regiocom GmbH is one of the market-leading service companies in the energy sector in Europe. Its main focus is on the branches of customer service, complaint management, and data processing. As a Business Process Outsourcing partner of the SAP AG, regiocom offers full service for energy providers.
The field of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) supports the energy providers through the whole customer life cycle. Currently, BPO supervises ca. 600.000 energy consumers. For the regular client care and -account, the industry solution of the SAP AG for public utilities (SAP IS-U) is being applied. The Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable (FI-CA) is the module that is responsible for the subledger accounting in the branch of IS-U. The accounting documents and advance payment plans are being submitted to the FI-CA by the invoicing process from accounting. In FI-CA, the documents for the booking are prepared and condensed at the central accounting.
The FI-CA is laid out especially for the execution of mass-activity. This is necessary in the utility industry including numerous consumers. The FI-CA administrates all business transactions in the context of Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable. Accounts Receivable are bookings which are not balanced by a specified date (call date). With the due date of an Account Receivable, overdue Accounts Receivable can be differentiated from Accounts Receivable which are not yet due. The open items list generates an overview about the receivables and payables of an energy provider. Thus, the open items list is an important device for financial budgeting.
With the creation of the advance payment plans for the payments of clients, the first receivables arise. Further receivables, but also payables arise from the process of invoicing. Invoices can be devided into periodic bills (annual consumption bill), interim bills and final bills. The final bill is generated after the end of the contract. Manual bookings are bookings which are recorded individually for particular clients, such as refunding of the additional costs or other costs. Theses also insitute obligations and accounts as Accounts Receivable. At regiocom GmbH, the generation of the Accounts Receivable-list currently takes place directly in the productive system. This takes place manually and in several steps. The result is presented in the form of an Excel format and is sent to the client afterwards. This proceeding is very time-consuming and charges the system. Furthermore, an ordinay Excel table is not flexible enough to include direct analyses and reports that are meant to measure up to the requirements of data content and data granularity.
The goal is to develop a data-warehouse based concept for the efficient processing of open items and the provision for different analyses afterwards. Based on this concept, the accounting system is meant to be relieved and the service provision is meant to be improved. For this purpose, the available Business Intelligence (BI) software, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP BW) is meant to be applied.