Marketing Funds Management: New CRM 7.0 EhP1 Functionality

[anik_roy]

I would like to share with you an interesting new functionality that's coming with CRM 7.0 EhP1... 

Marketing Funds Management improves budget control and spend visibility by leveraging all funds management functionalities in the marketing scenario.  It enables the establishment of marketing budgets and the direct tracking of funds consumed from campaigns, and related ERP purchase commitments and settlements, by integrating the existing CRM applications -- Campaign Management and Funds Management.

Marketing Funds Management is a cross-functional process involving finance, marketing and procurement functions. Here are the basic functionalities:

• Budgeting allows the multi-dimensional set up of funds by Marketing organization, Marketing plan and/or Product/Product category. It also enables budget transfers to support ad-hoc activities and quick reaction to market changes.
• Campaign Planning allows the assignment of funds to a campaign and the reservation of money according to planned campaign costs. It also supports seamless purchasing integration with ERP.
• Accruals & Consumptions are tracked in the fund checkbook allowing visibility into any cost overruns; Accruals can be calculated in CRM and posted to CRM and ERP. Purchasing commitments and settlements created in ERP are uploaded to CRM and tracked against the previously reserved campaign budget.
• Analytics are critical for brand managers and marketers to evaluate the performance of their marketing activities, track the status of their budget/spends and tie insight to action. Funds Analytics provide an aggregated view of funds in various contexts to provide visibility and enable marketers to quickly react and manage their budgets.

Here's an overview of the end-to-end process:

Some key benefits include the ability to:

• Track budgets closely and quickly shift money to support joint marketing initiatives, ad-hoc activities or to react to market changes.
• Increase spend visibility and Marketers' accountability to better control costs incurred by campaigns. 
   

The process can be broken down into three main areas as follows:

I created a VIDEO to demonstrate the main functionalities of Marketing Funds Management in the areas of Budgeting and Campaign Planning.

The video highlights the following:

1. Overview of marketing budgets set up through funds and budget transfer capabilities.
2. Funds consumption from campaigns -- reservations, commitments and settlements tracked through fund usages.
3. Creation of a campaign enabled for funds management integration -- showing the new user interface elements, association of funds at different levels, cost planning and campaign status driven fund postings.