Switch Document

Introduction

Deregulation of market has given consumers the freedom to choose their energy suppliers and to change the supplier if they are not satisfied with the services of the supplier, leaving challenges to the suppliers to have accurate and up-to-date data of switch history of the consumers.

As change of supplier process demands a lot of data to be shared between retailers or between retailer and distributor, Intercompany Data Exchange (IDE) are used which automates transactions between market players in a deregulated market. The situation becomes bad to worse when lots of data is exchanged and keeping a track on the data flow becomes a tedious job.

What is Switch Document?

Switch document is the object used to control and document the change of supplier process (E.g. Start of Supply, End of Supply, Change of Supplier etc). When a change of supplier process starts, related Switch Document is created which is used to record all the related activities related to that process.

The change of supplier is executed with reference to the point of delivery. We record change of supplier processes on POD basis therefore for a single point of delivery there will be just one Switch Document, for a switch type in active status.

Switch Document also act as a unique identifier for the process. Hence we can attach the corresponding workflow with the Switch Document.

Switch Types

Switch Types identifies the process for which the Switch Document has been created. The following switch types are predefined by SAP in the standard solution:

· Start of supply

A customer starts to purchase electricity for a supply location (after moving in, for example).

· End of supply

A customer stops purchasing electricity from the supplier for a service location (after moving out, for example), or the supplier stops supplying electricity to the customer (after receiving a cancellation notification from a new supplier, for example).

· Change of Supplier

This is when the supplier of energy to a service location changes from a former supplier to a new supplier.

Switch Views

A switch view is the view from which the change of supplier process is considered. Switch documents are always created with reference to a switch view.

The following switch views are predefined by SAP in the standard solution:

· Distributor view - 01

· Supplier view – new supplier - 02

· Supplier view – former supplier - 03

Switch Status

Switch status describes the current status of the Switch Document. When the Change of Supplier Process is in progress, switch Document status is set to Active (03). And when the Process completes, Switch Document status is set to Complete. Following are the statuses of the Switch Document.

Owner

Owner describes the owner of the process. It contains the name of the Service Provider who has started the process. If the Process has been started by the New Service provider, then the field will contain the name of the New Service Provider.

Start Scenario

There are many supply scenarios in the deregulated energy market. For example, grid usage and supply services can be performed by a service provider operating in the system or a consumer can choose a different supplier (third party service provider) this changes its supply situation.

Start Scenario describes the Supply Scenario at the point of delivery at the start of the process.

Target Scenario

Target Scenario describes the Supply Scenario at the point of delivery at the end of the process.

Why Switch Document?

The change of supplier process involves a high level of administrative effort. You can keep the resulting costs to a minimum by automating as much of the process as possible. This particularly applies to the automatic processing of data exchange (IDocs), which is used to share data between distributor and retailers. IDocs can be monitored from WE02 transaction. But to know all the IDocs related to a particular Change of Supplier Process, those IDocs should be consolidated at one place.

Therefore; there is a need for a central document which will carry the complete information related to a Supplier Switch Process.

· Switch Document is a central object for data related to a switch process. For example – POD for which the change of supplier process has started, Move In Date, Move Out date, Former Supplier, New Supplier etc

· Switch Document is mainly used to monitor the activities related to a process. It helps to keep a track on the progress of the process. The activities could be the response from a retailer or the step that has completed for the process.

For example – Examples of activities include:

· Switch notification received

· Notification processed

· Check switch permission

· Switch Document acts as a linkage to all the IDocs received or generated for a switch process. We can attach the IDoc related to an activity in Switch Document and can navigate to the IDoc. In this way, we can know the complete data that has entered the system or has gone out from the system for a switch process.

· Switch Document is linked with the related Workflow, so you can keep a track on the progress of the process (which all steps has been completed for the process).

· The change of supplier process (as an intercompany process) can be viewed from three different switch views. These are the New Supplier, the Former Supplier or the Distributor views.

· Switch Document can be enhanced to consolidate project-specific fields in it.

Monitoring Switch Document

Prerequisite

· New Retailer has sent an Enroll request to the Distributor for a POD.

· Enroll Request IDoc has created a Switch Document for that process. Go to ESWTMON01, enter the Switch Document Number and press execute (F8)

Click on the Document Number and you will find the complete data for a Switch Document.

For example – the below Switch Document is created for Switch Type – „02‟ (Customer is Enrolling to a new retailer) and all the related activities are captured in activity tab.