Last week, we pub­lished the first part of our con­ver­sa­tion with Chris­t­ian van Helfteren, author of the SAP Press book ​“Con­fig­ur­ing Sales in SAP S/4HANA.” In this sec­ond part, we exam­ine how SAP S/4HANA users can lever­age SAP Fiori apps to bol­ster their sales process­es, and van Helfteren dis­cuss­es how users can make use of automation. 

ASUG: How can cus­tomers lever­age automa­tion as it applies to the evo­lu­tion of sales con­tracts in SAP S/4HANA?

Chris: Tra­di­tion­al sales con­tracts have been around in SAP for a long time and are still avail­able with no major changes, but SAP S/4HANA has a new fea­ture called Sales Con­di­tion Con­tracts. These doc­u­ments eval­u­ate the busi­ness done with cus­tomers and allow you to auto­mate actions. This is sim­i­lar to what the sales rebate agree­ment used to do, but more pow­er­ful and flexible.

Although Con­di­tion Con­tracts are not just for rebates, the Sales Rebates Agree­ment func­tion­al­i­ty is grad­u­al­ly being phased out as of SAP S/4HANA ver­sion 2020, so com­pa­nies are very inter­est­ed in using Con­di­tion Con­tracts for sales rebates. For exam­ple, if the cus­tomer spends a cer­tain amount of dol­lars with us in a month, we can make them eli­gi­ble for a 10% dis­count, but only if they reach the tar­get by the end of the month. You could have a con­di­tion con­tract look­ing back at all the pur­chas­es you made over the month, cal­cu­lat­ing the total amount, and then decid­ing how much of that sale — if any — the cus­tomer will get back.

Sales Con­di­tion Con­tracts are an evo­lu­tion of both sales rebate agree­ments and con­tracts. They are based on Pur­chas­ing Con­di­tion Con­tracts, which have been around for some time. We can now use fea­tures that are unlike any­thing else on the sales mod­ule, such as busi­ness vol­ume selec­tion cri­te­ria, set­tle­ment cal­en­dar, delta accru­als, and par­tial set­tle­ments. That’s a big change from sales rebates, with great advan­tages. Since Sales Con­di­tion Con­tracts are dynam­ic, you don’t have the impact on the orig­i­nal invoice pric­ing pro­ce­dure. For retroac­tive rebates, you won’t have to go back and inter­fere with how that orig­i­nal invoice was issued to dic­tate how much of that cor­re­sponds to the rebate. 

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ASUG: Let’s move now to the SAP S/4HANA sales order man­age­ment fea­ture. Can you tell me a lit­tle bit about what it is and how it can effec­tive­ly be used?

Chris: Every time you talk about order-to-cash, the first thing that comes to mind is how you enter your orders. You want to bring those cus­tomer requests into your sys­tem and man­age the process as it may con­trol your pro­duc­tion, pur­chas­ing, and cred­it man­age­ment. When using SAP S/4HANA, one of the main advan­tages of the solu­tion is that you still have all the func­tion­al­i­ty that you used to have on SAP ECC. Now you can lever­age new func­tion­al­i­ty like the SAP Fiori apps. They have a more for­ward-think­ing design because they are more in line with the apps you have on your phone. The apps give you what you want right off the bat before we even asked for it. In oth­er words, you see the total amount of orders that you have in place right on the app tile before you even opened the app. 

ASUG: Can you give us an overview of what sort of func­tion­al­i­ties SAP S/4HANA has for billing and invoicing?

Chris: Com­pared to the typ­i­cal billing invoic­ing pro­ce­dures in oth­er sys­tems, some­thing that comes as a sur­prise to a lot of com­pa­nies when imple­ment­ing SAP S/4HANA is how much of the invoic­ing details are defined at the time of order entry. The invoice is a con­cern through­out the process, resolv­ing issues before they ever man­i­fest them­selves. This reduces the time it takes to issue invoic­es and finan­cial month-end clos­ing processes.

There are also fea­tures like billing plan func­tion­al­i­ty that will issue invoic­es based on events or sched­ules. They’re often used to imple­ment down-pay­ments, where you can charge the cus­tomer upfront, for instance, when sell­ing a cus­tomiz­able prod­uct. If you’re going to cus­tomize a prod­uct with the customer’s logo, you may want to have 100% or less of the total price of sale col­lect­ed before apply­ing the logo. That’s some­thing that can be enabled with a billing plan.

Some­thing else billing-relat­ed that com­pa­nies always have to con­sid­er nowa­days is the rev­enue account­ing recog­ni­tion com­po­nent (RAR). With SAP S/4HANA you have the RAR and you can start using more com­plex rules and automa­tion, defin­ing when you’re going to rec­og­nize that that sale effec­tive­ly took place and how it cor­re­sponds to rev­enue. This is impor­tant in order for you to report accu­rate num­bers to your stake­hold­ers. There are a num­ber of obser­va­tions you need to make before you can report rev­enue as such. This became a Gen­er­al­ly Accept­ed Account­ing Prin­ci­ples (GAAP) con­cern after some com­pa­nies report­ed rev­enue in advance to inflate their sales results. Now, nobody wants to fol­low that path and audi­tors are there to make sure you don’t. With RAR you have the tools to do so in a more auto­mat­ed fash­ion. RAR auto­mates the rules and once in place all we need to do is fol­low them. 

ASUG: What are some ways users can use SAP S/4HANA to han­dle cus­tomer com­plaints and feedback?

Chris: SAP S/4HANA has an improved advanced returns fea­ture. With pre­vi­ous ver­sions, the cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive had a com­plex and lim­it­ed range of options to address and cap­ture cus­tomer feed­back dur­ing the process of request­ing a return, often result­ing in incon­sis­ten­cies. Should I do a return first? Should I wait for the prod­uct to come back before I take action?

With advanced returns, you can record the expect­ed actions to be tak­en based on cus­tomer com­plaints in a sin­gle trans­ac­tion with a lot more flex­i­bil­i­ty and trace­abil­i­ty. In SAP S/4HANA, that’s work­ing quite well. Many com­pa­nies mak­ing use of it are very hap­py with it.

ASUG: What are some of the report­ing and sales ana­lyt­ics that SAP S/4HANA users have access to?

Chris: SAP Fiori pro­vides out-of-the-box on-time ana­lyt­i­cal reports that are very appeal­ing. For com­pa­nies con­sid­er­ing imple­ment­ing SAP S/4HANA, this is one of the things that attracts them the most to the sys­tem. Still, a lot of com­pa­nies are slow to adopt SAP Fiori, espe­cial­ly if they’ve been used to graph­i­cal user inter­face (GUI) for many years. It’s not as sim­ple as one would wish to just turn it on and start using it. You have to do some work to cus­tomize the launch­pads to match what the users uti­lize the most and make it very acces­si­ble to them, it is more detailed than just secu­ri­ty pro­files. On-time, high-per­for­mance ana­lyt­ics are usu­al­ly an impor­tant moti­vat­ing fac­tor to under­take this task.

ASUG: What do you want read­ers to be able to take away from your book? 

Chris: This book was writ­ten to help com­pa­nies that are imple­ment­ing SAP S/4HANA in a green­field-type envi­ron­ment. Green­field is a term that we use when you have a com­pa­ny that is new to the SAP Suite or prod­ucts. I did spend quite a bit of time in this book explain­ing all func­tion­al­i­ty keep­ing in mind that some com­pa­nies are see­ing SAP Suite for the first time.

At the same time, you can use the book as a ref­er­ence in oth­er types of envi­ron­ments, such as SAP ECC upgrades. Even though it’s not a step-by-step guide for an upgrade, you would want to know how cer­tain fea­tures work, for that you can cer­tain­ly use the book. The upcom­ing sec­ond edi­tion has even more details per­tain­ing to Customer/​Vendor Inte­gra­tion to Busi­ness Part­ner (CVI), which is only a con­cern for upgrade project envi­ron­ments (also known as brownfield).

The main goal for the infor­ma­tion in the book is not only for fel­low IT resources to learn con­fig­u­ra­tion, but also to help out peo­ple in the busi­ness, in spe­cial key-users. Busi­ness­es want to know what’s going on behind the scenes when they look at SAP trans­ac­tions. By attach­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion after each busi­ness trans­ac­tion, we get a clear sense of how involved the process is and how flex­i­ble it can be. The book shows behind the scenes how to cus­tomize the user-fac­ing transactions.

The sec­ond edi­tion has over 100 addi­tion­al pages of brand-new con­tent. The busi­ness part­ner and set­tle­ment man­age­ment (Con­di­tion Con­tract Man­age­ment) chap­ters were expand­ed a lot, all screen­shots were updat­ed with both SAP GUI and SAP Fiori upgrades for SAP S/4HANA ver­sions 1909 and 2020.

You pur­chase ​“Con­fig­ur­ing Sales in SAP S/4HANA” from SAP Press here.