Pricing service – Solution Brief

[Michael_W]

In this blog, we want to give you an introduction into the Pricing service, which is part of the solution SAP Variant Configuration and Pricing.

What is the Pricing service?

Overview

• The Pricing service lets your sales teams, customers, and channel partners price your products accurately and efficiently.


• The service features APIs to do interactive sales document pricing, to do catalog pricing, and to read pricing customizing.
  


• Service on SAP API Business Hub: Details | API References


• Leverage your knowledge of SAP sales pricing to model your pricing rules and use them everywhere. That provides smooth end-to-end data flow between your cloud applications and your SAP back end.


• Differences between the Pricing service and ERP sales pricing: SAP Note 2894167


• Relevant pricing data is replicated from SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA in the SAP Cloud to allow the Pricing service to use that data independently of the back-end load or availability.


• The Administration UI is a SaaS application to manage the replication of the master data. For on-premise back-end systems, it utilizes SAP HANA smart data integration (SDI) to establish a push-connection from the back end. The data is then stored in a HANA database on SAP BTP.


• The Pricing service can be used completely independent from the Variant Configuration service, and vice versa.


• Product page with all information (e.g. Feature Scope Description, Guides, SAP Notes): https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_VARIANT_CONFIGURATION_AND_PRICING .

 

Excerpt of Feature Scope Description: https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_VARIANT_CONFIGURATION_AND_PRICING/40af1155b9d344a4b7474c694d13f595

Feature	Description
Document pricing	Price calculation is based on pricing procedures and supports: •       Price, discount, and surcharge calculation •       Calculation rules •       Currency and quantity conversion •       Scale determination with different scale types •       Calculation logic on document and item level •       Exclusion e.g. Best Price Logic •       Sub-set of standard ABAP pricing user-exits •       Manual overwriting for header and item conditions
Stateless pricing	Same functionality as for document pricing above, but no manual changes possible for conditions, only automatic determination, via access sequence or external condition, is supported. In contrast to document pricing, there is only a single API that gets all the needed input and does the price calculation.
Pricing persistence	The Pricing service provides persistence for pricing runtime data. Every change in the pricing results during the pricing process is saved in the database. Only applicable to document pricing, not to stateless pricing.
Condition technique	Use condition technique in your SAP back end to maintain the pricing rules: •       Condition determination for standard and custom defined condition types •       Condition type with and without access sequence •       Access sequences with different access types ( fields in fixed key part and fields in the free key part)
Prices for configurable items	Pricing via so called variant conditions for simple and multi-level configurable products.
Prices for non-configurable items	See Document pricing and Stateless pricing above.
Taxes	Simple, condition-based tax calculation like MWST is possible. However, multiple tax levels, tax exemption licenses (for example for Italy and France), or tax calculation via external tax engine are not supported.
Pricing APIs	•       Customizing APIs to retrieve pricing procedure, condition type, and access sequence details as maintained in and replicated from ERP or S/4HANA •       Stateless Pricing API to calculate prices e.g. during product configuration, or for catalog items •       Pricing Document APIs to maintain a pricing document and its conditions (pricing elements) •       Pricing Document Item APIs to maintain pricing document’s items and their conditions (pricing elements)
Extensibility	Pricing routines, also known as user exits, can be used to influence price calculation. SAP provides a predefined set of standard routines, which are supported with best performance out-of-the-box. In addition, a custom web service called by the pricing engine for each custom routine can be specified. The customer is responsible for deployment, correctness, and potential performance impact of the calls to the user exits implementation. The following user exit types are supported that way for custom-coding: Requirements (REQ), Condition Base Formulas (BAS), Scale Base Formulas (SCL) (without group scales), Condition Value Formulas (VAL) (without group value), Group Key Formulas (GRP).

 

Try it out!

On API Business Hub, you cannot only find the full API documentation, but you can also test the service against a sandbox environment with the example model CPS_BURGER.

Open Overview | Pricing Service | SAP API Business Hub and click on Try Out.

Try Out

On the left, you find the different API groups with the different endpoints.

Open group Stateless Pricing and choose POST /api/v1/statelesspricing as depicted on the screenshot above and click on Run to price a burger menu.

As depicted on the screenshot above, you can find in the request body all the sales items and pricing context that is passed to the service.

In the response section, you can find the pricing results:

Response With Pricing Results

With that, you have a good first overview about the cloud service and how to test it. For more information about the different endpoints, please refer to the Development Guide on SAP Variant Configuration and Pricing | SAP Help Portal.