Product Catalog & Backend Combinations for SAP Web Channel Experience Management

[ingo_woesner]

Dear community members,

Intuitive browsing, search and navigation is the most important feature in every webshop, even more important as customer service. When user experience is not flawless, your webshop will never become prominent, and the spoilt digital customer will use alternatives.

Therefore in SAP Web Channel Experience Management THE strongest design focus was set on customer experience. The webshop user experience and shop navigation behavior of SAP Web Channel Experience Management strongly depends on the backend system.

As you might know if you decide to implement WCEM you have to choose to run it against a SAP ERP or a SAP CRM backend.See my blog CRM vs. ERP for a comprehensive picture on the backend dependencies. Based on your decision different catalog options are available.

In this blog I would like to explain the possible combinations of SAP product catalog solutions with the different backends CRM and ERP, and the consequences in terms of browsing, search and navigation.

Several components are required to display product data in the SAP Web Channel Experience Management (WCEM) webshop:

• Product Data
• Multimedia content
• Catalog Structure
• Runtime calls to the backend

All these components work hand in hand and result in a consistent webshop browsing experience:

 

Three Product Catalog-Backend combinations are supported with WCEM:

The system landscape is shown here:

So what are the system combinations for SAP Web Channel Experience Management:

COMBINATION 1: Multi Channel Catalog (based on SAP MDM) with SAP CRM backend

This is clearly the state-of-the-art scenario for a perfect user and shopping experience. In this combination SAP Web Channel Experience Management pulls all stops for a perfect catalog browsing, search and navigation and enables the interaction of eCommerce with eMarketing and eService features in the configured business scenarios. For large B2C businesses this is clearly the only option that makes true sense, and even for larger B2B businesses this is very much recommended. SAP Retail specific "Generic Articles" are only supported with combination 1 (CRM backend with MDM catalog).

Unlike the former Internet Sales solutíon the WCEM no longer uses the CRM Product Catalog. Instead the Multi Channel Catalog (based on SAP MDM) provides more advanced features and no longer need “catalog variants” for language-currency combinations. Also the MDM combines both catalog management, search engine and runtime – you no longer need to publish your catalog updates to the TREX, and all your changes in the catalog become active immediately. From WCEM 3.0 customer specific product views are integrated.

These great advantages of the Multi Channel Catalog had not been feasible with the CRM catalog, and that’s why WCEM doesn’t use the CRM catalog any longer.

The MDM Catalog Management license is included in the WCEM license.

Taking a look on the technical side CRM is the leading backend. It provides the product master data to the MDM repository via FTP (no SAP PI required). At runtime, the WCEM Catalog UI retrieves product data from the MDM repository. Product images and multimedia content are also provided by MDM. When the user navigates in the webshop, MDM provides the product catalog data including images and multimedia content, thus lowering the load on the CRM backend. The CRM backend is only called (via RFC) to retrieve specific product information like marketing messages, ratings and reviews. ERP is called to retrieve realtime stock availability (if configured), and the Internet Pricing Configurator (IPC) is called for dynamic pricing or list prices (as defined in the WCEM configuration). 

Please note that a Delta synch is not supported by the MDM catalog. To sync changes to Material master data from the backend to the MDM catalog, you need to repeat the Initial load. Reload to MDM is executed as ‘Merge & Update’ thus will not override existing data already available in MDM via previous Load from ERP and/or direct maintenance in MDM.

From a system landscape perspective CRM and MDM are installed on separate servers inside the corporate firewall. The WCEM server is located in the demilitarized zone.

• Product Data
  • Loaded from CRM into MDM using middleware extraction framework
• Multimedia content
  • Maintained and assigned to products inside MDM Data Manager
• Catalog Structure: 3 catalog modes are possible:
  • Area Mode: Catalog Structure is exclusively made of catalog areas and subareas manually created in MDM
  • Category Mode: Catalog Structure is exclusively derived from the CRM Product Categorization (recommended)
  • Combined Mode: Catalog Structure is made of both Areas and Product Categories (recommended)
• Runtime Calls
  • at runtime the Web Application Server (WAS) performs calls to the CRM, ERP and IPC, and optionally to 3rd party systems like a content management system, image servers etc.

COMBINATION 2: Multi Channel Catalog (based on SAP MDM) with SAP ERP backend

Even without using a CRM backend, you can benefit from the superior browsing, searching and navigation capabilities the Multi Channel Catalog based on SAP MDM provides. The user experience is almost identical to combination 1, but lacks of eMarketing and eService features due to the ERP backend.

Here the same advantages apply as in combination 1: no longer “catalog variants” for language-currency combinations - MDM does all in one catalog. Also the MDM combines both catalog management, search engine and runtime – you no longer need to publish your catalog updates to the TREX, and all your changes in the catalog become active immediately. From WCEM 3.0 customer specific product views are integrated.

Technicalls speaking the ERP provides material master data to the MDM repository via the SAP PI. At runtime, the catalog UI retrieves product data from the MDM product catalog repository. Product images and multimedia content are also provided by MDM. RFC calls are also performed to ERP and IPC during the user session. Please note that WCEM capabilities are limited with an ERP backend compared with a CRM.

• Product Data:
  • Loaded from ERP into MDM using ALE Idocs and with SAP PI acting as message hub between ERP and MDM
• Multimedia content:
  • Maintained and assigned toproducts inside MDM Data Manager
• Catalog Structure: 3 modes are possible:
  • Area Mode: Catalog Structure is exclusively made of catalog areas and subareas manually created in MDM
  • Category Mode: Catalog Structure is exclusively derived from the material classification (recommended)
  • Combined Mode: Catalog Structure is made of both Areas and Material Classification (recommended)
• Runtime Calls:
  • at runtime the Web Application Server (WAS) performs some call to the backend ERP (product recommendations, realtime stock availability), IPC (dynamic pricing), and (optionally) to other 3rd party systems implemented on project basis, e.g. a content management system

From a system landscape perspective ERP and MDM are installed on separate servers inside the corporate firewall. The WCEM server is located in the demilitarized zone.

Recommendation:

Before you consider combination 2 you should be aware that the TCO of this combination is almost as high as for combination 1 (CRM instead of an ERP backend):

You need to install and maintain an ERP, a WCEM server, an MDM server and a SAP PI to run a webshop with eCommerce features, but without eMarketing, eService features, and without store features like store locator, In-Store availability and In-Store Pickup. There are even more restrictions with an ERP backend - please see the CRM vs. ERP blog for further details.

The benefit however of choosing combination 2 is the superior browsing experience with the Category Mode or Combined Mode that the SAP MDM catalog provides. This browsing experience a strong differentiator, but for the sake of a reduced functionality compared to combination 1 (CRM with MDM), and a higher TCO than combination 3 (ERP with TREX). 

Before deciding about combination 2 I would recommend to evaluate

• Combination 1 with all its advantages and speed-implement SAP CRM as backend with the Rapid Deployment Solution for SAP CRM
• Combination 3 and benefit from the WCEM 2.0 Rapid Deployment Solution to speed-install WCEM 2.0 with ERP in a B2B scenario at a fixed service price in 8-10 weeks with a lower TCO than combination 2 and 3, while sacrify the superior browsing experience.

COMBINATION 3: TREX Search Engine with SAP ERP backend (from WCEM 2.0)

Combination 3 is an affordable option with a low TCO. In this case an ERP, a TREX server and the WCEM Java solution is required as a minimum. The product catalog content is maintained in the ERP Product Catalog (transaction wwm1/wwm2).

It is then replicated to a TREX index, which acts as catalog mirror for ERP to handle all catalog requests from the webshop. So the index prevents access from the web to the productive ERP system. At runtime, product data and catalog structure is retrieved from TREX. Runtime calls to the backend ERP are similar to combination 2. Images are usually located on the webserver, and the links to product images are defined in the ERP document management system.

With this combination only Area Mode webshop navigation is supported, which means browsing a static catalog hierarchy in the webshop. A facetted search (sometimes called "Taxation") to display product attributes in the left navigation bar (price from 1-10, 11-20, brand, ..) is not possible - in my opinion a shop stopper for B2C businesses. The ERP backend in general doesn't support eMarketing and eService features and many other CRM features (see the blog CRM vs. ERP - backend options and restrictions).

There are some topics to remember when using the ERP product catalog with a TREX index

• In the ERP Product Catalog so-called "catalog variants" are defined. A catalog variant represents a 1:1 combination of language + currency for a webshop. A ERP/TREX based webshop is assigned to one catalog variant. This means such a webshop supports exactly one language-currency combination. Of course you can have multiple wehsbhops, but each of the webshops will have a defined 1:1 language currency. Read also the blog CRM vs. ERP - backend options and restrictions
• A very comprehensive SAP consulting solution CatMan is available to way improve and extend the functionality of the ERP product catalog. The solution has continuously grown since 1998 and has been extended ever since. Whereever you use the ERP product catalog, either in Internet Sales, Web Channel Experience Management, print media generation or somewhere else, the CatMan is a MUST!
• Product Material long texts need to be maintained twice (in case you are not using CatMan...). The original texts from the material master are not automatically taken for the catalog. They must be entered in the catalog maintenance in ERP.

So except for the webshop UI which looks the same, this combination has nothing in common with the previous combinations 1 and 2 in terms of search and navigation.

From a system landscape perspective an ERP and a TREX server (recommended on a separate machine) is required inside the firewall, and a WCEM server in the demilitarized zone.

Advantages of the MDM Catalog Management

The MDM catalog provides all up-to-date product and navigation features a catalog should have, like the dynamic sorting of search results in the left hand navigation bar (price from … to, brand, colors, …).

With the MDM catalog you don’t need a physical catalog structure (from WCEM 2.0) because the catalog structure is generated logically by defined hierarchy data. There are a ton more features compared to the ECC catalog with TREX.

WCEM is optimized to manage a high volume of product data and is therefore dependent that the product catalogue data is provided in a very fast manner. MDM is an own in-memory database that can do this much faster than any traditional database. However, TREX has similar in-memory capabilities. No database license is required for MDM. The MDM catalog management license is included in the WCEM license.

When using the Multi Channel Catalog based on MDM the webshop provides a multiple language support within the very same webshop.

Unlike the ERP product catalog with TREX, MDM is both catalog management tool and runtime in one solution. This means the changes you make in the MDM catalog become immediately visible in the webshop, without the need of publishing the content to a separate index server.

Any questions are welcome. The FAQ blog may already provide an answer!

In addition to this blog please check the WCEM Blog Index for comprehensive information, especially the related blogs about CRM vs. ERP - backend options and restrictions and Evolution of SAP's eCommerce Solutions. Also please check the WCEM WIKI, which is the central info hub for WCEM.

Best regards,

Dr. Ingo Woesner

Product Manager

SAP Web Channel Experience Management - Rollout

Suite Development Strategic Innovation

SAP AG