SAP is one of the top market leaders in providing ERP solutions and services for businesses. The SAP Industry Specific Solution for Utilities - Customer Care & Service (IS-U/CCS) addresses the requirements of customer-oriented utility companies.
The SAP Industry Specific Solution for Utilities - Customer Care & Service (IS-U/CCS) is significant among companies that require management of all their service and business processes. More than 1,848 companies use the SAP IS-U or CCS. We will study what SAP IS-U refers to, its modules, features, and some fundamental functions in this SAP article.
What is SAP IS-U or CCS?
The SAP IS-U or CCS is short for Industry Specific Solution for Utilities - Customer Care & Service, which means it is specific to companies that support utility and waste disposal companies. It is a sales and information system that provides services dealing with supply and distribution of electricity, natural gas, and water.
SAP IS-U sustains business modules such as meter data management, meter reading, invoicing, scheduling, customer service, billing, calculation, and integration into customer relation administrations.
There are two main categories of the SAP IS-U master data model. These are as follows:
- Business Data
- Technical Data
Statistical analysis and research found that the companies that use the SAP for Utilities (IS-U) are most common in the United States and the Information Technology and Services industry. Companies having employees of more than 10000 and dollars in revenue exceeding 1000M most often uses SAP for Utilities (ISU).
This data for SAP for Utilities (ISU) usage goes back more than seven years and three months.
Which industries does SAP IS-U deal with?
IS-U or CCS deals with the following companies. Also, apart from the below-mentioned companies, other companies utilize the IS-U from SAP.
- Electric: The electricity providers of the electricity industries who deal with retail, transmission, generation, metering, trading, distribution, and customer care use the SAP IS-U for utilities.
- Natural Gas: The Natural Gas providers of the electricity industries who deal with distribution, retail, metering, and customer care use the SAP IS-U for utilities.
- Water and Wastewater: The Water and Wastewater providers of the electricity industries who deal with treatment, distribution, supply, metering, and customer care use the SAP IS-U for utilities
Which modules are integrated into SAP IS-U?
SAP IS-U mainly comprises the following modules:
- Material management
- Financial Accounting
- R/3 Central functions (Plant Maintenance, Customer Service, and Sales)
- Sales and distribution
- SAP Business Warehouse (BW)
- SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
What are the features of SAP IS-U?
The features of the SAP IS-U cover the following points:
- Device Management
- Work Management
- Billing and Invoicing
- Collections
- Customer Service
- Measuring consumption
- Move In/Out
- Mater data
- Energy Data Management
- Basic functions
- Waste management
- Contracts accounts receivable a payable
- Information system
- Inter-company data exchange
- Advanced metering data structure
Master Data in SAP IS-U or CCS:
The master data model of SAP IS-U includes both customer and property data. The Business Master Data maintains the customer data, and the Technical Master Data maintains the Property information. The SAP IS-U uses the SAP Business Workflow (BC-BMIT-WFM) application segment that automates business processes.
The fundamental functions of the SAP IS-U are as follows:
- Utility industries can manage addresses and regional structures and generate dates and schedules for billings, meter readings, and budget billings with the SAP IS-U.
- Customers can easily manage business data that remain fixed for a long duration using the Master Data of SAP IS-U. In IS-U, this data comprises the business contracts, associates, contract accounts, connection modules (real estate and buildings), and the hypotheses, installations, and device locations included internally.
- With Device Management, industries can manage the meter readings, installations, and certification of all devices for the utility business.
- Utility industries use the IS-U Billing component for billing the following standard divisions. These are electricity, natural gas, water or wastewater, multimedia services (such as cable TV, etc.), and district heating.
- With the IS-U Invoicing component, industries can run businesses with many notable features that enable them to set services and invoice them on a single bill. They can also use these components to estimate and charge payments and taxations.
- IS-U provides many modules that serve the core functions of a utility business. Energy Data Management (EDM) is a special module part of SAP Utilities Industry Solution to handle the energy data of a utility industry, such as standard load and load shapes. EDM is a solution that satisfies the needs of interval reading, schedule management, and the billing of interval energy consumption. EDM comprises the following areas:
- Settlement and schedule management utilizing the settlement workbench
- The central database for energy data, i.e., Energy Data Repository
- Billing of profiles utilizing real-time-pricing billing, i.e., RTP billing
- Work Management is another process of SAP IS-U that incorporates different SAP components and improves them to include industry-specific functions for planning, estimating, managing, and billing work orders.
- SAP Waste and Recycling (IS-U-WA) is a complete logistics, service, billing, and customer service strategy that comprises all the business strategies required by a waste disposal unit.
- One of the best solutions from the SAP IS-U is the Intercompany Data Exchange (IDE), which comprises the necessities that emerged from the deregulation of energy markets. IDE includes the following domains:
- Process execution
- Deregulation data management
- Data exchange processes management
Conclusion:
This article provided comprehensive details on SAP IS-U or CCS, its modules, features, and some basic functions. Almost every utility business utilizes the SAP IS-U to maintain its business data and customer accounts. One general analysis of SAP IS-U is that forty-two percent of SAP for Utilities (ISU) customers is in the United States, nine percent are in India, and six percent are in the United Kingdom.