What Kind of Use Cases Does it Enable?
Whenever there are sales events happening, for example at a Point of Sales, Service Delivery Platform, or E-commerce Platform there will be a need to match generated sales orders (priced or rated transactions) with the actual payments or payment confirmations (from credit cards/payment gateways, and banks). This matching is needed to properly recognize the revenue, make postings to the General Ledger and have proof of where each revenue instance came from for the tax authority auditors. While the actual matching is an accounting responsibility of the SAP S/4HANA system, it relies on the mediation system to provide accurate sales data originating in the ordering system.
SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, public cloud edition, needs to collect the sales orders from any customer data sources (e.g., residing on the public internet or customer premises), validate the information and prepare the data before sending it to Convergent Invoicing as Billable Items (BITs).
Preparing typically involves identifying the responsible business partner/contract account(s) and retrieving the product definitions to determine which BITs have to be created – think of a bundled product that is sold as a single order but requires multiple BITs for accounting purposes. Enriching the raw input with this data allows mediation to then create the proper BIT(s) including any supplementary BITs for tax, payments, etc. which are to be sent to Convergent Invoicing. See chapter “Mediation Functions Overview” for a more comprehensive view of the preparations.
Example of customer landscape where sales orders are mediated as Billable Items into Convergent Invoicing.
Example of Billable Item contents.
How Can it Be Used in Real-Life Scenarios?
Select the function amongst the available SAP forwarding functions.
Drag-and-drop it into the stream editor and connect to functions delivering prepared payloads.
Configure your data structure and data mappings directly within the function, no code needed.
As per the Convergent Invoicing Billable Item API (Create Billable Item), the following BIT categories and structures are supported in the GUI: Main, Payment, RatedConsumption, Tax, Text and AdditionalParameter.
New Connector Technical Features
The technical features below allow the implementer to focus on the functional side of the use case and leave the integration details to SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, public cloud edition. These capabilities ensure the messages are sent reliably to the targets and with full flexibility to manage any exceptions, with:
- Built-in retry option.
- At-least-once transaction safety.
- Respond-async option allows for immediate asynchronous acknowledgement from Convergent Invoicing.
- Management of response messages in separate stream via Response Handling feature.
- Utilizes batch API for better performance.
- Updated Preview capability allows testing the connection to Convergent Invoicing during development of the stream.
Overview of operational settings.
Mediation Functions Overview
Below are some examples of processing steps that can be performed within SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, public cloud edition streams to validate and enrich raw source data making it readily usable by downstream systems.
Mapping of External Transaction Record Format to BIT Format
SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, public cloud edition provides a flexible mapping layer where external protocol and data formats (e.g., CSV, Excel, XML, JSON) can be mapped to internal record format and then converted to other protocol and formats, in this case the BIT (Billable Item) format over ODATAV4.
Master Data Enrichment
To correctly categorize or group the BIT record, the record needs to be enriched based on external meta data. This could be done through lookups to database or external SOAP or REST APIs.
Record Splitting
An incoming transaction may contain multiple billable transactions, in which case the transaction needs to be split into several BITs so that they can be grouped, aggregated, and billed separately.
Validation
Examples of validation rules: mandatory fields present, values within expected ranges, lookups have matches, consistency counts of records within files. Invalid records are sent to a built-in Data Correction facility, where a Data Steward can correct and reprocess the records.
Aggregation
Where multiple partial transactions need to be correlated and aggregated into one BIT.
Deduplication
When duplicate transactions need to be removed prior to loading BITs into Convergent Invoicing. The deduplication functionality of SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, public cloud edition is highly scalable
Scalable Creation of BITs
SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, public cloud edition, provides a robust and performant solution for the creation of BITs. BIT creation can be scaled by parallel loading of BITs into Convergent Invoicing.
Conclusion
This new feature enables a new family of industry-agnostic use cases for SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, public cloud edition, by natively connecting to Convergent Invoicing. These use cases can be found across all industries, as they involve collecting and mediating priced/rated transactions downstream for revenue recognition purposes and compliance with tax authorities. Thus, significantly increasing the addressable market of SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, public cloud edition and the value it can provide to customers.
Key benefits:
- Faster Time to Value: Deploy the connector rapidly due to its out-of-the-box design and user-friendly controls.
- Standardization and Interoperability: Built on SAP API standards, future-proofing your data integration architecture.
- Operational Assurance: Reliable transaction and delivery assurance eliminate critical data loss in complex, high-volume contexts.
- Compliance and Audit Readiness: All data is validated and auditable, supporting stringent regulatory and tax compliance requirements.
- Industry-Agnostic: Applicable across any sector needing automated, compliant quote-to-cash processes.
