Utility Business Process And

SAP Components
The primary service provided by a utility company is around Electricity, Natural Gas,
Water and Waste management. In this blog series, I will primarily focus on Electric
and Gas Utilities, however, many of the challenges and solutions discussed here are
also common for Water and Waste Management processes. Experience shared in this
blog is vastly with utility companies in the United States, so please consider it when
reading this blog series as there are a some differences in the way utilities conduct
business in United States and other countries.This is some what similar to
deregulated market which is also available in most of the developing
countries like India also
There are three main operating units in utilities namely, Generation, Transmission
and Distribution. The generation arm is all about generating power from various
sources like Coal, Natural gas, Solar, Nuclear etc. Once power is generated it needs to
be transmitted through a network of grids and substations. This is usually dealt by
the transmission business. From the substations, the power is then delivered to
millions of homes and commercial establishments through the distribution arm of
the business. The distribution business is closest to the customer and deals with
many of the business processes that we will be dealing in this blog series.

A utility company implementing SAP usually deals with the following modules and
SAP components
Plant Maintenance : There is a lot of infrastructure like Power stations,
generators, reactors, transmission lines, meters, transformers etc. that require
regular maintenance and repairs and all these are managed using the work
management functionality provided by ECC IS-U
Project Systems: Most of the utility companies in the US are monopolies, so they
are regulated as well. This means, among other things, the rate the utility charges its
customers’ needs to be approved by regulators. This process is called ‘rate making’ or
‘rate case’ and as per regulations, utilities can only charge (in addition to the cost of
commodities) the customers for any capital expenses incurred. For e.g., any
improvements made to the existing infrastructure is treated as capital expense and
can be included in the rate case whereas day to day cost of operations like fixing
broken transmission lines or broken meters are considered operational expense and
cannot be considered for rate case. Here is where Project systems (provided ECC IS-
U) come in handy by allowing the various expenses incurred by the utility to be
appropriately grouped in to Capital and Operational expenses.
Front Office: This module is mainly used by the distribution business. It primarily
focuses on various customer service functions. Any interaction you do with the utility
as a customer like moving in to a new house or moving out of your existing house,
reporting outage etc. is enabled by the front office processes. The SAP components
that are used here are SAP CRM and SAP ECC. Because it deals with customers and
in many cases can deal with emergency situations, SAP implementations deal with
complex configurations and enhancements in this area. Some of the key interfaces
dealt in this area are integration with customer self-service web applications, CTI
(Computer Telephony Integration), IVR (Interactive Voice Response) etc. Some of
the key enhancements and developments dealt in this area are around CRM
Interaction center, guided procedures and workflows.
Device Management: This module is also used by the distribution business. It
deals with everything around managing and serializing meters, handling meter
reads, consumption information and so on so forth. This module is all about device
installation and maintenance. It also integrates with the quality control module for
meter testing.
Billing: This module deals with all the configurations and processes around billing a
customer for the services rendered. Billing is a complex process in utilities. One of
the key inputs to the billing process is meter reads and when there are no meter
reads for a particular month, usually there is an estimation process that estimates the
customer’s bill based on the consumption history. Of course there are other line
items and considerations in the bill, but you get the idea. Once the billing engine has
determined the customer’s bill, we have to deal with bill printing which is usually a
high volume activity. Usually, the actual bill print is done by 3rd party software and
vendors, so SAP provides an integration format called RDI (Raw Data Interchange)
which is a name value pair format. Many certified print vendors of SAP accept data in
the RDI format.
Financials And Contract Accounting: Now that we have billed the customer,
this module deals with payments received from the customer and any activities
related to dunning and collections. Payments from the customer can come in through
different channels like ACH payments, Credit cards, check etc., so SAP
implementations deal with interfaces and print forms in this area.
These are the basic modules that SAP implementations in utilities deal with. Of
course there other capabilities like AMI (Advance Metering Infrastructure),
Analytics, Energy Data Management etc., but this blog is aimed at providing a high
level overview of Utilities business process and the key SAP modules that support
them.

Master Data:

EKUN  ISU business partner data

BUT050  Business partner relationships
BUT100  Business partner roles
BUT020  Business partner address
ADRC  Addresses
BUT000  Business partner
DFKKLOCKS  Business locks
FKKVKP  Contract account for partner
FKKVK  Contract account
Billing and Invoicing:

ERDK  Print doc header

ERDO  Outsorting for invoices
ERDB  CA document for print document
ERCHO  Outsorting for billing document
ERCHC  Invoicing reversal history
ERCH  Billing doc header
DBERCHZ (1-8)  Billing doc lines
DBERDL  Print doc lines
DBERDLB  Billing doc-print doc line reference

Billing master data:

ETTA  Rate category

ETTAF  Rate category facts
TE221  Operands
ETRF  Rates
EKDI  Rate facts
ESCHS  Billing schema steps
ESCHS  Billing schema header
EPREIH  Price history
EPREI  Prices header
TE069  Rate types
ETTIF/ETTIFN/ETTIFB  Installation facts
ERTFND  Rate determination

Technical master data

EANL  Installation
EVBS  Premise
EHAUISU  Connection object
EANLH  Installation time slice
EGPLTX  Device locations
EUI HEAD  PoDs
EUITRANS  PoD internal to external Ids