Accounting Interaction Center: a new flavor of the CRM Interaction Center and Financials Shared Services
The interaction center is a widely used part of the SAP CRM product. SAP customers are covering all sorts of inbound and outbound contacts in their interaction centers to handle customer facing processes like sales, service and marketing.
In addition, the CRM interaction center is also extensively used for internal help desks such as IT service desks and HR help desks (also known as employee interaction centers). Some customers lately decided to use the interaction center for internal and external accounting help desks ("accounting interactioncCenter") - as part of their financials shared service strategy.
Learnings from these projects have been gathered and made available in a new How to guide on accounting interaction centers. The document is actually split up into two separate sections – a whitepaper and a cookbook:
AIC Whitepaper:
The first section is provided by Bernhard Fischer (SAP ERP product management) who is leading SAP’s thoughts in the area of shared service in general - offering strategic considerations on the accounting interaction center (AIC).
The AIC is introduced focusing for example on cost, quality and risk optimization strategies as well as communication technology. The contribution to the financials shared service strategy of a company is explained and the importance of the interaction center as a key building block for multifunctional shared service is described. AIC and self services are described as two synergistic routes towards excellent service.
AIC Cookbook:
The cookbook section provides hands on technical recommendations on how to implement the AIC in the SAP business suite. It was written as a joint effort by SAP consultants who gathered enhancements they had implemented in different customer projects. Enhancements are described that allow replication of accounting specific attributes like the company code as part of the partner replication (customers and vendors) and how to implement a company code based partner search in the interaction center. In addition it gives examples on how accounting help desk processes using ERP financials processes can be integrated with the AIC. Here typically the transaction launcher technique of the CRM interaction center is used – and the required steps on both sides (CRM and ERP) are provided in detail.
Combined this information can be useful for shared service center projects providing input both during the evaluation of business goals and strategies and during the actual implementation of processes in the SAP systems.
Please Note:
the original document is stored on the SAP service marketplace so executing the above link requires access to the SAP service marketplace.
