Order-to-Cash: Simple Insight-to-Action for Profit-Hold Issues

This post is about the SAP Smart Business for Sales Order Fulfilment and the latest innovations in the Order-to-Cash process.

With the new Smart Business Cockpit end user can monitor all the exceptions in the Order-to-Cash process. This was previously not possible, since the information about the exceptions had to be gathered from different transactions. Now, with the power of HANA, this functionality can be enabled even in real-time.

Let’s have a look at one concrete and typical pain point that occurs often in many businesses: an invoice is not sent out.

Let’s imagine the following scenario: you are an Internal Sales Representative responsible for the in-time fulfilment of your sales orders. It is close to end of the current financial period and there are still some invoice amounts on profit hold. You need an easy-to-consume and real-time overview of the current order fulfilment situation to be able to monitor and manage the profit hold situation. How can the new Smart Business Cockpit help you?

First step: be aware that there is a problem

You start you day by going to the Fiori Launchpad. Here you have a real-time situation of all of your KPIs (Figure 1). You can quickly notice that one of your KPIs is red, meaning that there is a problem that needs your immediate attention.

Figure 1: Fiori Launchpad

In our scenario the KPI that is notifying us about an existing problem is the “Profit Hold – Max Amount” KPI (Figure 2). This means that we have a 102.5K sales order that was not fulfilled.

Figure 2: The “Profit Hold – Max Amount” KPI is reporting a problem

Second step: get quick and meaningful insight into the problem

Once you have been made aware that there is a problem, you want to have meaningful insight into the problem, and this as quickly as possible. The insight you need is just some clicks away. In seconds you can open the sales order that is having problems and see the list of the issues are blocking the fulfilment (Figure 3). In our case we have a billing block, due to the terms of payment, and an invoicing issue.

Figure 3: Insight into the sales order issues

Third step: solve the problem

Now that you have identified the source, you can go on and solve the problem directly in the same view. In our fictive scenario you have to change the payment terms of the give sales order, remove the billing block and then go on and release the invoice. How many clicks are required? Only 6 in total and your invoice is created.

In less than 5 minutes, you were able to identify the problem, drill-down to find out the source and take immediate action. You were able to resolve the most important invoicing issues and reduce the current profit hold amount. And the system has immediately updated the status in real-time so that your problem KPI is now green (Figure 4).

Figure 4: KPI after the problem is solved

Interested in this solution?

If you want to find out more about the SAP Smart Business for Sales Order Fulfilment you can visit the dedicated help portal page here.

Also the following videos can give you more insights into the solution:

SAP’s CEO Bill McDermott had a clear message at SAPPHIRE 2014: “Simplify everything. Do anything”. Smart Business for Sales Order Fulfilment is a perfect example for how simple business processes should be.