As you may know, SAP announced the general availability of the SAP Business Suite 7 in May this year. SAP CRM is a core application within the SAP Business Suite and the release of CRM 7.0 was synchronized with the release of other Suite applications (SAP ERP, SAP SRM, SAP SCM and SAP PLM) in order to reduce the total cost of ownership for SAP customers.
SAP CRM provides a gamut of functions and features to support Order Management including multi channel capture and processing of quotes and orders, pricing, sales contracts, interactive product configuration and billing. It also offers tight integration with SAP ERP for order fulfillment, logistics and accounting.
This blog entry highlights the improvements to Order Management in CRM 7.0.
Lead-to-Cash Process with ERP Order
ERP Sales Transactions in CRM Web UI
CRM 7.0 offers a significantly improved integration with ERP SD (Sales and Distribution). The CRM Web UI can be used to create ERP sales transactions for Quotes, Orders and Quantity Contracts eliminating the need to replicate pricing and sales transaction data using the CRM Middleware. It is also possible to create any of these ERP sales transactions (i.e. Quote, Order or Quantity Contract) as a follow-on transaction from the CRM Opportunity and to track the document flow. For example, a CRM Opportunity will show the link to the ERP Quote and ERP Order that resulted from the CRM Opportunity.
CRM Product Proposals in ERP Quote and Order
The CRM Product Proposal feature can now be leveraged in ERP Quote and Order transactions using the CRM Web UI. Product Proposal is a CRM specific capability that allows product recommendations to be made based on up-selling or cross-selling rules, marketing campaigns, past order history, etc. Any recommendations selected by the customer can be automatically added to the ERP Quote or Order.
CRM Catalog Browse and Search in ERP Quote and Order
With CRM 7.0, it is possible to launch the CRM Product Catalog from ERP Quote and Order using the CRM Web UI. The product Catalog can be browsed or searched and any product(s) selected in the Product Catalog is automatically added to the ERP Quote or Order.
Please refer to this SAP CRM 7.0: Single Product Catalog View for Customers, Sales Reps and Call Center Agents for detailed information on how to add products from the Product Catalog to a Quote or Order.
The improved integration with ERP SD enhances the Lead-to-Cash process with ERP Order (see image below). The integration, though powerful, does not replace the ERP SD UI for Order Management. The ERP SD UI supports many more features than the CRM Web UI for ERP sales transactions. The CRM Web UI is intended for front office users with little or no training in order capture and processing using the ERP SD UI. This integration also reduces the TCO for customers requiring this scenario.
Guided Sales Configuration
CRM 7.0 introduces the concept of UI models for configurable products, which allow the creation of channel and role specific UI layout for configurable products. The UI model defines the number of pages, the sequencing of pages and configuration attributes, and rules for the display of associated images for a product configuration. This powerful feature makes it possible to design a UI layout based on marketing requirements and to guide the customer through a complex configuration.
The screen shot below shows how a multiple page UI layout has been designed for a configurable product.
Enterprise Services
With CRM 7.0, a broad range of enterprise services across Sales, Marketing and Service were introduced. This blog entry will focus on the enterprise bundles relevant for Order Management. Readers interested in an overview of the enterprise services delivered in CRM 7.0 can check out this Enterprise Services Delivery - CRM 7.0.
Furthermore, as the bundles have been sufficiently documented, I will only provide a link to Wiki content for the relevant bundles.
Pricing
New in CRM 7.0 is the ability to easily and quickly enter or edit multiple pricing elements in the pricing result data for CRM transactions using the CRM Web UI. The improved efficiency in maintaining pricing result data eliminates the pain point associated with previous Web UI releases where users could only enter or edit one price element at a time and needed to navigate to multiple screens to make any change.
Another new feature in CRM 7.0 is availability of three new data fields to the pricing result data for improved pricing transparency. The data fields added are: price element status, indicator for manually changed pricing element and indicator for statistical pricing element.
The above enhancements are likely to have a profound impact on usability and productivity. Please see below screen shot from CRM 7.0.
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