Marketing and Sales organizations work together to ensure that they are successful in positioning their products and services. Both organizations want to be aware of the different activities that are occurring over time.

For example, Consumer Product companies use SAP CRM Trade Promotions to increase brand, capital, name recognition, market share and sales volume, as well as improving the placement of new products on the market. Trade promotions are marketing activities, usually owned by the Sales organization, that have a specified period of time and are used to drive consumer behavior, particularly to build demand. A trade promotion is paid for by manufacturers of consumer goods to retailers for merchandising support. For more information on SAP CRM Trade Promotion Management, refer to the SAP online documentation:

https://help.sap.com/viewer/382a7758fbc64e3bbc4ea497d5328faa/4.0.04/en-US .

As of SAP Marketing Cloud release 2002, it is now possible to show different types of objects in the New Marketing Calendar. One of the new cool features is the ability to create custom business objects and enable them to be shown in the Marketing Calendar, provided that the custom business object has a start and end date, as well as an ID and a description.

This blog provides a step-by-step procedure to create a lightweight trade promotion object in SAP Marketing Cloud and see the instances of this object together with the marketing campaigns in the new Marketing Calendar app.

Prerequisites

The user that carries out the steps shall have the following business catalog assigned.

• Extensibility (SAP_CORE_BC_EXT)
• Extensibility and Adaptability – Marketing (SAP_CEC_BC_MKT_EXT_PC)
• Communication Management (SAP_CORE_BC_COM)

For more information regarding business catalogs used in SAP Marketing Cloud and the delivered business roles, refer to the SAP online documentation: https://help.sap.com/viewer/ac1eab4c66bc490da7ac2c378c46b0e7/2002.500/en-US/c34f55acb28047abb3ccb6cd5e541031.html

Procedure

1. Open the Custom Business Objects app.
2. Create a new custom business object: Give it a name and press Create.
3. Set the General Information:It is suggested to set all features as shown above.
   • • The Determination and Validation feature will enable you to implement custom logic for your custom business object.
     • The UI Generation feature  enables you to maintain data for the custom business object in a generated UI. Note that the UI Generation is only available in a Cloud deployment.
   • • The Service Generation feature creates an OData that enables the upload of data.
     • The Can Be Associated feature enables the association of the custom business object to a custom field.
     • The System Administrative Data feature automatically creates administrative fields Created On, Created By, Changed On, Changed By.
     • The Change Documents feature automatic logs who changed what and when.

   Prior to use Data Access Management , refer to the following blog post from the SAP Community https://blogs.sap.com/2019/11/21/data-access-management-for-custom-business-objects/ so that you learn about the feature before activating it.

4. Define the fields for the lightweight trade promotion.
   • • Select the Fields section and enter the main fields of the lightweight trade promotion. For example:Note that in this example, most of the fields have type Text. Some fields, such as Promotion Type, could be modeled as code list. However, if the data is uploaded to SAP Marketing from SAP CRM, this is not necessary. Since the leading system is SAP CRM, adding extra checks is not required and limits the flexibility to upload data. For example, if a new promotion type was created in SAP CRM and not added to the code list, it will generate errors and increase the maintenance without any advantages.
5. Create sub-nodes (optional) for the lightweight trade promotion. If you want to have the product, product category, or brands that are assigned to a trade promotion, create sub-nodes that will hold this information.
   • • Select the Nodes section and create the sub-nodes as required.
6. Assign the business catalogs in the General Information section using the Maintain Catalog.For example, depending whom shall see and maintain the data, assign the business catalog accordingly.
7. Save and Publish.
   • • Note that custom business objects do not yet provide instance authorization. It is not possible to restrict users to see only some instances of a trade promotion. This said, using the Logic section, you can implement restrictions to avoid the creation or the modification of instances. However, you cannot restrict deletion.
8. Create or upload trade promotions in the new custom business object that you just created. For information on how to upload data in a custom business object, refer to the following blog posts from the SAP Community:
   • • https://blogs.sap.com/2018/07/20/batch-load-data-into-a-custom-business-object-in-sap-s4hana-cloud/
     • https://blogs.sap.com/2017/12/05/setup-of-cpi-iflow-with-custom-business-object/
     • https://blogs.sap.com/2019/07/11/setup-of-cpi-iflow-with-custom-business-object-part-2/
9. If you want to see the trade promotion lightweight object in the marketing calendar, follow the steps in the SAP online documentation:
   • • https://help.sap.com/viewer/13d84c47bb6749a188fd53915c256516/latest/en-US/f57fb96754004664af66f4049c4810c7.html

Conclusion

Once those steps are completed, you can use the New Marketing Calendar in SAP Marketing Cloud and view your campaigns together with trade promotions.

This technique can also be used to bring other types of objects that are relevant for marketing. For example, a custom business object could be created to hold important milestone for the marketing organization which can be shown in the marketing calendar together with campaigns. It brings flexibility to the marketing organization to show different objects together and take better decisions.

We hope that this blog post is useful for your implementation projects. Don’t hesitate to comment and bring your perspective on your implementation project. Your ideas together with tips and tricks related to this topic are most welcome.

More Information

Find more information on the creation of custom business objects in a Cloud deployment in the SAP online documentation:

https://help.sap.com/viewer/0f69f8fb28ac4bf48d2b57b9637e81fa/latest/en-US/c703c5b4e6a24d52a928ea54e8ff5e52.html

For on-premise deployment, refer to the the SAP online documentation:

https://help.sap.com/viewer/9a281eac983f4f688d0deedc96b3c61c/latest/en-US/56100afaa8614547a1d9e6569d667618.html

Note that in an on-premise deployment, you must register the OData service using /IWFND/MAINT_SERVICE in order to use it. For more information, refer to the SAP online documentation:

https://help.sap.com/viewer/cc0c305d2fab47bd808adcad3ca7ee9d/7.5.9/en-US/1b023c1cad774eeb8b85b25c86d94f87.html.