SAP ERP

Provides capabilities that companies can use to create inquiries and quotations, acquire and enter orders, configure products, determine pricing, check product availability, track and manage, and bill orders.

Further Information

Please visit the SAP Service Marketplace to get further information Sales Order Management within SAP ERP.

The order management capabilities allow sales reps to easily configure, price, and create sales orders for customers. In addition order management provides the ability to perform product determination and substitution, explode structured products in a business transaction to carry out pricing, availability checks, transferring those requirements to production or purchasing for either the header product or for the components of the product and to perform incompleteness checks.

Allows you to create and process orders, including pricing and scheduling order for fulfillment. SAP ERP supports many process variants, for example:

• Cash sales
• Ship-to-order
• Make-to-order
• Engineer-to-order
• Empties
• Batch processing
• Serial number processing
• Payment card processing
• Third-party delivery processing
• Complaint handling
• Returns
  

Inquiries
Allows you to create and process customer requests.

Quotations

Allows you to create and process quotations.

Follow-Up Order

Creates an order as follow-up document to the quotation. Copies the data from the quotation into the order and creates two transaction documents, quotation and order.

Automatic Partner Determination

Allows you to automatically determine the partners involved in the sales transaction, for example:

• Ship-to-party
• Bill-to-party
• Payer
• Contact person
• Employee responsible

Automatic Text Handling

Allows you to determine and maintain texts on header and item level.

Pricing & Tax

Allows you to automatically determine the different kinds of conditions, such as product-, customer- and contract- specific prices, free goods, surcharges, discharges, freights, taxes, etc.

Flexible Price Calculation:

Highly flexible engine to determine prices based on whatever criteria one might think of. (This needs to be part of the database.)

Price List:

Customer-specific price lists can be generated. 

Tax calculation within SAP ERP allows you to calculate transaction taxes, such as VAT in Europe. For complex requirements regarding tax determination in the United States, third-party software can be integrated.
 

Payment Card Processing

Works with payment cards, such as credit cards. Copies payment card information from customer master data in orders and other sales documents.

Credit Management and Credit Check

Limits financial risks by carrying out credit checks that can influence transaction processing and setting up a workflow connection to notify responsible.

Full Integration with Credit Management in SAP Accounting

Credit check evaluates a transaction based on the credit standing of the payer in financial accounting.
 

Product Listing & Exclusion

Displays a list of products a specific customer is allowed or not allowed to buy.

Product Substitution

Enables the automatic substitution of products in sales documents during sales order processing according to flexible, predefined rules.

Free Goods

Offers free items on the sale of certain other items or takes money off a particular sale to a customer.

Minimum Order Quantity Check

Checks the product level automatically to determine whether a minimum order quantity has been reached.

Product Configuration

Includes the configuration of a product, of which different variants are available (e.g., a PC, a car, or a printing machine).

The integration points provide you with a unique, low TCO:

• Is integrated with master data maintenance for configurable products.
• Enables available-to-promise checks per component.
• Is integrated with low-level manufacturing configuration.

Availability Check

Checks whether a product can be confirmed in a sales order. Depends on whether enough stock is available, can be produced, or purchased on time. The product is reserved in the required quantity, and available-to-promise (ATP) requirements are transferred to production or purchasing.

ATP Check

SAP ERP handles online availability check for sales order, including shipment and transportation scheduling, and the resulting information is transferred back to sales order.

Availability Information

Displays product availability for items in a sales transaction (e.g., quotation). The products are not reserved, and requirements are not transferred to production or purchasing.

Document Flow

Provides interlinkages of preceding and subsequent documents for a selected transaction (for example, production orders, deliveries, invoices, and complaints).

Commodity Management comprises the activities of purchasing, selling, trading, logistic and financial planning and execution of Commodities.

Companies, who need a commodity management solution are all companies that have to handle commodities in procurement, are selling commodities or that are trading commodities as such. The main difference between handling (exchange traded) commodities and other products, is the pricing: The pricing in commodity management is usually based on exchange noted prices. Physical buying or selling contracts can be either fixed (price is decided and fixed) or unfixed (price is not decided and based on a formula that again is based on exchange indices). Market risk exists in both cases: In the fixed contract case, because of the variance against the market, in the unfixed contract case, because of the price itself. If the contract is unfixed, an agreement towards a calculation rule is in place. The calculation rule is usually based on either the market price of the commodity, an average over a specified period of the market prices of the commodity or an index.

• Usually classes of commodities are distinguished:
• Agricultural products
                  - Grain
                  - Soft commodities: coffee, cotton and sugar
                  - Citrus and orange juice
                  - Livestock
                  - others
• Metals
• Oil & Gas
• Electricity
• Coal, emissions and weather

The front office comprises those activities that interface to the outside word, in our case the activities carried out by the dealer, the normal trading activities. This includes “situation analysis, decision support and future simulation” within the cockpit a trader needs to get a view of the internal and external world, to simulate possible future scenarios and come to a decision. In comprises information as:

• External market information like commodity prices, company news, etc.
• Internal demand and supply information like how much of a certain commodity is needed anddo we have for production supply?
• Position Reporting like overview over the open buying and selling positions (physical and paper) in quantity and value.
• Value at Risk reporting (How big is the risk of loss?) including calculations based on mathematical models as briefly touched in chapter

In the middle- and backoffice the logistic execution, margin processing and financial settlement takes place.