Selection Rules for Involved Parties in SAP Sales Cloud
One of many goals of a Sales Automation Software is to simplify or automate repetitive (and often annoying) tasks. But in many cases it just takes a few clicks to, for example, document all the information relating to a transaction. But in the SAP Sales Cloud there are various tricks that can be used to reduce the number of clicks even further. In this blog I would like to introduce one little, but not insignificant, trick that can save you a few clicks in the advanced sales process.
Adding involved parties to a sales document is not a big deal in itself. You open the relevant document (e.g. Opportunity), go to the involved parties and select the desired person and its role. But the number of clicks can grow rather quickly the more complex the sales processes are. That’s because now you may be dealing with multiple document types for each document or perhaps multiple sales cycles. In addition, it’s only logical that the number of clicks will rise whenever you have to add the same large number of involved parties to a document. In these cases, you can use selection rules to simplify the process of assigning involved parties.
Example
Here we will take a look at the assignment of two involved parties in an example (Screenshots 1 & 2). The basic prerequisite in both cases is of course the creation of the required involved party roles in the fine-tuning task of the relevant object or sales document. In this fine-tuning task, you also determine whether the role is determined using the standard functions or using self-defined rules.
In the first case, we add to each opportunity one partner that we are working with. Because in this example appropriate partners in the customer master are assigned to all customers, here we use a standard selection rule that is used to derive the partner from the relationship to the business partner. This rule takes effect as soon as we create the opportunity.
Figure 1 – Standard selection rule of a partner
In the second case, a Quality manager is added to each offer that checks the quality of the offer to be submitted. For this assignment, we use our own selection rules.
Figure 2 – Selection rule for the Quality Manager
In this example, we add the appropriate role to each opportunity, which is why at this point we use few parameters in the selection rule. But as you can see in the screenshot, it is possible for much more complicated rule structures to arise here. Here the system checks the conditions of each rule in passing from top to bottom. In order to take all the constellations into account, therefore, it is advisable to create the specific rules first and then to become more general.
Other use in the system
Use of complex rules as a basis for the discovery of involved parties is available for opportunities, quotation and orders. Here it should be borne in mind that involved parties that have been added to an opportunity, for example, are added to the subsequent objects automatically. For that reason no duplication of rules is required as long as the document flow is continuously maintained here.