Johan van Zijl

This marks the 15th year of Democracy and Commercial Mobile Phone Networks in South Africa. It seems that SAP has been oblivious to the development of the mobile phone and the proliferation of the humble SMS as a means of communication with customers.

SAP CRM has been around for about 10 years now, and is marketed as a best of breed CRM solution. Why then is there no support for sending or receiving of SMS’s in the Interaction Centre?

Atleast they still support Letters…

I recently had a requirement were a vendor had to be replicated as partner function from a CRM Sales Order to an SD Sales Order.

At first I thought there wasn’t going to be any problem as it seems this is fully supported by customizing. The mapping between partner functions in ERP and CRM can be maintained respectively as shown below. In my case I wanted to replicate a Carrier(Partner function SP in German…it displays as CR in English). Also, note that partner function

IMG: Customer Relationship Management -> Basic Functions -> Partner Processing -> Data Transfer -> Distribution of Partner Functions from SAP ECC into CRM

The above setting will cause partner function SP to be remapped to my new partner function ZR in CRM.

Next you must maintain the mapping from CRM, back to ERP. This table you must always maintain even if you only want to download partner functions as the download from ERP reads the upload table as well(…makes sense right?).

IMG: Customer Relationship Management -> Basic Functions -> Partner Processing -> Data Transfer -> Distribution of Partner Functions from CRM into SAP ECC

What is important to note is the last column which indicates that this is a vendor mapping, and you would think the system would take that into account when uploading/downloading the Sales Order.

Unfortunately this didn’t work, which then prompted a Notes Search which produced Note 1303575. The gist of the note is:

Symptom: Partners of the type “LI” are not supported in the CRM sales document.

Solution: There is none.

Now, lets recap a couple of things:

1. Vendors can be downloaded to CRM using Middleware as described in Note 883162.

2. BP Relationships for Vendors can be downloaded as per Note 975195.

3. Customizing indicates the partner function is a vendor, so why not just map to a vendor instead of a customer?

Lets just say I will reserve my opinion of on the above note.

Anyway the fix is relatively simple. You create an implementation of CRM_DATAEXCHG_BADI in SE19.

To upload the Vendor Partner Function to ERP implement the code below method crm_dataexch_after_bapi_fill.

Next to download the partner function implement the following code in method crm_dataexch_r3d_mbdoc_fill.

The text of the code is available here…hope it helps.

<-Updated 05.09.2009 – Corrected some errors in published code->

Despite the multitude of options available for loading data into SAP, it seems the stapler still remains popular…

SAP CRM 7.0 includes the first official release of IT Service Management delivered by SAP.

In the past ITIL compliance has always been a stumbling block in convincing companies that SAP CRM is an excellent platform on which to implement IT Service Management.

It is great news that Pink Elephant has now certified SAP CRM in 8 ITIL v3 processes, namely:

• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Knowledge Management
• Request Fulfilment
• Change Management
• Service and Asset Configuration
• Service Level Management
• Financial Management

The verification can be viewed here: https://www.pinkelephant.com/en-GB/ResourceCenter/PinkVerify/PinkVERIFYTools.htm

This an extremely poorly documented area in SAP CRM, here are some useful notes:

Note 847643 – Composite SAP Note: Configuration in CRM

Note 741586 – Working with a knowledge base

Note 659608 – Replication of configurable materials

Note 161660 – Product configuration on Mobile Sales client