Configuring Sales Activities

Prioritize your tasks and maximize your productivity to get the most out of your day. With SAP's Activity Management, activities are highlighted for every customer interaction. 

As a business user, you can access the Activity Manager and the Task Manager from the main menu:

Using the Activity Manager

With the Activity Manager, you can:

• Manage appointments directly from Calendar.
• Prepare for upcoming appointments using Appointment Insights and Relationship Intelligence.
• Schedule both meetings and phone calls making scheduling events more user-friendly and consistent with other external applications.

Using the Task Manager

With the Task Manager, sales representatives:

• Can manage all tasks from an easy-to-use new Task Manager application.
• Can focus on active and overdue tasks with two separate task views, My Day and My Planned.
• Effortlessly use one-click task creation and completion.
• Perform action-oriented phone calls and email tasks using predefined leading actions.

As a prerequisite, administrators must create business roles for the business users responsible for making appointments, performing tasks, and using the calendar. Then the necessary business services must be assigned to these business roles.

These are the business services related to appointments, tasks, and calendars:

• appointmentservice to the business roles responsible for activating appointments.
• activitymanagementservice and appointmentservice to the business roles responsible for seeing a list view of appointments.
• taskservice to the business roles responsible for activating tasks.
• activitymanagementservice and taskservice to the business roles responsible for seeing a list view of tasks.
• calendarservice to the business roles that will need to use a calendar

Optionally, the administrator can also configure the following settings, if they aren't configured yet:

• For Tasks, the administrator can configure general settings and then task categories.
• For Appointments, the administrator can configure general settings, appointment categories, number range for appointment IDs, and the Party Schema, that is, the structure and organization of parties involved with appointments.
• For Calendar, the administrator can configure card colors, as well as working day calendars and holiday calendars for different countries or regions.

The current default duration when an appointment is created is one hour. The default category is set to Meeting, and the Priority is set to Urgent.

However, administrators can redefine the default settings when appointments are created by:

1. Navigating to the User Menu
2. Choosing Settings
3. Selecting All Settings
4. Finding the Appointments widget
5. Using the General Settings.

This provides administrators the flexibility to user's  default values to prepopulate business user's appointments

An administrator can create new appointment categories in addition to the default categories Meeting and Outbound Phone Call.

The administrator can configure a new number range for appointment IDs.

The number range comprises a distinct set of character strings and is employed to generate unique appointment IDs.

The party schema configuration determines the structure and organization of the parties involved in appointments. Parties can include individuals such as the organizer, or entities like owners, accounts, contacts, and other related entities associated with an appointment.

Through the party role assignment feature, administrators can define the relationships between parties, specify their roles, and outline the information that needs to be captured for each party. This configuration ensures that appointments accurately reflect the roles and responsibilities of all involved parties, enhancing the overall organization and efficiency of the process.

When configuring the party schema of appointments, the administrator can:

1. Activate or deactivate certain values.
2. Select which party role is mandatory.
3. Review the determination steps of each party role and activate or deactivate steps based on requirements.

Here, administrators can enable and set the default start dates and times of newly created tasks, enable and set the default reminder of a task, and configure the default category and priority of a task. 

• Users can maintain their own default settings to manage defaults in Task Create, Default filters for My Day and My Planned. This overrides the administrator defaults set in the system configuration.
• Sales representatives can customize the task manager as per their needs, using the defaults created by their administrators. 

The default reminder options are:

• No reminder
• 5 minutes
• 15 minutes
• 30 minutes
• 1 hour
• 2 hours before
• 4 hours before
• 1 day before

The default category options are:

• Text Message
• External Channel
• General Task
• Email
• Outbound Phone Call

The default priority options are:

• Immediate
• Urgent
• Normal
• Low

An administrator can add new default reminder options, categories, and priorities, if necessary.

The system comes with four default task categories, which can't be changed or deleted:

• External Channel
• General Task
• Outbound Phone Call
• Email

An administrator may need to add new task categories or change existing custom ones.

The administrator can link appointment priority entries with various colors. Additionally, sales representatives can personalize the colors of calendar card entries based on priority or category.

SAP Sales Cloud Version 2 offers enhanced flexibility by enabling administrators to configure custom working day and holiday calendars tailored to different countries or regions.

Administrators must assign the following business services to business roles that need to work with calendars:

• Global Calendar (sap.crm.service.calendarService) needs to be added to business roles to view appointments and visit days.
• Working Day Calendar (sap.crm.service.workingDayCalendarService) needs to be added to business roles that need to define and customize working day calendars for different countries and regions.
• Holiday Calendar (sap.crm.service.holidayCalendarService) needs to be added to business roles that need to define and customize holiday calendars for different countries and regions.
• The applications Calendar, Team Calendar, Working Day Calendars and Holiday Calendars must be enabled for all business users' roles that work with calendars (administration roles included).
• The application Calendar Administration must also be enabled for administration roles

Configuring a Working Day Calendar

To set up a Working Day Calendar, administrators must:   

1. Navigate to Working Day Calendar and select the plus button (Create).
2. Enter the Working Calendar Name, Working Calendar Code, Valid From year, and Valid To year.
3. Select the countries/regions and click Next.
4. Use the Working Day switch to select the working days.
5. Select the first day of the week and select Next.
6. Select the appropriate holiday calendar and then click Next.
7. Review the summary and click Finish to save the working day calendar.

Configuring a Holiday Calendar

To set up a Holiday Calendar, administrators must:   

1. Navigate to Holiday Calendars and select the plus button (Create).
2. Enter the Holiday Calendar Name, Holiday Calendar Code, Valid From year, and Valid To year.
3. Select holidays.
4. Review the summary and click Finish to save the holiday calendar.