What is SAP BRIM?
In today’s dynamic business environment, digitalization enables the creation of personalized products and services that must be pushed to market quickly. It is important that the new products with personal pricing models can be created fast in order to quickly offer services and capture fast moving business opportunities for (possibly) a large number of clients.
SAP BRIM (Billing and Revenue Innovation Management) is a modular billing solution for high-volume consumption industries and is used to ease the complex billing and invoicing process. It enables flexible consumption models and is used in different industries like telecommunications, financial services, utilities, media, logistics and public transport.
With the SAP BRIM solution, customer requirements can be implemented better and faster, and high data volumes can be processed with high efficiency. SAP BRIM simplifies the entire process of selling products and services and revenue sharing in the most effective way. SAP BRIM allows companies to design and tailor their pricing models and to create targeted products and services based on customer needs. Also, SAP BRIM offers the possibility of real-time pricing.
SAP BRIM Features
SAP BRIM bills single invoices by consolidating multiple billing streams
SAP BRIM allows revenue sharing and partner settlement agreements
SAP BRIM provides billing and invoicing for different types of charges such as one time, recurring and usage-based charges
SAP BRIM support complex discounting
SAP BRIM supports full revenue management processes
SAP BRIM Components
SAP BRIM consists of the following core components but also offers peripheral solutions which can be implemented as required to enhance the core BRIM solution.
SAP SOM (Subscription Order Management)
In the latest versions of S4/HANA SOM is an integral part of the end-to-end SAP BRIM solution. It is built as an additional function and is based on SAP CRM. Before this evolution, SAP CRM acted as the frontend through which companies connected with their customers for product and service selection.
SAP CRM and SOM are the starting point for SAP BRIM as it manages the product catalog, order creation and distribution and manages the contract lifecycle. It is integrated with Advanced Variant Configuration (AVC) for flexible product configuration. After the contracts and orders are created in Subscription Order Management, they are replicated to SAP FI-CA and SAP Convergent Charging for other processes (rating, charging, billing and invoicing) to take place.
SAP CC (Convergent Charging)
Convergent Charging is the core rating engine for the SAP BRIM solution and is designed to deliver pricing flexibility when charging customers. SAP Convergent Charging is used to determine the type of charges, such as recurring, one-time, and usage-based charges.
SAP CC is responsible for two main processes in the entire offer-to-cash: charging and rating. Charging determines the account of the customer who is paying for the service consumption, whereas the rating process focuses on calculating what the usage of a certain service costs.
SAP CI (Convergent Invoicing)
Convergent Invoicing offers a flexible solution for automating the billing and invoicing process. The process starts by accepting input (rated events, recurring charges, or complete bills) from one or more rating or billing software systems. It stores these inputs depending on their status and combines them into a single invoice for the customer and a single outstanding receivable.
SAP CI consolidates multiple billing sources into a single, simplified invoice from multiple sources. Once the charged and rated items reach SAP CI, they are stored as billable items and the processes of billable item aggregation, billing and invoice creation happens.
SAP FI-CA (Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable)
Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable is the last core component of SAP BRIM posts financial documents, receives or makes payments; manages disputes, credits and collections. It is the financial backend that provides subledger accounting postings tailored to accommodate the requirements of industry sectors in which companies must interact with multiple customers and many transactions. FI-CA also offers a wide range of functionalities like taxation, tax calculations, and country-specific processes, such as accounting principles, payment processing, collection management and partner settlement.
SAP CM (Convergent Mediation )
Convergent Mediation is not a core component of SAP BRIM, but it is a SAP partner product developed by company DigitalRoute. The component is pre-integrated into SAP BRIM and can be deployed quickly.
SAP Convergent Mediation enables a standardized approach to data mediation. As such, the software collects data from multiple sources, including a wide range of data sources and network technologies. The data is then filtered, converted, and consolidated into required formats to be used by other SAP BRIM components. The solution provides a single platform for all mediation activity. This reduces the number of multiple integration points required to manage data, it reduces IT infrastructure costs, and it increases flexibility and efficiency in data processing and innovation support..
Conclusion
SAP BRIM is a powerful solution used in managing subscriptions and other recurring revenue sources. It is especially useful in high-volume billing environments that require flexible product configuration and a fast time to market. SAP BRIM helps in the management of business model design, it performs contract and order management, billing, and invoice processing. It manages receivables and payables and provides support for financial customer care. SAP BRIM provides flexible options to automate the invoicing process.
I hope you found this article interesting and useful. In case you are interested to learn more on how SAP BRIM can add value for your business, please feel free to explore the articles below on our website.
