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SAP Solution Brief

SAP ERP

SALES ORDER
MANAGEMENT
The success of your sales orga-

Maximize Profit, Reduce Sales Order Operating

nization depends on its ability to

Costs, and Increase Customer Satisfaction

achieve perfect order management, and a gain in order performance can improve significantly
profit margin. To achieve this,
sales organizations must be
equipped to be both efficient

Effective organizations do more than just meet revenue targets;


they find new ways to achieve their goals while ensuring that
sales departments remain focused on activities that strengthen
profitable relationships. To remain successful, your sales professionals need answers for simple as well as complex requirements
answers that proactively address customer needs and guard
against competitive threats by demonstrating that doing business
with your organization is always easiest.

and effective in their actions to


satisfy the customer. SAP software provides the most complete
and flexible solution to achieve
top order management performance with excellent customer
satisfaction.

The SAP ERP application provides a complete and flexible sales


order management solution that meets these requirements for
organizations in all industries, of all sizes, and across all sales
channels. The functionality facilitates the use of profitable sales
and interaction channels, reduces administrative costs by automating sales order management, and ensures high customer satisfaction by delivering accurate and timely information to
customers.
A Complete Solution to Optimize Your Order-To-Cash
Process

SAP ERP provides your business with many powerful functions,


including the following:
Account management A holistic view of the customer
keeps your staff on the same page. You have that holistic view
because the functions in SAP ERP let you capture, monitor,
store, and track all critical information about customers and
prospects. As a result, your sales professionals have at-a-glance
visibility into key contacts, critical relationships, and the
up-to-date status of recent transactions as well as a complete
history of each account.

E-commerce SAP ERP provides e-commerce functionality


that gives your business the means to exploit the Internet as a
profitable sales and interaction channel. You receive all the
functions you need to set up catalog browsing, a product
search, and shopping basket options including saving, retrieving, and check-out functions, not to mention order status and
order history features. This e-commerce functionality means
you can promote business-to-business and business-to-consumer selling scenarios over the Internet, selling your products while significantly reducing the operating cost of sales. In
addition, you have functions for a complete auction-to-cash
process, allowing your company to sell excess inventory and
remarket idle assets by leveraging online communities such as
eBay.
Quotation and order management To ensure superior
and consistent customer service, SAP ERP provides comprehensive functionality to generate quotes and proposals, manage low- to high-volume customer orders, handle credit management checks, check product availability, and track orders.
Because the software integrates with your financials and supply chain operations from manufacturing and distribution to
service your complete end-to-end order-to-cash process becomes automated and streamlined. The software supports industry-specific order entry processes with dedicated screens. It
also has an intuitive, interactive assistant that guides sales professionals through their sales processes, which can get involved
for complex products with multiple options. SAP ERP provides
pricing and component availability to ensure that the products
sold fully meet the customers requirements. And because the
software takes into account customer-specific information
such as contracts, sales professionals can automatically calculate prices specifically for individual customers. The sales professionals can handle credit checks, invoices, and process payments themselves and view all billing information for their
customers. SAP ERP supports a wide range of process variants,
such as make to order, ship to order, engineer to order, batch
processing, returns, and many more.

Contract management and pricing SAP ERP allows users


to easily develop, verify, and submit value and quantity contracts tailored to fit an individual customers situation. The
software supports long-term agreements with customers, enabling them to buy products at special rates or with favorable
terms for delivery. Customers expect accurate, up-to-date pricing including current special quotes or contracts regardless
of the selling channel. With SAP ERP, you can execute pricing
strategies appropriate for each sales channel or customer based
on criteria you select. Pricing rules and data are maintained
centrally and distributed to sales professionals in the field. SAP
ERP handles overall price lists as well as promotional, customer-specific, rule-based, and contract pricing.
Billing The final sales processing stage the billing process
is fully automated, although information on billing is available
at each stage of order and delivery processing. Billing documents such as invoices and credit and debit memos can be created based solely on order information or based on both order
and delivery information. An example of the latter would be
when the quantity to be invoiced is derived from the delivery
note. During billing processing, you can create, change, and
delete billing documents. Because of seamless integration with
financial accounting, billing documents can be automatically
forwarded to financial accounting.
Incentive and commission management When structured
and implemented skillfully, incentive plans help attract, motivate, and retain the best sales professionals. In employing incentive compensation strategically for example, by aligning
the goals of your individual sales professionals with the goals of
the organization you can boost revenues and improve profitability. By developing, implementing, and managing compensation plans expertly, you can be sure of retaining your best
sales professionals and motivating them to succeed in an increasingly competitive market. SAP ERP plays an important
role in this area by enhancing your skills in developing attrac-

tive incentive compensation plans. At the same time, SAP ERP


gives sales professionals the means to track their performance
and measure potential compensation of sales in the pipeline.
Sales managers gain through improved visibility into their
overall team performance.
Reach of Sales Management Activities Extended
Through SAP NetWeaver Platform

The sales order functionality of SAP ERP is enriched by the SAP


NetWeaver platform. The platform extends the reach of sales order management activities in many areas through the following
components and tools:
Sales portals SAP ERP provides role-based portals that empower sales professionals and administrative sales staff to perform their daily tasks more efficiently. Whats more, you can
customize these portals to meet your staffs specific needs. Portals can improve the productivity of internal sales representatives by informing them of their current workload, of open
and expiring quotations, and about incomplete or deliveryblocked orders. As speed is critical in the area of customer service, the software provides a user-friendly interface for fast order entry.
Mobile sales Field sales professionals can access mission-critical information and processes from handheld devices and
smartphones. They can access up-to-date sales information to
review customer information, take sales orders via bar-code
scanning, modify or search sales orders, and view a complete
list of all materials.
Inbound telesales SAP ERP supports telesales through its
interaction center functionality and provides your customer
service representatives with all the resources they need all at
a significantly reduced cost.

Sales analytics and planning SAP ERP includes a rich offering of tools supporting sales analytics to help you monitor
the overall health of your business. Complete insight into your
business empowers you to create accurate forecasts, effectively
manage your budgets, properly allocate resources, and meet
your revenue goals. The application offers a variety of out-ofthe-box performance measurement tools for sales managers,
including incoming orders analysis, quotation success rate
analysis, and delivery analysis. In addition, you can build balanced scorecards and devise sales plans to translate company
targets into concrete, focused marketing, sales, and service
strategies. The planning process can be reconciled top-down
and bottom-up, thus increasing visibility and improving decision making for executives.
SAP ERP: Simplify, Optimize, Innovate

SAP is known for providing businesses like yours with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software needed to gain strategic
insight, increase productivity, and respond flexibly to changing
markets to compete better. SAP ERP software has been instrumental in increasing employee productivity and enabling informed decisions that set businesses apart from their competition. Yet the SAP ERP application demonstrates how the SAP
vision has broadened. Increasing efficiency within an organization is still of critical importance. However, SAPs concept for
ERP software has transcended the organizations walls to enable
automation of end-to-end business processes that extend to the
entire business ecosystem, including partners, suppliers, and
customers.

www.sap.com/contactsap

Powered by SAP NetWeaver

SAP ERP is powered by the SAP NetWeaver platform. SAP


NetWeaver unifies technology components into a single platform, allowing organizations to reduce IT complexity and
obtain more business value from their IT investments. It provides
the best way to integrate all systems running SAP or non-SAP
software.
SAP NetWeaver also helps organizations align IT with their
business. With SAP NetWeaver, organizations can compose and
enhance business solutions rapidly using enterprise services.
As the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture
(enterprise SOA), SAP NetWeaver allows organizations to evolve
their current IT landscapes into a strategic environment that
drives business change.
Find Out More

To learn more about how SAP ERP can help your organization,
call your SAP representative today or visit us on the Web at
www.sap.com/erp.

50 078 852 (07/03)

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