SAP S/4HANA 2021 Release Highlights in Sales

In my last release highlights blog, I was asked when there would be an SAP Fiori App to Create Sales Orders available for SAP S/4HANA On Premise. It is my pleasure to announce that the App has been released alongside the SAP S/4HANA 2021 release, together with many other exciting functional extensions in the Sales area.

The table of content below summarizes the most important release highlights:

• Create Sales Order SAP Fiori App
• Import Sales Orders from XLSX spreadsheet file
• Automatically create sales orders from PDF file
• Mass Change of Sales Documents SAP Fiori App
• Adoption of Business Partner multiple addresses in Order-to-Cash Process
• Down Payment processing for Sales Contract
• Omnichannel Sales Promotions in Sales Order

Create Sales Order SAP Fiori App

While the transaction VA01 (App Create Sales Order -VA01) continues to serve your key users’ business requirements, with SAP S/4HANA 2021 your sales office will benefit from a simple and intuitive user interface for sales order creation. You can access the App Create Sales Order directly or within the App Manage Sales Order. My SAP colleagues have put together a great blog series for you, introducing the App usability, UI adaptation and extensibility.

I recommend you read the App feature comparison information to understand the features offered by various apps which can be used for creating, changing, and displaying sales orders.

Import Sales Orders from XLSX spreadsheet file

Many SAP customers upload sales orders using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with own custom programs. This becomes a standard capability with SAP S/4HANA 2021.

With the App Import Sales Orders, you can download the pre-defined Excel template and upload multiple sales orders with one click. During the upload, the system performs the necessary checks for order entry and points out any upload failure reason, so that you can immediately correct any errors to complete the order entry.

The pre-defined template contains over 160 fields for sales order header and items. The template also includes custom fields that key users have enabled in the Custom Fields App.

A video about how Import Sales Orders works is published here.

Automatically create Sales Order from PDF file

If you receive your customer’s buying request (purchase order) as PDF file, you can now automate this kind of sales order creation process. Check out this video to see how SAP S/4HANA combined with the SAP Machine Learning Document Information Extraction Service can improve your sales team’s productivity. The technical guide is described in the scope item 4X9.

Note that you can use the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation bot to scan your mail inbox for unread purchase orders and to upload the PDF file to the SAP S/4HANA system automatically. More details can be read in “Automatic Creation of Sales Order Requests from Unstructured Data (5LT)” in the SAP Intelligent RPA Store.

A chart for a complete technical view below illustrates the order creation process and the relationship among the technical components.

Mass Change of Sales Documents SAP Fiori App

The App Mass Change of Sales Documents will be your central entry point to trigger mass changes of sales documents. With the App you can perform mass changes for

• sales orders
• sales quotations
• sales contracts
• customer returns
• sales scheduling agreements
• sales orders without charge
• Debit and Credit memo requests

The changes are scheduled as a background job. You can monitor the job status, check change logs, and decide whether to reschedule failed job or close the job manually. See how it works.

Adoption of Business Partner multiple addresses in Order-to-Cash process

With the SAP S/4HANA 2021 release you have the option to activate the business function Multiple Address Handling for Business Partners in Sales and Distribution (and its prerequisite business function Multiple Address Handling for Customer Master Data in Business Partner). By doing so, you allow Sales applications and documents (sales order, delivery, billing document) to consume multiple addresses of the same Business Partner master record that is assigned to one customer master record.

Let’s think of a common business scenario: Your customer’s standard address is Mannheim. And the billing and delivery addresses can be different. See the screenshot below:

When multiple address handling is active, the customer as a legal entity can typically be represented by a single customer number (that is the single Business Partner master record assigned to one customer master record). All addresses of customer, along with related address-dependent and address-independent data, are then available to the consuming applications under this single customer number.

During the creation and processing of Sales documents (for example, sales orders, outbound deliveries, and billing document), data that was previously derived from different customer master records (representing different addresses of the same customer) can now be derived from address-dependent and address-independent fields of a single Business Partner master record and its assigned customer master record. In our example, during the order creation, you can select from the different addresses based on your customer’s request.

In effect, multiple address handling typically allows a customer, as a legal entity, to be represented by a single customer number. All address-dependent and address-independent data belonging to this Business Partner is then available to the consuming applications under this single customer number.

Please read the full documentation on SAP Help Portal -> SAP S/4HANA 2021 -> Product Assistance -> Sales -> Order and Contract Management -> Sales Master Data Management -> Multiple Address Handling in SD Documents Using SAP Business Partner

Down Payment processing for Sales Contracts

The down payment processing for quantity-based Sales Contracts, facilitated by the milestone billing plan, is another example of how SAP S/4HANA helps to improve operational efficiency.

In sales quantity contracts, you can maintain milestone billing plans. You can then create a down payment request and release the order. The order is blocked for delivery as long as the down payment is not fully paid. Once the incoming payment is booked in finance, the order is automatically unblocked. The down payment amount will be considered in the invoice and deducted from the total payment amount.

SAP published a short video, when this capability was initially released for SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Omnichannel Sales Promotions in Sales Orders

With SAP S/4HANA 2021, you can leverage omnichannel sales promotions in sales orders to grant your customers free rewards (for example free goods or discounts).

SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing is a cloud solution, in which you can set up rules that define the eligibility criteria for omnichannel sales promotions and the related rewards. This is natively integrated with SAP S/4HANA price management as well as sales order management and processing. With the correct settings, the calculation service is called whenever a sales order is saved to verify the eligibility of the order for promotions. If the order is eligible for one or more promotions, the service returns this information as well as information about the free goods or discounts that are to be granted, which are then added to the sales order.

There are many more new sales capabilities available in the S/4HANA 2021 release than listed in this blog post. To have a complete view of the news in SAP S/4HANA Sales, you can refer to What’s New.

For the complete SAP S/4HANA scope, you may want to check:

SAP S/4HANA Community

SAP S/4HANA Feature Scope Description

SAP Help Portal -> SAP S/4HANA 2021 -> Product Assistance -> Sales

SAP Fiori Application Library

SAP S/4HANA Trials