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volker_vongloeden
Contributor
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About 1,5 years ago I described what you would typically monitor as part of an SAP CRM Sales process Best Practice: Business Process Monitoring for CRM Sales. As one of the most important key figures I highlighted the Sales Documents in status 'Error'. During different customer projects it was re-confirmed again and again that this key figure is very valuable but it was also detected that it is quite time-consuming and cumbersome to access every single document in order to figure out which errors occured.

During this development cycle for the new ST-A/PI 01Q we spend a lot of effort to simplify and speed-up the root cause analysis for our key figures. On SAP ERP side this meant new or enhanced key figures to evaluate exception messages from the delivery or billing due list log, that allow systematic exception analysis like never before (see my previous blogs New key figures: Analyzing/Monitoring exceptions during delivery due processing, New key figure: Analyzing/Monitoring exceptions during billing due processing and Enhanced key figures: Analyzing/monitoring SD invoices not transferred to FI. Similar effort was put into our CRM analysis capabilities. The new ST-A/PI 01Q can be downloaded via the SAP Service Marketplace http://service.sap.com/supporttools.

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An Order to Cash process might directly start in an SAP ERP system but can also begin in an SAP CRM system, e.g. when an inquiry, quotation or sales order is created in CRM before the respective document is replicated to SAP ERP. Experience shows that many CRM documents are created and saved although some data is still missing (e.g. no sales organization, distribution channel or ship-to-party was maintained). This missing information might lead to delays in processing of subsequent process steps (comparable to the incompletion log in SAP ERP).. In order to analyze those missing fields in SAP CRM you can use the following key figures (available for Business Process Analytics and Business Process Monitoing in SAP Solution Manager). You can find the new key figures in the setup environment at 

  • Application Area "Sales" > Exceptions in Sales Documents > Exceptions in Sales Documents
  • Application Area "Sales" > Exceptions in Bus. Activites/Tasks > Exceptions in Business Activities/Tasks
  • Application Area "Services" > Exceptions in Service Documents > Exceptions in Service Documents
  • Application Area "Services" > Exceptions in Bus. Activites/Tasks > Exceptions in Business Activities/Tasks

The field Business Transaction Category is mandatory to fill on the selection screen. In the Order to Cash case you would typically select BUS2000115 for Sales Order / Quotation / Inquiry but other categories for Sales Contract, Lead, Opportunity, Financing Contract or Complaint exist as well as F4- value help. The result list tells you immediately the User Status of the respective document and also lists you all exceptions (Exception Text) that belong to each document (split by header and item data).

Example screenshot

An example detail list for "Exceptions in Sales Documents" could look as follows

Further reading

Frequently Asked Questions about Business Process Monitoring and Business Process Analytics are answered at http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM/FAQ+Business+Process+Monitoring and

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM/FAQ+Business+Process+Analytics respectively.

The following blogs (in chronological order) provide further details about Business Process Analytics and Monitoring functionalities within the SAP Solution Manager.