Long before the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses had been on a steady path toward digital transformation to achieve huge improvements in worker productivity, public health and safety, quality of products, services, and customer experiences, and even to obtain a sustainable planet and a circular economy. In the same way, the pandemic is a wake-up call for companies to accelerate the process for digitization. With this digitalization, the sales process needs to be more agile than ever to be successful in a highly competitive environment, and the journey of digital transformation, data, and visualization accessibility plays a vital role. Demand for innovation and transparent real-time analysis has increased dramatically.
In the last blog of this blog series, I will give you an engineering expert view of some selected highlights for sales monitoring and analytics of our SAP S/4HANA 2021 for Sales.
The blog is built as a series of 3 parts and present the key highlights for:
To name just a few highlights that we have in store for master data management; sales contract management; sales monitoring and analytics:
Remark
All these innovations will also be available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.
Sales monitoring and analytics provide monitoring and analytical features across all core sales business processes, from quotations and contracts to sales orders, including their fulfillment, up to invoices. It provides you with valuable insights and decision proposals in the form of insight to action, with seamless integration into transactional processes, sales documents, and collaboration tools like Chatbots:
There are a number of steps in making a data-driven decision. Depending on who you are and where you are at in the process, you may start on any point of the continuum. You may start with a question that needs answering, or you may have received an alert that prompts you to investigate. Then you analyze what’s happening, you predict what’s likely to happen next, and you plan accordingly. Plans lead to action, and then you report on results.
Picture 1: Decision making is a collaborative process
In order to serve the needs of all types of decision-makers in an organization, and analytics solution needs to have all these capabilities. If not, the result is a lack of evaluating alternatives, understanding risk, and constraints, and prescribing the right next best action.
This app allows you to analyze and resolve issues that impede sales orders from being fulfilled. With it, you can analyze sales orders in critical stages, collaborate with contacts, and efficiently address issues to ensure that sales orders in critical stages are fulfilled as quickly as possible. The app highlights impediments provide supporting information and allow you to navigate to Track Sales Order Details to display further details and resolve the issues.
Video 1: Working with Analytical List Page apps: This app is built by using Analytical List Page (ALP). Watch the video to learn more about the general functions offered by ALP.
The Sales Order Fulfillment app and its corresponding tiles will be deleted from the SAP Fiori launchpad in SAP S/4HANA 2022.
The Sales Order Fulfillment app and its corresponding tiles have been replaced by the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues app. Please switch to this app as soon as possible.
Additional details:
The corresponding tiles will be deleted in SAP S/4HANA 2022:
The approval status and approval request reason are now displayed in the header section of sales documents (e.g. sales order, debit memo request) and sales order related issues.
This allows you to immediately see whether a sales document is in approval, which means that further processing of the sales document (including the creation of follow-up documents) is blocked.
Picture 2: Filter for Approval Status in Sales Monitoring apps
This issue occurs if a purchase requisition has not yet been transformed into a purchase order in third-party processing (that is, the purchase order is missing for the sales order).
In third-party order processing, your company does not deliver the items requested by a customer. Instead, you pass the order along to a third-party vendor who then ships the goods directly to the customer and bills you. A sales order may consist partly or wholly of third-party items.
The product determines if a third-party vendor is necessary to fulfill the order. If such a product is entered in the sales order, a purchase order requisition on the schedule line is created.
In case the purchase order is not created from the purchase order requisition the Sales Order Fulfillment app triggers an issue (supply issue in sales order) to draw attention to the fact that the necessary purchase order is missing and the fulfillment of the sales order is pending.
Picture 3: Purchasing confirmation status on header and item level
You can filter on this issue in the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues app and also search for a specific purchasing confirmation status in the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues and Track Sales Orders apps to display a supply issue in sales orders.
You can display further details on the issue in the Track Sales Order Details app. You can display the purchasing confirmation status on the header and item level. You can also navigate to the purchase requisition from the schedule line details.
It is now possible to navigate to the schedule lines for all item issues. Schedule line details can be displayed for the entire fulfillment process, for sales orders, and for issues.
Schedule line information such as requested and confirmed delivery quantities can be displayed.
Schedule line details can be displayed for the entire fulfillment process, for sales orders, and for all issues with items:
Picture 4: Navigation to Schedule Lines
Integration to SAP S/4HANA can now be used in the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues and Track Sales Orders apps.
The following issues (which were already available for trade compliance) are now also available for SAP GTS in the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues app. You can use these issues to display sales orders and deliveries that are blocked due to compliance management reasons in SAP GTS:
In the Track Sales Order Details app, you can display the blocked actions on the item level for the above issues.
In the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues and Track Sales Orders apps, you can filter on the following specific sales order-related SAP GTS statuses:
Depending on your company's settings, certain follow-up actions (such as delivery creation or purchase requisition creation for sales orders, and goods issue for outbound deliveries) can be blocked.
Picture 5: Trade Compliance Issue in Sales Orders
With this new SAP Fiori app, you can analyze a pricing element, that is, a condition type in billing documents (for example, to check current discount conditions and pricing strategies). In the same way, you are also able to analyze a condition type with quantity and amount over sales organizations and other dimensions, by a freely definable quarter, for example, starting on 03.12.2021.
The app provides the prerequisites for answering the following business questions:
Figure 6: Drill down into pricing elements or condition types to analyze the elements affecting net prices, such as discount, price, and tax
The following enhancements have been made to the Pricing Elements - Flexible Analysis app:
In SAP S/4HANA is mandatory to activate the customer-vendor integration.
The customer-vendor integration keeps the business partner in sync with the classical customer/vendor master data, and the Business partner comes with additional features compared to the classical master data framework such as multiple addresses per business partner. However, SAP ERP applications such as SD or MM currently do not support multiple addresses.
Now with SAP S/4HANA 2021release, Sales Order will be enabled for multiple addresses and you can now use the benefits provided by the business partner.
Figure 7: Harmonization of master data for sales processes by having one single BP per legal entity (instead of having one BP per customer, per address)
With this set of features, you enable applications and documents across the sales process and beyond to consume parts of the SAP Business Partner data model that can provide multiple addresses with time-dependent validities and address-dependent data per BP master record. Note that enabling multiple address handling requires the activation of two separate business functions.
With multiple address handing, you can increase the flexibility and efficiency with which the system handles business partner addresses in applications and documents (for example, sales orders and billing documents) across sales and distribution (SD) and some other parts of the system (for example, settlement management).
When multiple address handling is not active, the system uses the standard customer master data model for SD, which can only store a single customer address per customer master record. A legal entity with N addresses is therefore typically maintained as N parallel customer master records assigned to the same number of N business partner (BP) master records. This in turn leads to data redundancies, because the same legal entity is often represented in the system multiple times, once for each physical address.
When multiple address handling is active and customer master data has been consolidated as required, SD applications can model and process the relationships between BPs and their addresses in a way that more closely reflects the real-world legal and physical realities, where a single legal entity can have multiple physical addresses. For data consolidation best practices, see the Master Data Guide and Master Data Migration Guide attached to SAP Note 3067314.
Applications and documents across SD can then consume multiple addresses and address-dependent data of the same business partner master record that is assigned to a single customer master record.
For more information, see SAP Help Portal here.
For the sales quantity contract, down payments can be requested via a billing plan. Upon release order creation, delivery blocks are assigned to schedule lines in the release order. Once the down payments are received, the delivery blocks are removed automatically. In the delivery-related final invoice of the release order, the received down payments for the quantity contract is deducted.
For the complete process flow and step-by-step instructions on down payment processing for sales contracts, see scope item I9I in SAP Best Practices Explorer.
Figure 8: Provide new end-to-end process of how to handle down payments on quantity contracts in SAP S/4HANA 2021
With SAP S/4HANA 2021 release, facilitated by the milestone billing plan, you can enable down payment processing for sales quantity contracts.
In sales quantity contracts, you can maintain milestone billing plans for items on the Billing Plan tab in the Change Sales Contracts app.
You can then create the down payment request, as well as the contract release order that is blocked from delivery until the customer pays the full amount of the required down payments. When full payment is posted for the down payment request, the system removes the delivery blocks on schedule lines. You can then process the contract release order for delivery and invoicing.
During billing, the system inserts down payments that have already been made into the billing document as items to be cleared. These down payment items are inserted underneath the billing items to which they refer. The down payment item value corresponds to the down payments already made.
Figure 9: Increase sales force efficiency by providing intuitive tools to process sales contracts with down payments
Based on the down payment status on the sales contract, the system determines whether to remove the delivery blocks for the down payment from the release orders. The Down Payment Status field indicates whether the customer has made a payment and if payment is fully made for the down payment request.
For more information on delivery block removal, see Delivery Block Removal for Sales Contracts in Down Payment Processing here.
In the integration with the Central Finance system, when down payment comes into the Central Finance system, the down payment status is updated in your SAP S/4HANA source system.
For more information, see SD Down Payment Status Transfer here.
Thanks for reading this blog post. Stay tuned!
If you are also interested in other Line of Business, I would like to draw your attention to my link collection blog – The Link Collection
If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community. This platform which is available to SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers and partners has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA 2021, check out the following links:
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @VoglerChrist and LinkedIn
In the last blog of this blog series, I will give you an engineering expert view of some selected highlights for sales monitoring and analytics of our SAP S/4HANA 2021 for Sales.
The blog is built as a series of 3 parts and present the key highlights for:
- Part 1: Low-Touch Sales Order Processing
- Part 2: Sales Billing and Sales Pricing; Claims, Returns, and Refund Management
- Part 3: Master Data Management; Sales Contract Management; Sales Monitoring and Analytics
To name just a few highlights that we have in store for master data management; sales contract management; sales monitoring and analytics:
- Business Partner: adoption of multiple and Time-Dependent addresses
- Down payment processing in sales quantity contracts
- Sales Order Fulfillment – Analyze and Resolve Issues
- Pricing Elements – Flexible analysis
- SAP Global Trade Service (GTS) in the Sales Order Fulfillment
- … and more.
Remark
All these innovations will also be available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.
Introduction: Sales Monitoring and Analytics
Sales monitoring and analytics provide monitoring and analytical features across all core sales business processes, from quotations and contracts to sales orders, including their fulfillment, up to invoices. It provides you with valuable insights and decision proposals in the form of insight to action, with seamless integration into transactional processes, sales documents, and collaboration tools like Chatbots:
- In the monitoring apps, you can check whether the delivery of a sales order is on track regarding its fulfillment and resolve issues that impede sales orders from being fulfilled.
- In the analytical apps, you can use Key Performance Indicators and flexible drill-downs to gain insights into your current sales situation, ranging from conversion rates of quotations and contracts to incoming sales orders and backorders to delivery performance and sales volume.
- You can use sales plans to enter target values and amounts for sales dimensions, such as sales employee and product category, and analyze them in comparison to the actual data.
Insight to Action
There are a number of steps in making a data-driven decision. Depending on who you are and where you are at in the process, you may start on any point of the continuum. You may start with a question that needs answering, or you may have received an alert that prompts you to investigate. Then you analyze what’s happening, you predict what’s likely to happen next, and you plan accordingly. Plans lead to action, and then you report on results.
Picture 1: Decision making is a collaborative process
In order to serve the needs of all types of decision-makers in an organization, and analytics solution needs to have all these capabilities. If not, the result is a lack of evaluating alternatives, understanding risk, and constraints, and prescribing the right next best action.
Sales Order Fulfillment – Analyze and Resolve Issues
This app allows you to analyze and resolve issues that impede sales orders from being fulfilled. With it, you can analyze sales orders in critical stages, collaborate with contacts, and efficiently address issues to ensure that sales orders in critical stages are fulfilled as quickly as possible. The app highlights impediments provide supporting information and allow you to navigate to Track Sales Order Details to display further details and resolve the issues.
Video 1: Working with Analytical List Page apps: This app is built by using Analytical List Page (ALP). Watch the video to learn more about the general functions offered by ALP.
Remark
The Sales Order Fulfillment app and its corresponding tiles will be deleted from the SAP Fiori launchpad in SAP S/4HANA 2022.
The Sales Order Fulfillment app and its corresponding tiles have been replaced by the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues app. Please switch to this app as soon as possible.
Additional details:
The corresponding tiles will be deleted in SAP S/4HANA 2022:
- Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze Issues
- Sales Order Fulfillment - Resolve Issues
- Sales Order Fulfillment - Issues in Next 7 Days
- Sales Order Fulfillment - Resolve Incomplete Data
- Sales Order Fulfillment - Resolve Delivery Block
- Sales Order Fulfillment - Resolve Billing Block
- Sales Order Fulfillment - Resolve Credit Block
Approval Status and Approval Request Reason
The approval status and approval request reason are now displayed in the header section of sales documents (e.g. sales order, debit memo request) and sales order related issues.
This allows you to immediately see whether a sales document is in approval, which means that further processing of the sales document (including the creation of follow-up documents) is blocked.
Picture 2: Filter for Approval Status in Sales Monitoring apps
New Issue: Supply Issue in Sales Orders
This issue occurs if a purchase requisition has not yet been transformed into a purchase order in third-party processing (that is, the purchase order is missing for the sales order).
In third-party order processing, your company does not deliver the items requested by a customer. Instead, you pass the order along to a third-party vendor who then ships the goods directly to the customer and bills you. A sales order may consist partly or wholly of third-party items.
The product determines if a third-party vendor is necessary to fulfill the order. If such a product is entered in the sales order, a purchase order requisition on the schedule line is created.
In case the purchase order is not created from the purchase order requisition the Sales Order Fulfillment app triggers an issue (supply issue in sales order) to draw attention to the fact that the necessary purchase order is missing and the fulfillment of the sales order is pending.
Picture 3: Purchasing confirmation status on header and item level
You can filter on this issue in the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues app and also search for a specific purchasing confirmation status in the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues and Track Sales Orders apps to display a supply issue in sales orders.
You can display further details on the issue in the Track Sales Order Details app. You can display the purchasing confirmation status on the header and item level. You can also navigate to the purchase requisition from the schedule line details.
Navigation to Schedule Line for all Item Issues in Track Sales Order Details
It is now possible to navigate to the schedule lines for all item issues. Schedule line details can be displayed for the entire fulfillment process, for sales orders, and for issues.
Schedule line information such as requested and confirmed delivery quantities can be displayed.
Schedule line details can be displayed for the entire fulfillment process, for sales orders, and for all issues with items:
- Incomplete Data in Sales Orders
- Delivery Block in Sales Orders
- Billing Block in Sales Orders
- Delivery Issue in Sales Orders
- Unconfirmed Quantities in Sales Orders
- Trade Compliance Issue in Sales Orders
- Purchasing Issue in Supply
- Supply Issue in Sales Orders
Picture 4: Navigation to Schedule Lines
SAP Global Trade Services (SAP GTS)
Integration to SAP S/4HANA can now be used in the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues and Track Sales Orders apps.
The following issues (which were already available for trade compliance) are now also available for SAP GTS in the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues app. You can use these issues to display sales orders and deliveries that are blocked due to compliance management reasons in SAP GTS:
- Trade Compliance Issue in Sales Orders
- Trade Compliance Issue in Delivery
In the Track Sales Order Details app, you can display the blocked actions on the item level for the above issues.
In the Sales Order Fulfillment - Analyze and Resolve Issues and Track Sales Orders apps, you can filter on the following specific sales order-related SAP GTS statuses:
- Legal control status
- Embargo status
- Screening status
Depending on your company's settings, certain follow-up actions (such as delivery creation or purchase requisition creation for sales orders, and goods issue for outbound deliveries) can be blocked.
Picture 5: Trade Compliance Issue in Sales Orders
Pricing Elements - Flexible Analysis
With this new SAP Fiori app, you can analyze a pricing element, that is, a condition type in billing documents (for example, to check current discount conditions and pricing strategies). In the same way, you are also able to analyze a condition type with quantity and amount over sales organizations and other dimensions, by a freely definable quarter, for example, starting on 03.12.2021.
The app provides the prerequisites for answering the following business questions:
- How is a specific condition type distributed over my sales organizations in a specific quarter?
- Which pricing elements or condition types influence my sales volume by either lowering or increasing it?
- Is the current pricing strategy adequate?
- Are the current discount conditions adequate?
- Which elements, for example, discounts or price, affect my net price?
Figure 6: Drill down into pricing elements or condition types to analyze the elements affecting net prices, such as discount, price, and tax
The following enhancements have been made to the Pricing Elements - Flexible Analysis app:
- Multiple condition types: You can now filter on more than one condition type
- Mandatory filter on the number of evaluation days (the number of days counting back from the current date). This replaces the previous mandatory filter at the start of the quarter.
- Additional optional filters: You now have the option of filtering on the condition type, condition class, sales organization, distribution channel, division, and sales office.
Business Partner: Adoption of Multiple and Time-Dependent Addresses
Background
In SAP S/4HANA is mandatory to activate the customer-vendor integration.
The customer-vendor integration keeps the business partner in sync with the classical customer/vendor master data, and the Business partner comes with additional features compared to the classical master data framework such as multiple addresses per business partner. However, SAP ERP applications such as SD or MM currently do not support multiple addresses.
Now with SAP S/4HANA 2021release, Sales Order will be enabled for multiple addresses and you can now use the benefits provided by the business partner.
Figure 7: Harmonization of master data for sales processes by having one single BP per legal entity (instead of having one BP per customer, per address)
With this set of features, you enable applications and documents across the sales process and beyond to consume parts of the SAP Business Partner data model that can provide multiple addresses with time-dependent validities and address-dependent data per BP master record. Note that enabling multiple address handling requires the activation of two separate business functions.
Additional Details
With multiple address handing, you can increase the flexibility and efficiency with which the system handles business partner addresses in applications and documents (for example, sales orders and billing documents) across sales and distribution (SD) and some other parts of the system (for example, settlement management).
When multiple address handling is not active, the system uses the standard customer master data model for SD, which can only store a single customer address per customer master record. A legal entity with N addresses is therefore typically maintained as N parallel customer master records assigned to the same number of N business partner (BP) master records. This in turn leads to data redundancies, because the same legal entity is often represented in the system multiple times, once for each physical address.
When multiple address handling is active and customer master data has been consolidated as required, SD applications can model and process the relationships between BPs and their addresses in a way that more closely reflects the real-world legal and physical realities, where a single legal entity can have multiple physical addresses. For data consolidation best practices, see the Master Data Guide and Master Data Migration Guide attached to SAP Note 3067314.
Applications and documents across SD can then consume multiple addresses and address-dependent data of the same business partner master record that is assigned to a single customer master record.
For more information, see SAP Help Portal here.
Down payment processing in sales quantity contracts
For the sales quantity contract, down payments can be requested via a billing plan. Upon release order creation, delivery blocks are assigned to schedule lines in the release order. Once the down payments are received, the delivery blocks are removed automatically. In the delivery-related final invoice of the release order, the received down payments for the quantity contract is deducted.
For the complete process flow and step-by-step instructions on down payment processing for sales contracts, see scope item I9I in SAP Best Practices Explorer.
Figure 8: Provide new end-to-end process of how to handle down payments on quantity contracts in SAP S/4HANA 2021
With SAP S/4HANA 2021 release, facilitated by the milestone billing plan, you can enable down payment processing for sales quantity contracts.
In sales quantity contracts, you can maintain milestone billing plans for items on the Billing Plan tab in the Change Sales Contracts app.
You can then create the down payment request, as well as the contract release order that is blocked from delivery until the customer pays the full amount of the required down payments. When full payment is posted for the down payment request, the system removes the delivery blocks on schedule lines. You can then process the contract release order for delivery and invoicing.
During billing, the system inserts down payments that have already been made into the billing document as items to be cleared. These down payment items are inserted underneath the billing items to which they refer. The down payment item value corresponds to the down payments already made.
Figure 9: Increase sales force efficiency by providing intuitive tools to process sales contracts with down payments
Delivery Block Removal for Sales Contracts in Down Payment Processing
Based on the down payment status on the sales contract, the system determines whether to remove the delivery blocks for the down payment from the release orders. The Down Payment Status field indicates whether the customer has made a payment and if payment is fully made for the down payment request.
For more information on delivery block removal, see Delivery Block Removal for Sales Contracts in Down Payment Processing here.
Integration
In the integration with the Central Finance system, when down payment comes into the Central Finance system, the down payment status is updated in your SAP S/4HANA source system.
For more information, see SD Down Payment Status Transfer here.
Thanks for reading this blog post. Stay tuned!
If you are also interested in other Line of Business, I would like to draw your attention to my link collection blog – The Link Collection
If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community. This platform which is available to SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers and partners has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA 2021, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA release info: sap.com/s4hana
- SAP S/4HANA Community here
- The Link Collection for Sales here
- SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- Join the SAP S/4HANA Movement
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA here
- Help Portal Product Page here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @VoglerChrist and LinkedIn
- SAP Managed Tags:
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