What is Choice ?
Across the world the liberalization of the utility markets introduced deregulation in the way utility companies sold energy. The customer now had the option of choosing their supplier of choice for their energy needs and the market in turn facilitated the entry of new suppliers of energy. These new suppliers would purchase energy in the market directly to then sell to the customers
The deregulated market brought the need for communication between these suppliers and existing energy distributors regarding the customer’s consumption , billing and payments. This was managed through various market transaction messages , in most cases defined by regulatory bodies that kept all the market players aligned about the customer and the role and responsibility that the market participant would have with the customer.
SAP IS-Utilities and the evolution of the Choice solution
The SAP IS-Utilities solution available for Choice to meet this market need for the exchanges of messages between the various market participants is IDE (Intercompany Data Exchange) . This solution setup the framework of defining the market participants/service providers and the medium in which these market messages were to be exchanged for the various business processes from the change of supplier at the customer, the exchange of consumption and billing details to invoice the customer to the settlement of the financial dues between the customer and the market participant.
Next in the evolution of the SAP IS-Utilities solution for Choice in SAP ECC was IDEX ( Intercompany Data Exchange Extended) as an add on and which provided a framework to view the entire business process and all the messages associated with it through the entity of the process document. This solution was provided under the namespace /IDXPF/
With S/4 HANA the Choice IS-U solution evolved further into the Market Process Management(MPM) This version of MPM is under the solution namespace /IDXGC/
What is Market Process Management (MPM) ?
What are the key benefits that MPM provides ?
The /IDXGC/ MPM solution brought into S/4 HANA all of the core processes developed as part of IDEX(/IDXPF) with process documents as the key entity in this framework to view all the market transactions and updates performed for a business process.
Introducing the New SAP Application Process Engine (APE)
With the 2208 version of S/4 HANA , MPM has now evolved further into Application Process Engine(APE) fitting in with the cloud first centric approach of SAP , utilizing SAP’s FIORI UI technology and best practices in development for the cloud
Features of the Application Process Engine (APE)
Monitoring using a Fiori Enabled Front End .
APE introduces Transfer docs as the new integration mechanism for market messages and provides a Fiori app to monitor the transmission of the transfer docs to the market participant as well as FIORI apps to monitor Process Documents and Exceptions created.
Fiori Enabled Configuration
Own Test Framework to test processes prior to deployment into a productive environment
The new APE solution utilizes the Restful ABAP Programming model with Odata HTTP Rest API’s for integration.
More information on APE and it’s features can be found at the SAP help site - https://help.sap.com/docs/market-process-management-for-utilities-for-s4hana
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