Book Review: Effective Pricing with SAP ERP ( SAP Press )

You would wonder why the hell is he publishing a book review of a SAP SD topic in CRM area. The reason is very simple. There were no books available for pricing in SAP CRM area hence I decided to accelerate my learning by purchasing this book. In fact if you have worked on projects which have a CRM and ECC integration using CRM Middleware , then most of the customizing is downloaded from ECC system to CRM, so learning SD customizations for Pricing makes perfect sense.Since I am currently working in one such project , I had a good use case to use the knowledge that I would gain from this.

I found the book a must read for any body who doesn’t have an extensive SAP Pricing experience and would like to ramp-up quickly in this area. The books claims to help you with these points

• Understand the complete pricing solution from SAP

If you are working in SAP SD , then this statement completely holds true. This is a very good book to understand the pricing from SAP point of view. Exposes you to almost every thing related to pricing. Also exposes you to Variant Configuration and Internet Pricing .  But from a SAP CRM point of view, this would expose you only with the configuration ( which is good ) and not anything else ( which is also not the core constituency ) of the book. The book also details the User Exits which are used in SD Pricing and Routines which needs to be developed. If you are looking for a formal introduction to pricing configurations , condition techniques and various intricate details of pricing configurations then this part is satisfactory. There are finer details which is difficult to pick but this book exposes to you with that.

• Master Pricing with Materials Management and Sales & Distribution, as well as condition technique and industry-specific coverage

Though I did go through MM Pricing portions but they were not relevant to my study hence I would not provide any review on it. Now coming to Sales&Distribution pricing. Provides a very detailed analysis on pricing , condition techniques , special topics in pricing , pricing performance enhancement and data migration and cutover planning.An example that I liked very much is it is using the pricing enhancements only that we make sure if a condition record is fetched using a particular access then no further records are fetched.It is always mentioned in topics that once a condition record is fetched using an access no further search is made but that is not possible without a customization. This book exposes you many such small details which is very necessary for real life scenarios. There are many topics which you don’t come across until you have very high exposure to SD Pricing for e.g. there are certain checks which happen on header level fields which would help optimize pricing.

• Explore case studies and practical, real life examples and throughput.

The book uses examples to build upon the concepts. And also it goes from a simple concept to build upon the composite topics. For e.g. the condition type customizing would determine if scale based pricing is to be maintained and quantity conversion details. Once you go through this you would appreciate smaller details like this. It is this practical approach that helped a noob like me to pick the concepts faster. Actually once you see the examples in this book , you would start noticing smaller artifacts in your project system as well.

This book can be used to in many stages. First to get acquainted , them to familiarize and then to gain expertise. That also means that if you are newbie then you may have to read the books multiple times. This is a very good guide for any one and every one who is looking to make a serious career in Pricing. Why ? because you have to start some where and this is an excellent starting point. CRM consultants may argue that it doesn’t topics such as IPC , customizations specific to CRM but then there is no book on that at present and hence this would be a launch pad.

My verdict : Must read and must be read many times.