SAP or non-SAP systems. 

Entitlement Lifecycle management – With the help of entitlement lifecycle management you can define the procedure of events effecting entitlements and maintain statuses on entitlements throughout the lifecycle and define custom alerts. Also, simplifies and provide support to up-sell, renewal, return, upgrade processes and operations. 

Realtime Reporting and Analysis – Provides custom reports as per the requirement of the customers, products or entitlements and helps customers with insights on current, past and nearing expiration entitlements with the help of user-friendly dashboard. 

Sales, Support and Self-services – SAP entitlement management automates renewal processes by using co-termination logic and simulates entitlement at quotation level. It also helps in enabling self-service scenarios and custom views for sales support and customers with APIs. 

Helps with a Central Repository – Assists in enabling up-to-date visibility of entitlements and as defined in modelling and related product assignments. With the help entitlement management by SAP, you help your business grow and adjust by utilizing highly scalable central repository provided. 

Advantages of using SAP Entitlement Management

An intelligent way to increase sales and revenue –

The intelligent entitlement management system allows businesses to grow by boosting sustainable and recurring revenue streams with the support of subscription-based business models.

Innovative and Better Deliveries –

When it comes to deliver better outcomes, SAP entitlement management could be the best choice. This can help teams in enabling teams with faster deployment of latest offers and related entitlements. Further, it can also assist with the tracking process of the performance to inform and repeat as per requirement.

Deliver the most value from entitlements –

Let your customers get most value from the entitlements and provide them transparency of their entitlements. Range of relevant self-services, alerts, and reminders are offered to the customers to maintain the transparency.

How to get Maximum Value and Revenue from SAP Entitlement Management?

As this is deployed in the cloud, it is available as software as a service (SaaS) based on subscription and the number of users. Businesses need a solid entitlement management system because at times the back-office operations might become more complex. It maximises value and revenue by assuring that: 

  • Your sales reps and channel partners have clear visions of the entitlements of their customers, so that you never miss any opportunity for renewal, cross or upsell. 
  • Your sales teams can deploy proposed bundles faster, and at the same time can track and assess market performance with surety. 
  • Your IT and license administrators are equipped with the important tools to deploy, manage and report on any type of entitlement. 
  • Your customer service executives are well aware of exactly what the customer is entitled to and provides them the tools so that they can properly assist the customer and engage in any upsell or cross opportunity. 
  • Your customers are provided complete transparency into their entitlements, they will also receive entitlement related alerts and reminders, and are restricted from unauthorised usage, that might result in revenue leakage and other such unethical outcomes. 

Software companies, manufacturing, telecommunications, retail, healthcare, financial services, etc. can use SAP Entitlement Management services to manage the entitlements and licenses of their software products and services.

Discover How Acuiti Labs can assist you in effectively managing your SAP Entitlements with these valuable solutions

Licensing and Entitlements: Acuiti Labs can help you manage and automate your software licensing and entitlements, enabling you to track and manage your customer entitlements across multiple channels and product lines. 

Billing and Invoicing: Acuiti Labs can help you streamline your billing and invoicing processes, ensuring that you are accurately billing your customers based on their entitlements. 

Revenue Recognition: Acuiti Labs can help you ensure that your revenue recognition is accurate and compliant with accounting standards, reducing the risk of audit failures. 

Analytics and Reporting: Acuiti Labs can help you leverage data analytics and reporting to gain insights into your entitlement management processes, enabling you to make informed decisions and optimize your revenue streams. 

Integration with SAP BRIM: Acuiti Labs can help you integrate SAP entitlement management services with other SAP BRIM solutions, such as billing and invoicing, order management, and revenue management, providing you with a comprehensive and integrated solution for managing your revenue streams. 

Be it service, support, or security and compliance, SAP entitlement management does it all! If you are looking for an effective and quicker way to transform your business, manage entitlements and deliver best to your customers, look no further and get complete information about this here – www.acuitilabs.com 

 

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