SD Sales and Billing 2019: "Alternative product description in sales order item" improvement implementation

[DominikTylczyn]

SAP Customer Connection

SAP Customer Connection is a great program run by SAP that allows to incrementally improve on-premise product. The rules of engagement are simple:

1. SAP opens a project to gather improvement proposals. You can find all campaigns here: SAP Customer Influence - All Opportunities


2. Customers and partners are able to provide their improvement proposals for open campaigns. Another one SD Sales and Billing 2020 will start on September 24th, 2019.


3. The proposals are voted. Once a proposal gets enough votes (typically 5) it's going to be considered by SAP for implementation. Here is the list of all my improvement proposal submitted for SD Sales and Billing 2019


4. Up-voted proposal are reviewed by SAP and if approved they are delivered, mostly with support notes.

Alternative product description in sales order item

One of my improvement proposals, to display alternative product description in sales order item was delivered on May 16th, 2019 with support note 2753355 - Display material description from material master:

If customer material info record is used in sales order processing, the product description in sales order item is derived from the info record. Thus the product description in sales order item corresponds to customer requirements. That's great from their perspective. That is however confusing to sales personel of the supplier who are used to their own descriptions of the products. Notice that the product description of a customer and a supplier may be utterly different.

The request is to provide additional field in sales order item and provide visibility of both product descriptions - material master short text and the description from the customer material info record.

That would make sales teams work more efficient and less error prone.

Only recently I've had a chance to actually implement it and check what SAP delivered. The implementation process has been surprisingly smooth with only a couple of manual activities. No problem whatsoever.

After the implementation, there is additional field in sales order overview screen that provides material description as maintained in material master data. This description is available long with standard sales order item description derived from customer-material info record:

1. Column "description" shows standard sales order item material description as maintained in customer-material info record.


2. Column "material description" shows material description as maintained in material master data.

The improvement implementation adds the new column as the last field. Therefore you need to position it according to your needs with table control settings.

Improvement general availability

The improvement is shipped with the following patches:



Therefore sooner or later it will get into your system. You can get it right now with the above mentioned support note.

What is quite nice, is that SAP has decided to include the improvement in S/4HANA Cloud edition version 1908.

Final remarks

I'd encourage you to browse through all already delivered improvements before launching any custom development initiatives. There are already close to 9000 improvements delivered!

Look out to current and upcoming campaigns. SAP Customer Connection is a great opportunity to share pain points or improvement ideas and have them delivered as standard.