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 Trade, Agency Business

Technical Data

Technical name of the business function

ISR_RET_AGENCY

Available as of

SAP ERP Enhancement Package 2005.2

ECC software component

SAP_APPL, EA-RETAIL

ECC application component

Agency Business LO-AB

Business Intelligence content

Not relevant

SAP Enterprise Services

Not relevant

JAVA software component

Not relevant

Portal content

Not relevant

Additional content available in other SAP applications

Not relevant

Business function requiring activation in addition

Not relevant

Use

With this business function you can use additional features of Agency Business, such as Credit Management, Configuration and Collection Invoices to implement business processes more flexibly.

Prerequisites

In order for the business process logic to take the new features of this business function into account, you must carry out additional Customizing activities.

  • You control the functional enhancements for variant configuration and linking of SAP Credit Management using the billing type. You maintain the appropriate fields for this in the IMG activity W_WLFA_0004.

  • You control the new business process Variant for Settlement of Vendor Invoices in Case of Settlement using the payment type. You maintain the appropriate fields for this in the IMG activity W_WLFA_0010.

Features

Target groups

These features are aimed at all enterprises that offer financial services to their customers or suppliers for invoice bundling, or that require invoice bundling because they have multiple subsidiaries of branches.

Influence groups within these companies are the following:

Target

Interest

Value of the solution (Messaging)

CEO, COO

Profitability

Additional value because of the unique selling proposition of Agency Business against competitors.

CIO

Keep maintenance and integration cost down (TCO)

Huge additional value compared with other solutions because of the architecture and therefore the low integration cost.

End user

Facilitate and automate the payment and billing processes

Unique automated business processes are applicable for mass data management in enterprise payment processes (internal and external)

Pain Points SAP Credit Management

Purchasing organizations often offer financial services to bundle invoices of suppliers for their customers. Customers then receive one invoice that includes multiple suppliers, which lowers their effort significantly. Suppliers send their invoices or pro-forma invoices to the wholesale distributor, who sometimes pays them upfront. The wholesale distributor receives compensation or commissions for this service, either from the customers or the vendors. Wholesale distributors struggle with insolvencies of their customers and need to apply credit limit checks with each incoming sales order.

Integration with SAP Credit Management

In a logistics business transaction that involves financial transactions, a best business practice standard is to check the credit limit of a business partner if that partner is a customer. Within the Agency Business Solution, it is quite important to monitor the customer’s credit limit so that the agency does not run into a financial obligation if an invoice is accepted or entered. To ensure a maximum of flexible checks and risk determination procedures for the underlying business process, it is necessary that the Agency Business Solution is tightly integrated with the SAP Credit Management Solution. Besides the common credit check features, it is also necessary to update the credit risk in SAP Credit Management in order to have an overall overview of the credit risk per customer or line of business.

Benefit SAP Credit Management

Real-time and comprehensive credit limit checks ensure timely information about customers and prevent financial risks. Users can benefit from the whole scope of SAP Credit Management.

Pain Points “Vendor Settlement of Settlement Request Documents”

The core process of Agency Business – bundling of invoices for customers and suppliers – should allow users to create new collective and summary invoices in both directions.

New business processes to settle Settlement Request Documents

In the existing Agency Business process, invoices are bundled in settlement request lists that contain individual documents. This list is not a discrete invoice document. With this enhancement package, it is possible to create independent collective invoices for suppliers and customers. The collective invoice is treated as an independent document and can be maintained separately (for example,conditions or currencies can still be changed).

Benefit “Vendor Settlement of Settlement Request Documents”

This feature allows implementation of new businesses processes for central billing.

Pain Points “Variant Configuration”

Some enterprises have to handle special products that have to be configured; for example, steel and wood, or more complex technical products. To benefit from Agency Business’s central billing or pooled payment features, these special products or configured variants have to be implemented in all processes.

Integration of Variant Configuration

Within variant configuration, special products can be described by qualitative characteristics, such as length, height and depth. In some cases, the variant configuration might be price-relevant.

The configuration of these variants has to be implemented during the creation of Agency Business documents and considered in all processes. A new link from Agency Business documents to variant configuration enables users to benefit from this business process.

Benefit “Variant Configuration”

The Variant Configuration is a completely new business process variant to handle special products.