Mastering Q2C with SAP BRIM: Strategies for Success

In Episode 3, we delve into SAP BRIM (Billing and Revenue Innovation Management) and its transformative impact on your Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) process. Discover how integrating BRIM can drive business expansion and optimize cash flow, particularly for service industries like telecom, logistics, airports, seaports, high tech, and media entertainment. Learn about the various benefits of implementing BRIM and how it stands as a top-notch solution for enhancing financial efficiency and growth.

Transcript

Hello viewers, and welcome to another episode of our podcast, Acuity Docs. Today’s topic is going to be an exciting blend in the business optimization process. We’re going to be talking about BRIM, which is billing and revenue innovation management, and we are going to be covering how BRIM implemented with your Q2C process will help you expand and grow your business.

So today we are going to be welcoming our esteemed guest Manoj again. So he can guide us through this process. Hello and welcome again Manoj. Thank you so much for joining us today again. It’s been a very insightful few episodes and we hope to continue this journey further down the road with you. So to kick things off for this episode, my first question would be, what do you think are the cool benefits that businesses can reap out of implementing BRIM with their quote to cash processes?

Yeah great question, Thank you Rhea. Quote to Cash optimization, process optimization, digital transformation they call it whatever can be supported by SAP BRIM. SAP BRIM is it’s like the top notch solution for cash flow optimization, particularly for services industries. Whether it is telco it so logistics business, airports, seaports, that high tech business any sort of media entertainment.

So there’s lots of industries such as technology services industry quote to cash optimization, business transformation supported by SAP BRIM. Is like, the kind of the uber position to be, right? and this is typically, a solution which helps people with the various challenges that we talked about earlier. So if you were in services industries, typically everybody’s can either has moved to a subscription based businesses, business or would be moving into a subscription based business.

So that is something that from SAP BRIM supports just out of the box, right? That’s the stack. And then event based billing, so every everything that in the services industry that happens today, they’re in the Nirvana state for all of them, would be that they can move to an event based system, which means as and when the services provided is provisioned, that’s when you bill for exactly that want of service to as provision.

And that event based billing is something which is so different. Data acquisition and converting that into a billable item is what SAP BRIM would do. And then complex pricing that we talked about contracting, bundling of those products, how you use your existing services plus couple of them with other services, you third party services that the customer actually needs or wants, which helps you sell your product better.

That’s what, SAP BRIM you know, brings to the table allows you to create complex bundles, third party bundles, and then you have, the complex pricing to complicate. So any sort of pricing that you have, anything that you can think of, imagine in terms of complexity, in terms of multi-level pricing, discounts, all of that can be addressed through to people.

So what effectively this does is you have your subscription and event based model, you got your data acquisition, you have contracts which support that. And then the bundling of the products, the complex pricing, all of that results into what we call billable items. So you have accurate, very granular level details of what service has been provided, when it has been provided and how much it should be charged.

What do we have in the contract and whether it matches? If it doesn’t match, how much should we charge them and bring that into a pot which is called billable, item. So then, convergent invoicing, these items, when they’re collated for based on your billing cycle, whether it is a monthly billing or, quarterly billing, you get invoiced and here you’re getting an accurate invoice based on individual events hasn’t been they occured.

So that invoicing that accurate invoice honestly creates, a much better experience for the customer and also for all the because of the ability to bundle you now not having separate invoices for separate services. So same customer in lots of industries. And we see this very often even now is the same customer gets multiple invoices one for service A one for service B.

Another one for a bulk of other services with no underlying details. What happens with that? Because one does lack of customer satisfaction and then they raise a lot more disputes. What happens with that is that you have invoices remaining outstanding for longer, which means, you know, DSO is very high. All of that results in the loss. And if the customer eventually is dissatisfied with your billing, they’re probably gonna move to competitions. And this is something that we see very often. And how SAP BRIM does, you know, the transformation for you for quote to cash perspective completely changes that. Right? So your right from the contract to your pricing to your accurate invoicing results and you getting paid quicker sooner, the more likely to be paid then dispute.

Of course then there is the whole back of finance system, the collection system, then, revenue recognition. Again this is best in class collection system that they BRIM provides as a standard. you have depending on the organization, some are subscription based organization, which, you know, have hundreds of thousands or even millions of subscribers to be able to manage their, whole collection process can be pretty complex, but that’s how it works.

That’s a standard process within SAP BRIM. Very very complex revenue recognition requirements for industries, ranging from entertainment industry to IP based industries. Being able to manage that revenue recognition, it’s again, topnotch from a SAP BRIM. So all in all, you’re you’re blocking the revenue leakage getting better revenue recognition help fundamentals in place.

You’re having a full fledged SAP finance system to go with it. Your DSO is reduced, your customer satisfaction is increased, your complex pricing is addressed. The complex contracting, bundling requirements, it is addressed. And then you have your quote process which directly links to the contracting costs. So all in all, that is what you would typically call automating standardizing your quote to cash process.

And like I said previously to its effectively if you do this well it should really run it. So once you have that interaction with the customer, you set up that contract and it should run for perpetuity and you shouldn’t be touching it again there. You should. All you should be doing is getting your you paid on time by those customers.That would be the state to be.

Yeah. I think that sounds for people who are currently not using BRIM. It sounds a bit too complex, but I think at the same time, you’ve highlighted so many benefits of it that it sounds like everyone should be implementing BRIM in that quote to cash process.

So considering Acuiti’s expertise is actually BRIM. What do you think we as a company bring to the table when we are going to customers, and how can we help them navigate through this.

Yeah just to kind of respond to your previous comment. Yes SAP BRIM, as I said, it’s a great solution and it does help solve all of these different challenges, but it’s not for everybody. It is suited for organizations which are at a certain level. So they have certain revenue level that have certain complexity in the organization, organization should be big enough, and BRIM is the right answer for them.

I’m not going to tag it and give numbers, but it should be at least a certain level for this to be useful for them. And the complexity should be that it’s not just because of size, but because of size and complexity BRIM could be the right answer. If you are a smaller organization and you may or may not have same set, same levels of complexity, then you have the Cloud Solutions, which is Subscription Billing, CPQ (Configure Price Quote), Entitlement Management and that’s what we do.

So we deliver that for more kind of mid-tier organizations on on the public cloud. And this is more on the private. So there are slightly different solutions. But for the different industries.

Coming to Acuiti Labs, we have good experience of delivering both public cloud solution as well as private cloud solutions in a lot of different industries. So over the last ten years, we’ve been delivering these solutions and these transformation successfully in various different industries. And I think I mentioned this previously, industry experience is very important. Having good understanding, deep knowledge in the technology helps bring that to the front for our customers, what you what we’ve also done, is as a part of, you know, what we do is build several products, right and one of the things that we’ve done to help with, doing this better for our customers is we built these accelerators, which means we bring in a fully singing, dancing, SAP BRIM solution to any industry time. So and this is something that we use as a part of our design. Workshops with our customers so that they can actually see and feel what the change would mean for them and how they would like to see their system going forward.

So we find that as a great recipe for success. And every single time we find that the outcome is much, much better. Then it could have been, if we were doing PowerPoints, you know, took just whiteboarding stuff. So of course it’s coupled with PowerPoints and reporting. But when you have a singing dancing system, it’s a lot better for people to grasp what what they would expect and what they would like to see up from that perspective.

So I think that, but also the fact that we’ve got, deep expertise that there’s the entire organization is all about quote to cash transformation. All our people in the organization are very, very well trained and skilled consultants with, deep expertise in SAP BRIM and quote to cash, subscription billing. I think we just bring immense value to, you know, for our customers to be able to deliver some successfuly.

Which effectively hinders their growth. They’re not able to tap the new ways of doing business in terms of subscription, bundling, providing those complex offers to the customers, which customers are used to these offers now.

So that’s another challenge. And this is kind of the front end part of it, but if you go into the backend, talk about revenue recognition. Or making sure that your invoices are actually accurate to the customer. You’re not sending multiple invoices based on multiple services to the same customer. Are you able to consolidate that and send one single invoice, which is you guarantee that it’s an accurate invoice? You’re not losing any revenue, as in you are not collecting data from various different sources, different events from different places, trying to put them together in a manual system and therefore eventually losing out some of those. And again, it is very common as an example, if you look at logistics industry typically they would lose something like 4 to 5% of their revenue as a revenue leakage and in most cases, you would expect to hear from them that that’s part of doing business. That’s the cost of doing business. But its not. There are ways and you can in which you can completely stem that leakage and we will probably talk about that later. Then in any of the services industries you would like to send accurate invoices you would like to do everything you know absolutely correct. But you might still have customers who might come back and raise a dispute.

So say OK well you say I was in Argentina, but I was not in Argentina. I was only in Brazil. That’s coming up and So that they should be able to raise that dispute and there should be a dispute resolution process, which should also be automated. And that’s what you couldn’t do if you were running on on manual processes or disparate systems or excel sheets, etc. So these are these are the typical challenges that we see and of course for more larger customers, you, you will see other sorts of challenges as well in terms of the complexity of revenue recognition, but we’ll skip that. There’s a long list.

That sounds amazing. And thank you for, including that aspect about BRIM and other companies that might be using some other models that are more, you know, valuable.

So and so that’s great. Actually, this was a very insightful session again, and thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you so much Rhea appreciate it.

And thank you, viewers for tuning in today. We’ll be back again with another exciting episode of our podcast, The Acuiti Talks. Until next time.