About The New, New Automotive Dealer Portal
Did you know that SAP has developed a new and improved automotive dealer portal? It is part of the SAP Business Suite 7.0 and available through ERP 6.0 EhP4.
You may know that previously there was a so-called "dealer portal" by SAP?! Strictly speaking, the dealer portal comprised two release packages by SAP in the past years, named Discrete Industry Web Interface Di-Wi.
The first release, was shipped some time in 2001; it came with a hard coded layout and could only be copied (or modified) to adapt customer requirements. The second release, developed in model-view-controller-technique and BSP, was much simpler to implement and use. Many Business Add-Ins (BAdis) allowed a modification-free implementation, the copy or modification of the entire package became unnecessary.
But, was it really compelling? Wasn't this or that function missing? Weren't there useful features that every customer had to develop?
It's here - the THIRD Automotive Dealer Portal*, made by SAP
It is developed using the Web Dynpro for ABAP technology. Here's a glimpse:
Before I start stepping into the details of the new automotive dealer portal*, I will explain the purpose of it:
The Automotive Dealer Portal
The cooperation of dealers and importers focuses heavily on the areas of the vehicle supply chain, spare parts ordering and processing warranty claims. These collaborative processes are often done by sending documents with long lists of vehicles or spare parts order items. A real, on-line cooperation is often not available. Both participants, importers/wholesales and dealers have to keep each others' data and documents redundantly in separate systems and folders. This form of cooperation is ineffective and inefficient, without any value adds and is a particularly a good opportunity for many misunderstandings and errors.
A seamless integration of these business scenarios can be established through the automotive dealer portal. This automotive dealer portal is operated by the OEM, importer or wholesale organization as a web-frontend of their own SAP ERP solution for their retail network. The automotive dealer portal offers role-based and web-enabled user interfaces and functionality of the SAP Vehicle Management System, SAP ERP Sales & Distribution (SD) module and the SAP ERP Warranty module - tailored for dealers. Dealers require simple internet access and, if needed, a folder for downloaded files.
Three Basic Modules of the Automotive Dealer Portal
Vehicle Sales Management
The automotive dealer portal enables online access by dealers to the importer's/OEM's national sales center vehicle database. Dealers can search for vehicles, configure (using the SAP Internet and Pricing Configurator IPC) and order vehicles. Once a vehicle has been ordered, dealers can track the vehicle in real-time with no gaps in visibility until it's arrived at the dealer's yard and invoiced.
Spare Parts Sales
The purchase of spare parts from the manufacturer or distributor is easy as ordering a book on the web: search in the database of the distributor or catalog for parts, find and select, check for availability and requested delivery date. Save the order and track the order until parts delivery and invoicing.
Warranty Management
Instead of using e-mail technology with attached pre-formatted excel-lists and letters, the dealer portal enables the online creation or upload of (formatted) claim files to the importer/OEM's SAP ERP system. Entered and submitted claims processing progress can be tracked and incoming payments can be easily analyzed.
Where is it, the new automotive dealer portal?
As indicated at the beginning of this blog, it is part of the SAP Business Suite 7.0 and comes through ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack Four (Ehp4). More information about EhP4 is on the SAP Service Marketplace, login required).
Two business functions need to be activated to launch the full set of functionality:
- WTY-DP-1 is for Warranty Management
- AUTO-DP-1 includes Spare Parts Sales and Vehicle Sales Management. The requirement to activate this business function is an active DIMP Switch.
What's Next?
We - that's a team of experts from the IBU Automotive and the automotive dealer portal developers - are going to write a four blog sequence to introduce the new automotive dealer portal for you. Check for this blog periodically. The new blogs will be linked here, and also published via the SAP Blog (see category "Automotive")
- Automotive Dealer Portal: Vehicle Sales Management
- Automotive Dealer Portal: Spare Parts Sale
- Warranty Processing via the new Automotive Dealer Portal
- Behind the scenes - about the technology and adaptability of the new automotive dealer portal.
And while these blogs are in writing, here is the link to the new Dealer Portal documentation and SAP Ramp-Up Knowledge Transfer for ERP.
Stay tuned !
Best,
Ute
* "Dealer Portal" - a tiny little heads up: many people - including myself - use this term quite often, is indeed a universal term and more related to the combination of business functions as available in the SAP Enhancement Pack 4. Also, the previous package and releases - the Discrete Web Interface Di-Wi - was not truly a portal; they have provided business functionality that could have been integrated into the SAP Enterprise Portal or other complementary portals. However, don't waste your time with thinking about an alternative term, just be aware that the Dealer Portal is not a package or component by SAP - it is really just a term for combined business functions.
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