Cloud for Customer (C4C) with Utility specific objects and attributes
With the current version of C4C – released May 2014 – we have included support for some of our utility specific objects. The focus is for us to be able to support the Business to Business (B2B) sales process with integration to the SAP CRM for Utilities solution.
This is great news for us who want to further support the Utilities Key Account Managers (KAM) with the effective handling of the sales process delivered by standard C4C functionality and now extending this with specific attributes relevant for their industry.
The B2B Sales Process
From talking to our customers we know that a portion of the support needed from IT tools are not industryspecific. We have therefore adopted C4C’s standard support for things like Workflow, Email Integration. From a process perspective we are also using the standard C4C sales process, but with the addition of utility attributes like Premises, Meter Points (POD’s) and the Business Agreement.
With this we are now able to perform the sales process and capturing the relevant information for the SAP CRM system to perform the Quote calculation with the utility specific data needed in CRM for Utilities.
Here you see a sample of the screens form the C4C solution.
The above screen is an example of the Business Agreement and also shows how the UI looks in the C4C solution.
The Data Model
For the more technical interested, I have included a view of the data model and how it aligns to the backend system. I have drawn red boxes around the objects we have added as part of utility functionality. The dashed line around Quotation is to indicate that Quotation already existed in C4C but we added utility attributes to the solution.
Do I still need SAP CRM for Utilities?
Yes – we still need SAP CRM for the process to work because:
- We collect the information needed to create a quote in C4C, but the actual quote
calculation is performed in the CRM backend and then handed back to C4C as a
PDF document.
- The integration to the utility technical objects and the Business Agreement is delivered as integration to SAP CRM
Moving forward
We are now working with customers to get feedback on what they see as the next set of functionality required. The intent is to keep working in a co-innovation mode with our customers.
Links to further material on Cloud for Customer
– SAP Cloud for Customer: http://help.sap.com/cloud4customer
Interesting to see the Technical master data object being made available in C4C. Is that the premise to the more generic Installed base object to be made available for Cloud for Service? It is sorely missed 🙂
Agreed, Thierry.
If we've been able to do it for an industry specific variation of an Installed Base object, what are the chances and likelihood of seeing Installed Base management access via C4C? I'm looking for any more details about this if someone can provide.
Hi,
as you have correctly guessed the current implementation strictly works with the utility variant of the Ibase.
Outside of utility we have a demo where we implemented the Ibase objects as a customer template, but not as part of standard. I will make sure to update this blog if/when we get some further capabilities.
Thanks for reading the blog.
Dear Mr. Hansen,
do you have new information about the planned Installed Base Object in C4C?
Currently, there is Installed Base Management only in beta stadium. It is planned to be released in 1502 Version. Is there a commitment by SAP that the underlying BO will also be released for extensibility so that partners can develop addons because we urgently need this for our customer? Thank you for your information!
Best regards,
Rufat Gadirov
When we have shown the solution to B2B sales managers at utilities customers they all respond positively due to the fact that they can see themselves using this solution (Run Simple) and they can see how the valuable information in SAP about the accounts could be delivered to the sales teams to help them engage customers like never before.
Great blog, thanks for sharing Steen.