Using SAP Smart Business for Sales Order Fulfillment

When using a traditional ERP system like SAP ERP 6.0, employees have to check multiple reports to get a holistic view of all process-related issues. Detecting multiple (often diverse) issues in one sales order usually means checking various transactions and reports for that sales order. This increases the risk of non detecting certain exceptional situations or detecting them late. It also increases complexity.

Within SAP S/4HANA Sales, internal sales representatives can analyze the current sales order fulfillment situation with one app. Eliminating the need of the above mentioned multiple transactions and reports. A prioritized list of sales orders that cannot be fulfilled, can for instance be displayed in order to focus on the most important items first. The Sales Order Fulfillment Issues app can be used to achieve this.

The Sales Order Fulfillment Issues app is an example of what is known in SAP S/4HANA as a Smart Business app.

The following demonstration will show you some functionality of the Sales Order Fulfillment Issues app:

SAP Smart Business provides tiles that can be assigned to tile groups on the SAP Fiori launchpad home page of a user. It can be used to easily identify exceptions using for example key performance indicator (KPI) visualizations that use semantic colors based on defined targets and thresholds.

SAP Smart Business also offers an app for easy configuration of for example new KPIs and their visual appearance. This app is called Manage KPIs and Reports and is available since SAP S/4HANA release 1909.

SAP Smart Business provides a different user experience and working model for internal sales representatives compared to working in SAP ERP. It provides:

• Role-based access to all relevant information like key performance indicators, news feeds, and specific tasks
• A different working model compared to SAP ERP, supporting end-to-end insight to action scenarios
• An easily adaptable user interface based on drag & drop capabilities and an extensive tile catalog
• A coherent and responsive user experience
• Color-coded visualization of violated thresholds
• An open framework with which customers and partners can define their own KPIs and integrate with collaboration and analytical tools or existing applications

As stated before, an example of an SAP Smart Business app is the Sales Order Fulfillment Issues app. With this app, sales orders can be analyzed and processed that are blocked due to various reasons. Examples include missing calculations, changed payment terms or manual billing blocks.

For these sales orders, the following options are available:

• Display header information and the list of blocked items
• Display details for each blocked item
• Contact an expert from Finance to clarify the billing blocking reason
• Remove the billing block on header level and/or item level
• Check and edit the payment terms on header and/or item level
• Navigate to the sales order to change it (transaction VA02)

With SAP Smart Business for Sales Order Fulfillment, the following types of issues can be analyzed and resolved:

• Incomplete data

• Unconfirmed quantities

• Billing blocks

• Delivery blocks in sales orders and other delivery related issues

• Blocks in deliveries and other shipping related issues in deliveries

• Billing issues and accounting issues for billing documents

• Issues concerning supply: related to purchase and/or production orders

The process flow has the following features:

• It provides a quick overview of a complete business process and shows the issues in the context of the related business objects.
• It gives a graphical overview of all documents, their relationships, and the document status.
• It allows resolving the issues directly from within the process flow itself.
• It indicates graphically the actual status of a document (red, green).
• It shows a colored circle with the overall status of the involved documents for each stage (In Order, In Supply, In Delivery and In Invoice).
• It changes from red to green once all issues are resolved.

In SAP S/4HANA, it is possible to define custom tiles and KPIs as part of SAP Smart Business.

When creating tiles, custom titles can be entered and filter criteria can be used to display specific information. An example: display the top three customers within a certain sales organization in a certain period.

The business user/key user requires the following roles to be able access the Manage KPIs and Reports app: SAP_BR_ANALYTICS_SPECIALIST.

The slide shows the relationships between the elements used when defining a Smart Business KPI and tile. See http://help.sap.com for more information concerning all elements that can be configured. For example: a new KPI can be created either from scratch or by using an existing KPI as a template. After defining the KPI, an evaluation can be defined (see slide).

Different tile formats are available for the creation of a new tile. Depending on the type of information that is the basis for the evaluation shown in the tile, an appropriate tile format needs to be selected. The graphic of the tile itself can then provide information about the evaluation, even before the user clicks on the tile to start the app.

When the tile has been created and assigned to a tile catalog, it can be added to the SAP Fiori launchpad home page (or a tile group available there) of the relevant user(s).