With an SAP solution Comfort Charge can offer the entire charging process between various e-mobility providers (EMPs) and customers from a single source. The platform-based, fully automated B2B system ensures correct billing of charging data between Comfort Charge and the various e-mobility providers and, by harmonizing the – in some instances – very heterogenous data from the various systems of the cooperating EMPs, creates stringent financial processes. Comfort Charge is able to offer its B2B customers all important interfaces for transparent and automated billing. With the full-package solution, Comfort Charge is now able to further expand its business.
The fact that we, as a charging point operator, maintain our own backend is a great competitive advantage for us.
Patrick Eberwein, Comfort Charge Managing Director
Comfort Charge is a charging station operator. The company operates the physical infrastructure, makes parking spaces available for electric charging, and ensures that the electricity at the charging stations always flows as it should. However, the actual contract partner of the person charging their vehicle is the e-mobility provider (EMP). This provider supplies electricity to consumers and commercial vehicle owners and bills the users for the electricity. Various methods of payment and identification can come into play here depending on whether the driver has a contract with the EMP or spontaneously wishes to use the charging point to fill up. This is the challenge faced by Comfort Charge as the charging point operator: to ensure that the customer ultimately receives a transparent bill, heterogenous data from various sources needs to be consolidated in a single system. Comfort Charge Managing Director Patrick Eberwein explains: “The prices of the electricity providers, the consumed charging volume of each charging point, the contract data of EMP customers, and the access to payment service providers all need to be integrated with one another. This requires a powerful and reliable backend, as well as an instance that takes care of the clearing, i.e., the harmonization of the billing data with regard to the e-mobility providers.”
In order to meet the high requirements placed on clearing, Comfort Change – together with SAP specialists from T-Systems – created an SAP-based platform solution for the B2B business. The project began in the second quarter of 2019 and, according to Gerhard Klein, who, as SAP Solution Designer at T-Systems, was responsible for the implementation of the billing application, is “a continuing project that will grow together with the infrastructure and the requirements of Comfort Charge”. During this process, the team of developers made the use of standards and the conscientious combination of existing SAP elements their motto.
The SAP system is operated in a highly available private cloud hosted in the T-Systems data center. This gives Comfort Charge the option of being able to ramp up capacity quickly in order to tackle the further growth of its business. The first expansion phase was successfully concluded as early as the end of 2019. By successfully implementing the amendment of the VAT rates which took effect on July 1, 2020, the team has successfully implemented a further important phase of the project. In assessing the collaboration, Comfort Charge Managing Director Eberwein and SAP solution architect Klein share the same opinion: the project is a prime example of how well agile collaboration can work. The open exchange between the Comfort Charge and T-Systems teams led to everybody benefiting from the experiences of their colleagues and also being able to utilize their own strengths.
Comfort Charge is an innovative company based in Bonn, operating charging stations for electric vehicles across Germany as well as offering additional services related to e-mobility. In this way, the company is creating the necessary infrastructure for the breakthrough of e-mobility in Germany. Comfort Charge is part of the Deutsche Telekom Group.
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