Innovative sales processes for satisfied customers
Strengthen your sales force and get it fit for the future: SAP S/4HANA on-premise or in the cloud solutions support the sales process from lead to order processing and payment. You can only meet today’s growing customer expectations along the customer journey and remain competitive with digitized and automated processes.
Inspire and retain customers
Purchasing behavior has changed considerably in recent years: Online information is important, as are personalized products and short delivery times. This change not only affects B2C but also B2B. Solutions are needed throughout the sales process, which increase efficiency and speed, and guarantee a unique shopping experience.
Companies who have already switched to SAP S/4HANA benefit from numerous opportunities to speed up the sales processes – from pre-sales to contract management, billing and after-sales. Many process steps can be automated across all sales channels. This saves time, leads to satisfied customers and strengthens customer loyalty.
Our sales experts will find the right solution for you. They support you with in-depth expertise and experience in different requirements:
- Customer order management: Streamline the entire order management cycle from creation to completion, ensuring orders, prices and discounts are handled effectively.
- Pricing and invoicing: Use SAP’s pricing and conditioning techniques for accurate invoicing.
- Credit management: Benefit from reliable credit management within SAP. Effective customer credit control minimizes risk and ensures healthy cash flow.
- Shipping and transport: With SAP’s shipping and transport functions, you increase the efficiency of your logistics from planning to delivery.
- External trade and export management: With SAP, you manage your global trading processes as well as guaranteeing that regulations are adhered to and international sales and customs formalities are handled efficiently.
- Customer and material master data management: With our expertise in managing customer and product data within SAP, you can depend on reliable and consistent data in the sales processes.
- Reporting and analysis: With SAP’s analysis tools, you get insightful sales reports – the ideal basis for informed decisions.
Special requirements call for special solutions. SAP S/4HANA opens up a wide range of possibilities to optimize processes. Our consultation focuses on a few key points:
Advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP)
Is the right material available for an order? At what plant and in sufficient quantity? Advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP) is a business function in SAP S/4HANA that provides a response to sales and production planning requests. The order fulfillment request consists of the required material, plant, requested quantity, and material availability date. The response to the request is based on the current stock situation and any future, anticipated or planned stock receipts and considers concurrent orders, as the function works with real-time stock data. The ATP function generates confirmation proposals for the requested material and plant, including confirmed quantities and dates.
This aATP function offers many ways to tailor the availability check to company needs. It ensures that the requirements are always met by stocks or material receipts and improves stock transparency and the accuracy of the order promise – for reliable delivery dates and an optimal order fulfilment process. Some of the key features of aATP include:
You can use the Product Availability Check (PAC) in SAP S/4HANA to determine on which date and in which quantities a product is available, or, if there is a quota by customer group, the maximum amount of material a customer can receive. The result of the product availability check is confirmation for the user.
In many cases, companies want to reserve certain quantities for special groups and also assign priorities to these groups. Supply protection is used to protect a group against the demand of other groups. It can be used to define objects at material/plant level, such as a region where quantities are reserved and the demands are prioritized for its customer groups or other groups. Quantities can now be reserved for future periods in much more detail than before.
Sales order requirements consist of various attributes, the most important being a requested product in a specific quantity, a requested delivering plant, and a requested delivery date. You can use Alternative-Based Confirmation (ABC) to calculate possible alternatives when, for example, the availability of a product at a requested delivering plant is insufficient to confirm the original sales order requirement by the requested delivery date. This improves the confirmation of a sales order requirement.
This function distributes limited quantities of material available to unconfirmed sales and transfer orders. To do this, it divides orders into groups with different priorities, automatically choosing the group with the highest priority. The user can specify the order in which the quantity should be selected and sorted.
BOP also helps withdraw and redistribute materials in the case of already confirmed orders or transfers. This may be the case, for example, when pallets fall off the shelf or when stock being dispatched. This cancels any previously made confirmations.
In addition to the apps for Backorder Processing (BOP) for automating the distribution of materials with limited availability, you can use this function to manually post-process due order documents for materials with limited availability. This enables you to view the material availability and assess the potential financial impact of being unable to fulfill an order. This can prevent expensive cancellation and rollback activities that may occur if last-minute high priority orders come in, causing conflicts for materials which quantities are limited for.
Efficient and transparent return process with SAP Advanced Returns Management (ARM)
A transparent returns process strengthens customer confidence. However, the process is often complex because different departments are involved and there are different approval levels to accept or reject a return request. Advanced Returns Management (ARM) integrates all steps from creating an order to audit management and creating a credit memo into an end-to-end process. It makes any kind of returns simple and transparent. You can use the tool to process both customer and supplier returns. The integration of customer and supplier systems on a digital platform ensures a faster, more transparent and more efficient returns process. ARM on SAP S/4HANA offers some new features:
Returns overview
The complete returns process and the status of all process steps is visible on a single screen window.
Material inspection
The Quality Control department inspects the returned items. Employees can record the results of customer returns directly in the return order or, for supplier returns, in the “Material Inspection” application in the warehouse. The result of the inspection determines the follow-up action in the returns process.
Definition of logistical follow-up action
You can define a specific action plan to follow during the returns process. This may include, for example, transporting goods to other locations, such as suppliers, customers or other warehouses.
Automatic creation of follow-on documents
The system automatically creates follow-on documents to track the logistics process and control the refund.
Return
Pre-defined return or refund policies help speed up the process. ARM can also be used to determine the percentage or amount of the refunded value. It also provides the flexibility to add charges for damaged goods or additional services such as repackaging goods.
Integration with EWM
ARM can also be integrated into SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) to improve the processing of goods, making handling returned material more efficient.
Optimize transportation with SAP LE-TRA/SAP TM
Bundling shipments by ship, truck or train, communicating with the carrier, printing loading lists or accounting for freight costs – SAP LE-TRA supports transportation planning, processing and billing processes. This relatively streamlined tool is very suitable for companies with a smaller fleet without a large shipping department.
The abbreviation LE-TRA stands for the logistics transport solution (TRA), which is integrated under SAP ECC within Logistics Execution (LE). LE-TRA is also available under SAP S/4HANA, but the right of use expires on December 31, 2030.
SAP is offering a more than adequate replacement with the SAP S/4HANA version 1709 Transportation Management (TM) Basic Shipping as the new transport software. It covers the core functions of LE-TRA, but can do even more: All business processes can be fully integrated into EMW, the data is available in real time and the resulting information is presented transparently.
Users can easily operate SAP TM using the Transportation Cockpit – a FIORI Launchpad app that provides a transparent overview of planned, current and completed tours in real time. Users with responsibility for transportation always have a full overview of all freight orders and can quickly react to disruptions and reschedule tours.
With SAP TM, you ensure that your delivery and transport operations are equipped with the latest technology. This is particularly important for companies that rely on efficient, timely and reliable logistical processes.
Automatically correct recycling with SAP Recycling Administration (REA)
Whether it’s packaging, old electronic devices or batteries – the fees for recycling can be determined automatically and billed conveniently. And naturally in compliance with the law, according to EU guidelines and legal regulations in the respective countries, as well as in accordance with recycling partner requirements based on master data and movement data. This is the strength of SAP Recycling Administration (SAP REA).
The focus of SAP REA is the item-based or weight-based fee calculation for specific materials, as well as end-to-end transparency and implementation of the legal reporting requirements to environmental authorities. It also enables accurate reporting, for example with recycling partners or compliance schemes, and supports you with functions that analyze costs. Ultimately, REA helps reduce the costs of recycling management and take projected recycling fees into account in the price calculation.
Commission settlement and bonus agreements using Condition Contract Management (CCM)
Sales and purchasing often enter into commission and bonus agreements with their business partners. Complex contracts based on various factors such as the turnover of goods purchased or sold are common, especially in the food and beverage industry. Monitoring these contracts and ensuring that all parties meet the terms and conditions and that agreed commission and bonuses are applied correctly is time consuming and prone to errors.
With Condition Contract Management (CCM) for SAP S/4HANA, previously known as Condition Contract Settlement (CCS), SAP offers a powerful and intelligent solution to map, manage and account for retrospective payments such as commission and bonuses – and provides real-time insight. All condition contracts can be stored and managed in one place using the tool. SAP CCM is part of settlement management in SAP S/4HANA. Anyone who has previously used CCS must switch to CCM under SAP S/4HANA; it can be installed and customized in SAP S/4HANA with relatively little effort.
CCM makes the condition contract management process much faster and easier. Even complex contracts remain clear and understandable. This improves business relationships and contributes to business success.
Users can file all contracts and manage various billing dates in SAP CCM. It calculates the commission claims and displays the level of the provisions. You can choose whether the commission is paid directly or monthly. If monthly provisions are created and booked provisions are subsequently reversed, SAP CCM automatically adjusts the provisions to the annual revenue. This avoids incorrect billing.
Incorrect payments or chaotic Excel spreadsheets are just a few examples of the problems that may arise when managing bonus agreements. SAP CCM enables companies to efficiently handle sales bonuses for customers or suppliers. Billing is automated, accurate and transparent. In addition, sales can be combined across multiple invoices. The tool also takes tiered sales bonuses into account, which simplifies the complex process even more.
Promotions are the most common form of rebates or discounts in the food retail sector. These are included in the category of deferred discounts. They generally require a great deal of administration – it is not uncommon to have one million items for invoices as a result of promotions. SAP CCM is a useful tool that maps, manages, and greatly simplifies these agreements.
CCM also helps when invoice conditions are already integrated into an invoice, such as a deduction of several percent. If the invoice for the full amount is to be compiled without deduction, provisions are automatically created and then reversed properly.
The tool also provides reports – for a clear overview of the bonus provisions and accounting activities. Reports can be provided for the validation and processing of bonus arrangements.
Integration with SAP Commerce Cloud
The dynamics on today’s markets and wide range of requirements from customers, for example, for personalized products, fast delivery and uncomplicated returns, pose particular challenges for online retail. One flexible solution is SAP Commerce Cloud, formerly Hybris, one of the leading cloud-based e-commerce platforms.
The solution covers the requirements of both B2B and B2C companies and accompanies customers through their customer journey from research to purchase, payment and delivery. It can also be used to collect and manage vast amounts of customer information. SAP Commerce Cloud is part of SAP’s Customer Experience Solutions software portfolio and combines the customer journey’s digital and physical touchpoints on a single platform.
The special advantage of the solution is the seamless integration of all systems: SAP Commerce Cloud can be connected directly to an ERP system such as SAP S/4HANA. Thanks to a BAPI (Business Application Programming Interface) interface, this direct connection allows you to compare the master data for materials, customers or prices and discounts in real time. So the real-time price is calculated every time the shopping cart is updated.
Our consolut experts specialize in connecting SAP Commerce Cloud to SAP S/4HANA. This includes inbound and outbound functions: An order is generated directly in SAP S/4HANA for each customer order from the web shop, and inbound monitoring is created in SAP S/4HANA. In addition to this inbound function, status information, such as confirmations or billing, goes back to SAP Commerce Cloud (outbound) from SAP S/4HANA via an IDoc interface. These are integrated into the Document Management System (DMS). If an order that has not yet been invoiced is changed in SAP, this will be displayed on the website and in the order history. The customer can view their entire order and invoice history. These are just a few examples of functions that enable connection to SAP S/4HANA.
With SAP Commerce Cloud, you gain a real competitive edge. The solution significantly improves the efficiency and responsiveness of online sales channels.
SAP Commerce Cloud benefits
The omni-channel solution enables companies to create unique shopping experiences.
SAP Commerce Cloud is suitable for both B2B and B2C and other business models. All the important functions from purchasing to order management and returns processing are integrated on one platform.
SAP Commerce Cloud can be integrated into other systems such as an ERP and extended with add-ons.
Real-time data such as the current price and personalization help generate more revenue.
Our approach
We conduct a thorough analysis or joint workshop to determine which solution is right for your business. Because every process is different and every company has different requirements.
We specialize in optimizing your business processes using SAP S/4HANA innovations. Use the efficient data model to process your sales data quickly and efficiently, as well as modern, user-friendly Fiori apps that can be operated intuitively. With our help, you simplify your order management and enhance the efficiency of your sales and distribution processes.
We are not only experienced in purchasing and procurement, but also cover the entire range of SAP business knowledge – from finance to sales and supply chain management. At the same time, we incorporate our many years of experience from projects for manufacturing companies in a wide range of industries.
We are glad to help.
Do you need support with sales? You are welcome to contact us!
