With the Release 2021, there are now exciting new features offered in the Sales area. In this blog post I will give you a quick preview of some of these topics.
Fiori App for order entry
Long anticipated and now available in the first version, a streamlined Fiori App for order entry. The VA01 transaction of course remains the standard for key users who need all of the detailed information and functions. But for more basic entry requirements, the simpler and intuitive Fiori App “Create Sales Order” is now available. According to SAP, this is aimed at sales employees in their daily work.
The most important functions and differences with the VA01 are summarized in the following summary of the SAP (also available) here.
Excel import of sales orders
Many customers have individually expanded their order entry by adding an import interface for Microsoft Excel tables. This enables mass order creation using table templates as a basis. SAP has now incorporated this approach into the standard, as the “Import Sales Orders” now provides the template download. A mass import of sales orders can then be performed on this basis. The required tests are completed at upload and the relevant errors are listed for correction.
Once the necessary corrections have been made, the sales orders are created in the system and are stored in an import history.
Automated creation of sales orders from PDF files
A further step towards automation is taken with the new capability of generating sales orders from PDF files sent by the customer. Even unread emails with attached customer orders can be automatically checked using an iRPA bot and imported to the system for further processing and checking. But for this process, which is more complicated than it may at first appear, multiple components must be used. The following flowchart shows how they work together.
Fiori app for mass changes to sales orders
In addition to the ability to create mass orders mentioned above, you can also perform mass changes to sales documents centrally with the app “Mass Change of Sales Documents”. The following sales documents can be changed in this way:
- sales orders
- sales quotations
- sales contracts
- customer returns
- sales scheduling agreements
- debit and credit memo requests
The changes are planned with a background job and are then carried out.
Using multiple addresses of the business partner in the order-to-cash process
The business partner has always offered the ability to enter multiple addresses and address usages. Now these addresses can also be used by the sales process and in the associated documents (e.g. sales order, delivery and invoicing). This requires the activation of the business functions “Multiple Address Handling for Business Partners in Sales and Distribution” and “Multiple Address Handling for Customer Master Data in Business Partner”.
The following screenshot shows the different addresses that are maintained for a business partner in the system.
With the new function, the saved addresses can be used in the editing process of the sales documents. For this purpose the address overview can be accessed and the desired address can be selected. Here is an example from the creation of a sales order.
It’s exciting to see how this new function is being adopted by SAP customers and how it works with the existing capabilities and may even replace them.
