The SAP CRM Rapid Deployment solution (RDS) brings together software and services in a new offering that provides essential CRM functionality quickly and affordably, reduces risk, and puts customers on a predictable path to attain their CRM vision.
It delivers preconfigured software to support essential sales, service, and marketing processes, together with corresponding implementation services. If the CRM needs of customers are basic, SAP CRM rapid-deployment solution can provide a permanent solution to customer care requirements. If CRM needs are more extensive, the software can lay the foundation for an incremental evolution toward the comprehensive SAP CRM application suite.
Comparing with CRM Enterprise solution, RDS provides robust and essential functionality so as reduce complexity. Regarding to RDS sales area, here is an overview of comparison between the 2 solutions based on CRM Solution map.
The SAP CRM RDS sales solution provides:
- Account and Contact Management*
- Activity Management, including integration to Groupware (MS Outlook / Lotus Notes) *
- Opportunity Management
- Pipeline Performance Management
- Integrated ERP Order and Quotation Management
- CRM Interactive Reporting*
* these 3 are included in foundation
Those functions allow you:
Account and Contact Management
With Account and Contact Management, you may create, change, delete accounts and contacts or merge duplicated accounts. To get the 360°view of an account, you may read, download and print the customer fact sheet and access the interaction history. You could also assign the responsible employee to an account and maintain business partner relationship and marketing attribute for a certain customer within this function.
Activity Management, including integration to Groupware (MS Outlook / Lotus Notes)
Activity management provides complete visibility into all sales activities and fosters collaboration and team efficiency, with support for visit planning and bidirectional synchronization with leading groupware (MS Outlook / Lotus Notes).
The following transaction types are used for activity management:
- Interaction log
- Appointment
- Task
Opportunity Management
For below business cases, we recommend to use opportunity management:
- Large sales orders are commonplace
- Opportunities are distributed across the organization
- A large number of sales employees are in the organization
- The sales cycles are complex and take a long time to complete
- A simple quote to order system is not sufficient to track opportunity details
A sales rep. could create an opportunity manually, also based on an activity or from a qualified lead. With Opportunity management, it could help sales team win complex sales, e.g. Sales projects, and also optimize the sales process to improve sales volume with an effective sales process. With team selling function, sales team save the communication time within the sales unit.
For an opportunity, sales rep. could maintain a buying center to identify all roles in the decision- makers and display the relationship network of the people involved in the sales process.
Pipeline Performance Management
Pipeline Performance Management (PPM) is a highly interactive analytical application designed to help sales managers plan quotas and manage pipeline activities to achieve targets.
Sales managers and sales representatives can monitor and analyze opportunities in the UI pages with below different views:
- Target to Date View
- Closing Date View
- Sales Pipeline View
- Sales Pipeline Change View
By clicking on the different color part in the column chart, the opportunities with different status could be filter out automatically. Sales rep. may focus on the open opportunities so as take follow up activities. With the briefing card, sales rep. could get the summary information for each opportunity, including related activities, sales team involved, contacts, competitors and products.
Sales manager can enter or change the sales quotas for his/her team and team members for a planning period. All the sales people could view and change the planning list in the level below his own in the organization hierarchy.
Integrated ERP Order and Quotation Management
The Integrated ERP Order and Quotation Management building block allows sales employees to create sales orders and quotations directly in the ERP system from within the CRM UI. The data is transferred to the ERP system in real time and the order or quotation is created directly.
The Customizing settings from the ERP system are used to create these documents. You are not required to configure any additional Customizing settings for transactions in CRM.
CRM Interactive Reporting
CRM Interactive Reporting offers a simplified customer information reporting framework in which an SAP BI system is not needed. Reporting is carried out in the CRM database directly.
For any business user, it is easy to create or edit a report with wizard. When CRM data, only CRM data, real-time data needed, interactive report is the best choice. Meanwhile, you can navigate to the objects directly via the hyperlink within the report. The report could also be exported to excel.
For sales area, those reports areas are available for analytics:
Opportunities, activity management.
In conclusion
Hope this blog already gave you a brief introduction on the RDS sales functionalities. There will be a series web blogs and video blogs to show you the functionality in detail.