BEYOND COMMODITY: UTILIZING HYBRIS TO EXTEND CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS Terry Coots & Muneesh Narakula TXU Energy
BEYOND COMMODITY: UTILIZING HYBRIS TO EXTEND CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
Terry Coots & Muneesh Narakula TXU Energy
AGENDA
• About TXU Energy
• Project Background
• Business Drivers and Goals
• Evaluation: Our Choice for Hybris
• Driving Business Benefit
• Configuration and Integration
• Application Architecture
• Challenges
• Our Keys to Success
• Q&A
• Appendix
ABOUT TXU ENERGY
• Leading Retail Electric Provider in Texas with more than 1.7 million residential
and business customers.
• Redefining how consumers buy and use electricity and related services.
• Trustworthy. Innovative. Customer centric. Dependable.
• TXU is expanding by exploring and delivering adjacent products and services
• We are searching to extend relationships within our core business and through
our vendor networks
• Launched a series of TXU Energy Solutions (“Non-Commodity”) products
– iThermostat (web-controlled thermostat)
– TXU MyHome Protect (home warranty)
– TXU ACProtect (HVAC system service warranty)
• Technology foundation (“pilot”)
– Great to start as a small scale pilot
– Initially used SAP CRM billing
– Limited capabilities
– Hard to synchronize with ECC billing processes
PROJECT BACKGROUND
BUSINESS DRIVERS AND GOALS
• Enhance customer experience
– Visibility into coverage/billing
periods
• Improve speed to market
– Fast, flexible product launches
– Configure vs. code
• Enable a solid operating foundation
• Improve cash flow
– Billing in advance
– Proration
• Improve operational
efficiencies
– Dependable exception
management
“Enable a flexible operating system foundation to implement our broad, multi-product customer relationship business model.”
EVALUATION: OUR CHOICE FOR HYBRIS
Why Hybris Billing?
1. Protect our Core system and leverage our SAP platform
2. Buy vs. Build – Native integration with ECC 6.0
3. Flexible, easy to configure charge-plan structures
4. Many out of the box capabilities we desired
5. Demonstrated high-volume billing capabilities
6. Allows for future growth in complexity of products
7. SAP partnership and enablement workshops
Evaluated Options: • Enhance ECC 6.0 • Customize SAP CRM billing (more) • Hybris Billing
DRIVING BUSINESS BENEFITS
Before After
Monthly Billing Daily Billing
Billing in Arrears Billing in Advance
Missing First / Last Charge Proration and Always Bill
No Dates on Charges Clear Dates & Term Length
Complex Billing / Data Simplified Structure
Limited Product Capabilities Flexible Products
Customer Experience
• Improved clarity of charges
• Smooth migration to new platform
Speed to Market
• Reduced product launch time
• Delivered solution in 6 months resulting in quick
payback on investment
Cash Flow
• Faster creation of customer bills
• Increased cash flow and speed of payments
Operational Efficiencies
• Exceptional exception management
• Implemented solution with less than 0.5% defect
rate
Convergent Mediation
Convergent charging Convergent Invoicing Convergent Financial
Management Convergent Usage
Analytics
Marketing
Sales & customer service
Finance
Billing
Operations
Offer Design
Sales and order
Management
Manage subscription
Account
Price and Rate
Events
Measure Usage
Manage Billing
Accounts
Invoicing and Payment
Statements
Manage Receivables
and Payables
Financial Customer
Care
Pricing Design
Run Collection
s
Book Revenues and costs
Deliver Service
Analytics Credit
Scoring Prepaid
Refill
SAP HYBRIS BILLING
APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE
External account
Meter Readings
ECC6.0(SP08)
Convergent Rating/Charging
Convergent Invoicing
ISU Billing
ISU Invoicing
Billing Documents
Target Invoicing
‘ISU’
Print Document
Hybris Billing
CRM 5.0 R F C
Billing Documents
ISU
Convergent Charging 4.0 (SP08)
JCO
Contract account
Webservices
BIT’s
Subscriber account
Business Partner
Dispatcher Slave
HYBRIS BILLING- DEPLOYMENT
Desktop Tool
Dispatcher Master
Updater Slave
Update Master
Guider Slave
Guider Master
Rater Slave
Rater Master
Bulkloader Slave
Bulkloader Master
Rated Event Files
Core DB
MIGRATION STRATEGY AND REPLICATION
• Only migrated active non-commodity Business
Partner and Contract Accounts
• Replicate Business Partner and CA to Core Tool
at the time of creation of provider contract
• Replication must occur to ECC before CC
• Tools are provided out-of-the-box by SAP for
replication monitoring
PROJECT CHALLENGES
Technology Challenges
• Required ECC upgrade to Service
Pack 08
• SQL Server vs Oracle
• Data anomalies
Business Challenges
• Process change concerns
– Product Rollovers
– Multiyear product pricing in advance
• Requirement decisions
– Billing in Advance
– Proration
– Alignment to the Utility cycle
OUR KEYS TO SUCCESS
• Prototyping and sharing understanding with stakeholders
• Focusing on minimum viable product (MVP) with a vision to foundational
implementation
• Minimizing work in progress, focusing on getting work done
• Prioritizing use of “out of the box” functionality
• Choosing a platform with native integration to ECC (SAP Hybris)
• Conducting “enablement workshops” with SAP
• Executing parallel test cycles (integration testing and user acceptance testing)
• Practicing migration
Q&A
APPENDIX
At TXU Energy, most of our business process results were achieved by simple out of the box configuration that Hybris Billing and SAP Convergent invoicing offer. Examples : 1. Billing Process – We defined billing process specific to our Solutions business. 2. Grouping Variant – Aggregate billable items based on dates and provider contract. 3. Billing Unit – System groups billable items based on grouping variant and billing unit
groups . You can also manually control the creation of billing units in the billing dialog processing.
4. Triggering activation on cycle dates – We used cycle dates for activation of BITS for provider contract .
SPEAKER BIO
Terry Coots Terry Coots is the Director of Business Applications and Platform Integration at TXU Energy. At TXUE he is responsible for the core ERP systems and surrounding business applications. Terry has a long history of experience in the Retail Electric industry and SAP implementation practice.
Muneesh Narakula Muneesh Narakula has over 10years of SAP experience with implementation and upgrade experience of various SAP products. At TXUE he manages the Engineering and Delivery Governance team which handles the release execution quality, adherence to coding standards across a number of applications (SAP (CRM, ISU, BI & XI), Salesforce & Web) and maturity in the Landscape Management function to assure consistent and reliable operations of BT systems. Along with supporting of existing TXUE applications he is responsible for evaluation and implementing new solutions.