Chapter 2

IS-U/CCS An Overview

IS-U/CCS An Overview
IS-U/CCS is a business process-oriented customer information system that handles all categories of supply and services provided by utility and service companies. You can use IS-U/CCS to manage and bill residential, nonresidential, and
service customers and to manage prospective customers.
IS-U/CCS is exceptionally flexible. It supports a varied range of divisions and
business partners and provides a large number of functions. Furthermore, IS-U/
CCS processes all business transactions and activities with a central business partner jointly, and it offers account management, which integrates all of a business
partners payment transactions.
In addition, you can take advantage of powerful customizing functions and the
flexibility of the R/3 System to customize IS-U/CCS to meet your individual requirements. This means that you can deploy IS-U/CCS in utility companies of
sizes and shapes each with its own individual corporate and market strategy.

Fig. 2-1: Functional Scope of IS-U/CCS

Utility companies can use IS-U/CCS to bill all the traditional divisions:
Electricity
Gas
District heating
Water and waste water

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

IS-U/CCS also handles billing for waste disposal (as of Release 1.2) and cable
television connections.
Because IS-U/CCS is integrated with the Service Management (PM-SMA) and Sales
and Distribution (SD) application components of the R/3 System, you can also bill
service orders and service contracts for services of all types, plus the sale of goods,
such as meters, heat pumps, and consumption devices.
IS-U/CCS jointly invoices (if desired and appropriate in terms of time) all the
services that a utility company provides to customers. It combines them into a
single bill and processes them for accounts receivable via Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable.
Moreover, using an interface you can include the billing results from external billing systems in invoicing. This allows you to collectively create bills and process
accounts receivable with the billing results of IS-U/CCS (Release 2).
Of particular significance in IS-U/CCS is the collective billing of services from
more than one company. This includes convergent billing and intercompany billing.
With convergent billing, a utility company can manage the services of a third party and include them in its own bill. Examples include:
Waste disposal in behalf of the city sanitation department,
Cable charges for telecommunications companies
Drainage charges on behalf of the municipality.
With intercompany billing, several independent companies (each with their own
separate balance sheets) can combine their services into a single bill. The services
are based on contracts with different company codes.
Integrating services from more than one company provides advantages to both
consumers and utility companies. Integration is also the foundation for future
forms of billing in a deregulated utility industry where the services of any one
division consist of service components from more than one company.

Functions and Special Features

This section briefly reviews the most important functions and features of IS-U/CCS.

Basic Functions and Tools

With the basic functions of IS-U/CCS, you can manage the addresses and regional structures and generate scheduled dates for meter readings, budget billings,
and regular billings.
The print workbench gives you the capability for flexible layout of bills and other
customer letters using SAPscript, the word processing system of the standard R/3
System. You can either edit the data in SAPscript and pass it to the printer, or you
can make the data available for mass printing at the raw data interface (RDI).
As part of the migration process, you can transfer data from your current system
to IS-U/CCS.

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

Other functions allow you to:

Configure screens with tab strips
Enter nonstandardized additional information as notes
Store time-dependent data as information in a history
Maintain number ranges to assign unique sort features
Set up flexible access protection
Log changes

Master Data
The master data in IS-U/CCS includes:
Business partners
Contracts and contract accounts
Connection objects (such as buildings or land) and the premises, utility installations, and device locations they contain

Device Management
For managing utility company devices, meters, and equipment, IS-U/CCS offers
the following functions:
The capability to divide devices into device categories
Meter and device procurement, warehousing, and stock movements using
integration with the Materials Management (MM) component
Maintain installation structures with their existing relationships between
meters, devices, registers, and rate data
Maintain rate reference values and other information about the purchase of
power
Installation, removal, and replacement of meters and devices
Device inspection and certification based on a sampling procedure or individual certification
In addition, device management allows you to create meter-reading orders and enter
consumption and demand. In this area, IS-U/CCS offers the following functions:
Create meter reading orders and documents in printed or machine-readable
form
Enter meter reading results manually or automatically
Conveniently connect external entry systems
Validate meter reading results
Correct or post-process meter reading results
Monitor meter readings
Valuate at flat rates consumption and demand on the basis of various replacement values (such as the number of cable television connections or the energy
intake of streetlights)

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

Contract Billing
Billing is the core of IS-U/CCS. It covers the billing of supply categories and services. In addition, you can incorporate the services that you processed and billed
with the Service Management and Sales and Distribution components and the meter
reading results from external billing systems in IS-U/CCS invoicing (Release 1.2
and Release 2).

Fig. 2-2: Billing and Invoicing

A contract is billed as follows:

1. The necessary data is collected.
2. The data is prorated. The system accounts for price and tax changes during
the billing period.
3. The system converts the readings into billable quantities (such as register factors or thermal gas billing).
4. The quantities are valued using rates in which the utility company has stored
its billing rules.
5. The meter reading results are validated and form the basis for invoicing.
IS-U/CCS supports the following forms of billing:
Periodic billing
Floating backbilling
Period-end billing
Interim billing
Final billing
Budget billing and average monthly billing or equalized billing (North America)

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

The most important functions of contract billing are as follows:

IS-U/CCS supports as billing cycles both annual consumption billing and
monthly billing cycles for less than a year.
The system bills nonresidential and residential customers in the same data
structures with the same functions. The two types of customer are differentiated only by the data.
You can reverse all forms of bills. You can initiate credit memos and backbillings.
In addition to automated billing, you can use manual billing (Release 2).
IS-U/CCS supports many division-specific types of billing. Some examples
are:
Thermal gas billing procedures
Billing of public lighting using electricity or gas
Waste disposal (Release 1.2)
Company and plant consumption of the utility
Billing for employees (Release 2)

Invoicing
Generates accounting documents for receivables and credit memos from billing documents

Invoicing

Offsets accounting documents against down payments made, particularly paid

budget billings
Formats data for bill printout
Creates new budget billing plans
Supports the calculation of taxes
With bill printout you can flexibly design and display your bills according to
your needs. You can print bills using the IS-U/CCS print workbench or make
them available to external print systems for mass printing. In addition, you can
insert individual notification texts or flyers with printed documents.

Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable

Because of their large numbers of customers and generally monthly billing or
budget billing request, utility companies create large volumes of requests for payment. So that you do not have to maintain this mass data under General Ledger
Accounting, IS-U/CCS offers an integrated subledger called contract accounts receivable and payable. Contract accounts receivable is especially designed to meet
the needs of mass processing. At specific intervals, the system transfers the accumulated individual postings to the general ledger of the Financial Accounting (FI)
component or to the general ledger of a third-party system. You can also transfer
sales or service invoices from the Sales and Distribution component to contract accounts receivable and payable (Release 1.2).

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

The objective of contract accounts receivable and payable is to automate all transactions as far possible. You only need to manually intervene when a transaction
requires a decision.
The most important characteristics of contract accounts receivable and payable
are the following:
You can individually customize account and open-item displays.
In response to certain business transactions, the system automatically creates
printed documents (such as checks, account statements, and returns correspondence) and correspondence with user-defined text.
Using a neutral interface, the system can transfer and automatically perform
postings that result from automated incoming payments (from front-end systems, financial institutions, or agencies), from collection procedures, credit
refunds, or returns processing.
The system can process and include in invoicing down payments for energy
consumption (budget billings) and for services to be performed in the future.
You can impose payments in advance or security deposits on customers with
a negative payment history or a bad credit rating.
Flexible dunning is based on dunning levels that you can define for each receivables item. Every utility company can define the individual steps of the
dunning proceedings itself. The system maintains all information relevant to
dunning in a history that is the basis for a credit rating.
You can calculate interest on debit and credit items at the line-item level. You
can determine rates of interest individually depending on the business partner or transaction concerned (so far as legal requirements, for example, exist).
You can defer receivables items or transfer them to installment plans.
You can send documents relating to different accounts or business partners
jointly to a collective bill recipient, for example, a housing construction company).
You can identify receivables as good, doubtful, and irrecoverable and then
process them accordingly.
You can manage and process unallocatable incoming payments.
Receivables items are included in financial accounting.

SAP Business Workflow

The SAP Business Workflow component of the standard R/3 System allows you to
coordinate business-process flows across applications. Underlying the workflows
is a model of the various business processes that you define.
A workflow consists of individual steps performed by a single person, possibly
time-delayed, or by a number of different people. The system can execute certain
steps automatically, such as initiating a confirmation letter after a rate change or
logging changes (such as change in the contract, bank data, or budget billings)
that result from a customer contact. The SAP Business Workflow component provides technologies and tools for automatic control and processing of workflows.
It allows you to adapt IS-U/CCS and the standard R/3 System to meet the needs
of your utility company.

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

It makes sense to map a business process as a workflow if it:

Keeps occurring in the same or in a similar form
Consists of a number of possibly cross-application processing steps that have
to be executed as a structured whole
Consists of a number of processing steps involving more than one person or
departments or that are time delayed
IS-U/CCS contains predefined reference workflows for some of the more important business processes. These include processes for disconnecting and reconnecting a utility installation and installing a service connection. These workflows are
discussed in the chapter titled Business Processes.
The organizational plan of the utility company determines which staff members
are involved in a workflow. You can define this organizational plan using the
Organizational Management component of the standard R/3 System. The system
assigns tasks automatically to the appropriate staff members. The system processes the assignment of work via the integrated inbox, which supports staff members
as they work. The workflow also ensures that required actions, such as the notification, are not overlooked. A log allows you to trace exactly the steps executed for
each process. In addition, you can trace the status of any workflow.
If deadlines are missed, the system can automatically notify a supervisor. A flexible information system allows you to analyze the runtimes of individual steps
and processes. With this data you can identify weak points in the application flow
and optimize the relevant processes.

Fig. 2-3: Workflow in the Typical Case of a Rate Change

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

Customer Service
Every year, larger utility companies deal with several hundred thousand direct
customer contacts. In light of this large number, efficient processing of contacts is
an important performance characteristic of IS-U/CCS. In particular, entering
business transactions places considerable demands on the user interface, service
flow, and response time of the system.
The front office is the most important part of customer service. This is where
customers can obtain information on all the important data and start all the processes that are important to their work centers. Depending on the content of the
business processes, it uses R/3 workflow management to support the flow of those
processes.
You can configure the front office to your requirements in Customizing. These
configurations allow you to set up a work environment specifically suited to a
particular staff member and to define which data and transactions that the staff
member is allowed to access.
In its customer information IS-U/CCS offers various ready-made views with
which staff can provide customers with information on, for example, their data
and accounts. Workflow management contains predefined transactions with which
staff can handle such jobs as:
Creating a new premise
Processing a move-in
Changing a contract
Entering a fault report.

Fig.2-4: Customer Service in the Front Office

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

The initial step in any customer contact in the front office is the identification of
the customer, which is supported by a powerful search function, the Data Finder.
You define in Customizing which data the system uses as search criteria. You can
automate this step by integrating a computer telephone integration (CTI) system
and display an initial information screen that contains information on the customer.
Once the customer has been identified, your staff can call up information screens
and then branch from there to additional, detailed views. If changes are required,
you can make them on the spot. For example, you can change bank details or
process a move-in.
If you cannot complete the transaction because required data is unavailable or if
detailed processing is required, you can:
Initiate a workflow
Depending on the definition of the workflow, you continue the transaction in
the back office when the necessary events have occurred
Create a follow-up for the appropriate person
In this case, you can enter customer information in a note and attach it to the
follow-up.
IS-U/CCS automatically logs the customer contact. You can enter notes (like marketing-relevant remarks) on a customer contact. You can quickly obtain an overview of prior contacts and sort them according to various criteria, such as prior
dunning events or field service operations. The log record for the customer contact references the relevant object or documents. This means that you can display
the dunning letter sent for a dunning event, for example, directly from the log.

Work Management
The efficient performance of services is increasingly important for utility companies in times of growing competition and increased customer orientation. Utility
companies consequently plan and cost such services as work orders. Examples
include:
Setting up service connections
Maintaining technical equipment, performing periodic device replacement
Processing repairs and reports of damage
Creating collection and disconnection orders
Performing energy consulting
In IS-U/CCS, Work Management processes those work orders. Work Management
uses functions from the standard Plant Maintenance and Service Management component and integrates them with industry-specific functions from IS-U/CCS to
form cross-component business processes.
In many cases you can bill customers for work orders. Where this is the case, the
system executes the Inquiry Quotation Order transaction before the work order and the Billing Invoicing transaction after the work order. The system handles these transactions based on the integration of the Plant Maintenance and Service Management and the Sales and Distribution components.

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IS-U/CCS An Overview

You can combine the billing results for services from Sales and Distribution with
the results for energy billing from IS-U/CCS in IS-U/CCS invoicing and show
them on one bill (Release 2).

Information System
The Information System enables you to analyze the data resources underlying ISU/CCS. Like other components of R/3, IS-U/CCS offers a variety of forms of
analysis:
Statistics
The statistics are based on a statistical dataset, which the system updates continuously or monthly from dialog and batch functions. IS-U/CCS distinguishes
between three different statistics applications:
Stock statistics
Stock statistics reflect the current stock of all the essential objects in the
dataset at a specific point in time.
Transaction statistics
Transaction statistics cover the most important processes executed during
a specific period of time. These might include move-in or move-out or
disconnection.
Sales statistics
Sales statistics provide comprehensive information on quantities sold in
the various divisions and the resulting revenues.
The Logistics Information System (LO-LIS) component of the standard system enables you to evaluate the statistical dataset. The Logistics Information System offers
many different options for evaluating, analyzing and presenting data.
IS-U/CCS Navigator
With the IS-U/CCS Navigator you can get a quick overview of how the data
interrelates within IS-U/CCS. Starting from any given data object, such as a
customer, you can use graphics to navigate through the entire data environment of the object.

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