Abstract:
SAP Variant Configuration Planning (VCP) stands as a pivotal tool in the arsenal of enterprises aiming to streamline their product configuration processes and enhance operational efficiency. This abstract provides a thorough examination of SAP VCP, elucidating its core functionalities, benefits, implementation strategies, and its transformative impact on organizational productivity.
SAP VCP is an integrated solution designed to facilitate the configuration and planning of complex products across diverse industries. Built upon the robust SAP ERP platform, VCP empowers organizations to manage product variants, configure-to-order processes, and optimize production planning with unparalleled precision. By centralizing variant data and automating configuration rules, SAP VCP enables companies to swiftly respond to customer demands, reduce lead times, and minimize errors in the order fulfillment process.
Key features of SAP VCP include configurable product modeling, constraint-based configuration, variant explosion, and integration with other SAP modules such as Sales and Distribution (SD), Production Planning (PP), and Materials Management (MM). Through seamless data exchange and real-time synchronization, VCP ensures data integrity and consistency across the entire supply chain ecosystem.
How can SAP Variant configuration & pricing (VCP) help?
SAP Variant configuration and Pricing (VCP) is the name of the solution that offers two business services on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)
- Variant Configuration service
- Pricing service
The configuration and pricing services provide variant configuration and sales pricing functionalities with high compatibility to the back-end ERP. This allows us to create digital, omni channel business. It is a public cloud solution (SAAS). The service works on master data and customizing maintained in the back end which supports both ECC & S/4 HANA.
SAP VCP offers a Quote to-Order process using the same configuration and pricing models which will minimize the manual process and improve the efficiency in the business operations. It avoids errors and helps to improve time to market. We can model once and use in any application.
We can design the Variant configuration in S4HANA Advance variant configuration/ECC LO-VC, and this will be exposed to commerce cloud for customers to configure or CPQ where sales reps can configure for the customers. The configured quote can be sent to the sales engineer for verification and then to the customer for approval. As the customer, sales rep and sales engineer are all working on the same product model, the quote is completed faster & improve the customer experience.
The services are offered in three flavors:
- Add on for SAP commerce cloud – the focus lies on doing product configuration in a cart via the variant configuration service. The addon offers the configuration UI and further integration aspects like sending the configuration results with the order to the back end. During configuration, the pricing service is used to calculate surcharges depending on the chosen options.
- Add on for SAP CPQ – The configuration and pricing services are used to bypass SAP CPQ’s own engine for configuration and pricing. With that, configuration and pricing models can be created in SAP ECC or SAP S/$ HANA & can also be used in SAP CPQ, instead of re-modelling them again in SAP CPQ and map them when sending the quotes to the backend.
- API based integrations – To build custom integrations, own applications on top of the services or want to integrate them in other applications than SAP commerce cloud or SAP CPQ.
Architecture:
Integration data flow:
- The Variant configuration service needs a knowledge base, a collection of all LO-VC or AVC configuration data (like characteristics and rules) for a configuration material.
- The Pricing service needs pricing procedure, condition records, currency exchange rates from SAP SD pricing.
- The Variant configuration service and Pricing service are using SAP HANA smart data integration (SDI) for data replication from on-premises or private cloud back end connected via SDI data provisioning agent. SDI is the component of S4 HANA that facilitates receiving, transforming, and loading data to & from the HANA Database.
- Consuming applications need materials, business partners which are loaded from the backend. They call the variant configuration service during runtime to configure VC product. The Pricing service will be called during runtime to calculate prices of products and surcharges based on selected options.
- Consuming applications send documents with price details and configuration results to SAP back end (via cloud integration).
Citations:
- This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, which permits noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited: https://www.SAP.com