Category: SAP

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 

 

Is SAP Commerce the right platform for me?

Onboarding new clients is a sign of growth but being able to effectively manage a growing clientele is where it can get tricky, enter, SAP’s Commerce platform! Our previous blog ‘Does your e-commerce platform need to be upgraded to SAP Commerce’ covered when businesses should consider changing platforms, now we will focus on why the SAP Hybris Commerce platform is a highly recommended alternative to resolve the problems.

We have broken down how businesses and their customers can benefit from making this investment so you can gauge a better understanding on how the platform can be leveraged to meet versatile business needs.

Flexible, adaptable, stable and efficient – SAP’s Hybris Commerce platform’s flexibility & performance is incomparable to other e-commerce platforms. Not only does the platform provide businesses with a range of tools catered for different operations, but it also works well when integrated with existing systems. As the platform uses cutting edge technology, end users benefit from a great quality of service.

Multi-language opportunities – This platform can be used and presented in multiple languages, currencies and local tax rates, a unique feature that adds to its adaptability for both domestic and international clientele.

Cost effective and multitasking – Most existing platforms have failed to deliver adequate support or framework to accommodate added functions, whereas SAP Hybris Commerce comes with an added feature that helps users implement extensions and add-ons in real-time. Platforms that are not flexible tend to result in higher costs to maintain, as new features have to be brought and implemented by external teams. SAP Commerce provides users with more autonomy and independence, resulting in a reduction in company costs.

Popular choice for B2B and B2C markets – It’s becoming a growing trend for businesses to directly reach out to their end-users, with a strategy to extend sales opportunities to merge B2B and B2C models. Unfortunately, many businesses have not been able to successfully execute this strategy as a result of various limitations in their existing e-commerce platforms. Switching to SAP Hybris Commerce will give businesses an advantage as the platform is built for both B2B and B2C users and can manage end-customers in both markets from a single platform.

Omni- channel functionality – One of the most important features of this highly efficient e-commerce platform includes its omni-channel functionality. This functionality makes it easier for businesses to connect with the significant customers from any location, and utilise new channels and touchpoints for efficient interactions. Channels could be via websites, emails, mobile devices, call centers, etc

Existing SAP Hybris Commerce users opted for this platform to:

  • Enhance business growth
  • Improve customer engagement and interaction
  • Achieve business goals
  • Improve customer service
  • Make business operations more effective
  • Ensure general efficiency, visibility, and reliability

Summary:

Our experts recommend the SAP Hybris Commerce platform for both growing and established businesses, not only to sustain their positions in highly competitive markets but to also remain a step ahead in terms of technology and opportunities.

Enter the world of ample opportunities to grow your business from all quadrants quickly and effectively by adopting the SAP Commerce Platform.

Have a read through our SAP BRIM AP Sales Cloud, SAP Billing(blogs to familiarize yourself with some of SAP’s other solutions, and as always, get in contact with our team if you have any further questions!

Does your e-commerce platform need to be upgraded to SAP Commerce?

Before choosing the right platform for your business, it is extremely important to recognise and understand symptoms that indicate changes need to be made. We’ve broken this down into four simple signs for you to have a think about.

When should you upgrade?

  1. Consistency – It’s no secret that businesses often use a variety of platforms to support different divisions within the organisation, but in many cases, fail to work in unison. If your current platforms are not working in harmony with one another, changing to an end-to-end platform like SAP Hybris Commerce which covers all stages of a sales process will save businesses time and money.  Conflicting platforms often slow internal operations down, and in most cases can only be resolved by IT divisions, whereas an all-rounder platform will centralise all tools and systems.
  1. Un-happy customers – Customer satisfaction can make or break a business, so keeping them happy should be a top priority. One of the easiest ways of identifying how existing e-commerce platforms are performing is by analysing customer experiences.  The majority of customers (including myself) hate filling out surveys, but a simple ‘were you happy with your experience today’ is a great way to measure satisfaction levels.  If you are receiving negative feedback from unsatisfied customers, your e-commerce platform is most likely unable to keep up with their demands and needs be replaced with a more advanced, adaptable and user-friendly system.
  2. Changing Technologies – When it comes to technology, change is always good. I know what you’re thinking, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’- a common mistake when businesses review their technological platforms.  Changing trends create new demands, and the only way businesses can keep up with them is to use flexible platforms.  Failing to keep up with the latest technology will have a negative impact on end customers and the long-term growth of a business.  You don’t have to be an expert in every single platform there is, but you do need to establish what platform will best suit your business needs, and we have a team of experts who can help you reach that conclusion.
  1. Business Satisfaction – Take a step back and ask yourself, am I happy with how my e-commerce platform is performing and is it helping me achieve our targets? If you are spending too much time updating systems, waiting for the IT division to resolve any glitches or any of the above-mentioned points, it’s time to switch to an advanced platform such as SAP Hybris Commerce.

If you can relate to any of these issues, or recently had a conversation with someone who was complaining about their systems crashing, we need to talk! Many of the companies we have helped transition did not even realise their systems were outdated until they had a think about what they were really getting out of their existing e-commerce platform. We want to ensure our clients and their customers are getting the best from their platforms and would love to hear from you if you think your e-commerce platform is due for an upgrade.

Keep an eye out for our next blog which will be focusing on the SAP Hybris Commerce platform, and how businesses can benefit from adopting it.

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