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 SAP Smart Business for Retail Promotion Execution

 

SAP Smart Business for retail promotion execution is an SAP Smart Business cockpit that provides you with insight-to-action capabilities based on a real-time overview of issues in process steps during preparation of SAP Retail ERP promotions. These issues may impede the promotion execution in the stores. An issue is reported if a process step (such as purchase price activation or sales price activation) is due or overdue for processing, or if a block exists on header or item level. Issues also include processing errors in ERP like errors in sales price calculation because of incomplete master data.

The goal of the cockpit is to simplify and speed up the detection of promotion preparation issues, to find the root causes (for example, the supply chain), and efficiently resolve them, to ensure smooth promotion execution and to achieve a higher promotion success rate by avoiding errors.

The availability of multiple filtering options, for example by sales organization, process step, and urgency of the issues, allows role-based insight, flexibility, and targeted action.

The cockpit provides a direct drilldown into the issue details, to understand the root causes of issues. Immediate action for the issues is possible based on the “insight-to-action” capabilities, and collaboration options with other users or groups.

There are several process steps that belong to the promotion preparation, like purchase price activation or sales price activation. Depending on the business processes of the customer, process steps can be mandatory, optionally, or skipped altogether. For example, some retailers want to sell stock sitting in the stores, and therefore only create special sales prices, and no procurement documents are needed, thus an allocation table would not be created. Depending on the processes at the customer, the different process steps need to be executed a specific number of days prior to the promotion sales period. The process step is overdue if the step has not been executed successfully by that date. That means that it is already critical to take immediate action in the respective process steps in the preparation of a promotion, to ensure that the promotion sales can start as planned. This is also important information for the responsible managers, such as a promotion manager or logistics manager. The overdue date can be specified by lead times in customizing and in the promotion itself. Additionally, it can be specified when the process step should be executed. During this time window, the process step is “due”. The promotion execution cockpit, with selection of due issues, can be used by a promotion team member in charge of subsequent processing, as an efficient worklist to avoid that process steps are missed.

“Blocking” issues are manually set blocks in the ERP promotion, either on header or item level. For the subsequent processing steps of a promotion, blockings overrule the other issues so that e.g. a promotion with block on header level will not be shown as due or overdue (same applies for blocked articles). Issues with the follow-on document creation of the allocation table are independent from the blockings in a promotion.

For the following types of issues (referring to process steps in the retail promotion preparation) you can use the cockpit to monitor, resolve, and collaborate:

  • Purchase Price Activation (due or overdue, can also contain ERP processing errors)

  • DC Price Activation (due or overdue, can also contain ERP processing errors)

  • Sales Price Activation (due or overdue, can also contain ERP processing errors)

  • Listing (due or overdue)

  • Source of Supply Determination (due, in the case of ERP processing errors)

  • Allocation Table Generation (due or overdue, can also contain ERP processing errors)

  • Blocked (neither due nor overdue)

  • Stock Transport Order Creation (due or overdue). This relates to stock transport orders as follow-on documents of the allocation table created on the basis of the promotion.

  • Vendor Purchase Order Creation (due or overdue). This relates to vendor purchase orders as follow-on documents of the allocation table created on the basis of the promotion.

  • Open Goods Receipt from Vendor (due or overdue). This relates to goods receipts as follow-on documents of vendor purchase orders that are linked to promotions.

  • Open Goods Receipt from DC (due or overdue). This relates to goods receipts as follow-on documents of stock transport orders that are linked to promotions.

Key Features

KPI Tiles

The KPI tiles listed below are included in SAP Smart Business for retail promotion execution. They are displayed in a launchpad. The KPI tiles show different KPIs involved in promotion execution issues (number of promotions containing issues, overdue issues, due issues, blocking issues) with different input parameters for a role-based view, and pre-filtered access to a drilldown screen.

  • Promotions Containing Issues: In All Process Steps (the KPI shown in this tile is the number of promotions containing issues without pre-filtering). The drilldown from this tile leads to the overview screen Issues in Promotion Preparation.

  • Overdue Issues in Promotions: In All Process Steps (the KPI shown in this tile is the number of overdue issues in promotions) with pre-filtering on urgency to see overdue issues only. The drilldown from this tile leads to the overview screen Issues in Promotion Preparation applying the pre-filtering for overdue issues.

  • Overdue Issues in Promotions: Logistics Manager View (the KPI shown on this tile is the number of overdue issues in promotions with an additional filter on the process steps that are typically relevant for a logistics manager: listing, allocation table generation, source of supply determination, blocking, stock transport order creation, vendor purchase order creation, goods receipt from vendor, goods receipt from DC.) The drilldown from this tile leads to the overview screen Issues in Promotion Preparation applying pre-filtering for overdue issues and for the mentioned process steps.

    Note Note

    The process steps Source of Supply Determination and Blocked can never become overdue, therefore they are not counted in the number of overdue issues that is shown on the tile. They are nevertheless contained in the filter of the tile, to pass them to the overview screen where the logistics manager can change the fast filter, which is pre-set to Overdue for his role. The filter can be changed to, for example, Total Issues or Blocking to get an overview of all, or blocked, issues for the process steps in his or her responsibility. The pre-selected process steps that are passed from the tile can be further filtered, to see only a subset of them, but cannot be extended beyond those defined on the tile for this specific role).

    End of the note.
  • Total Issues in Promotions: In All Process Steps (there are 3 KPIs shown as separate bars on this tile: (1) the number of overdue issues in promotions, (2) the number of due issues, (3) the number of promotions with blocks). The drilldown from this tile leads to the overview screen Issues in Promotion Preparation.

  • Overdue Issues in Promotions: Per Area of Responsibility (the KPI shown in this tile is the number of overdue issues in promotions per sales organization with pre-filtering on urgency to see overdue issues only). This is intended to be a manager’s view on the issues. On the tile, the three sales organizations with the highest number of overdue issues are shown in a bar chart. The drilldown from this tile leads to the generic drilldown screen Issues in Promotions: Per Area of Responsibility. The number of overdue issues is used as a sorting criterion for the bar charts on issues per area of responsibility of the drilldown By Sales Organization and By Promotion Type.

These KPI tiles can also be used as examples for the creation of customer tiles in the KPI modeler with specific pre-filtering of process steps, urgency, error relevance, sales organization, and so on, to suit the business needs of roles such as logistics manager, logistics team member, promotion manager/promotion team member, purchaser, or master data expert with responsibilities for different organizational units.

In the KPI modeler, you define the scope of the business data that is displayed later on in the KPI tile of your app. For more information about the KPI modeler, see Adding a KPI in the SAP Smart Business Cockpits Administrator's Guide. Each business role can have predefined tiles in its launchpad that correspond to filtered KPIs for the information relevant to them.

For more information on specific tile configuration for SAP Smart Business for retail promotion execution, see Configuration Settings: Promotions Containing Issues.

Overview Screen Issues in Promotion Preparation

From four of the KPI tiles described above, the drilldown leads to this overview screen, partly with a different pre-filtering. The overview screen provides the following key features:

  • Selection of issues for processing, using filter criteria such as Total Issues/Due/Overdue/Blocking (these are realized as fast filters using radio buttons), Promotion, Process Steps, Promotion Type, Error Relevance (Errors/No Errors), Sales Organization, Purchasing Organization, Purchasing Group, Sales Organization, Distribution Channel. If the tile is pre-filtered, then only those promotions and issues are shown that correspond to those filters. If the tile is pre-filtered by process steps for role-based access, then only those process steps can be selected for further filtering. For the fast filters Total Issues/Due/Overdue/Blocking, the total number of issues is shown separately at the top of the screen, irrespective of which radio button is selected. (The selection of the fast filter of course influences the resulting set of promotions with issues, shown in the rows beneath).

    The filter Promotion takes four different sources of information into account: The name and the ID of the higher-level promotion and the name and the ID of the operational promotion. It is possible to enter parts of a string.

    The filter bar is hidden by default and can be shown by choosing the button Show Filter Bar. Different filters can be combined. The provided filter values are determined smartly based on the other filter values that have already been entered. Once different filter values have been entered in the filter bar, the “Go” Button starts applying the filters to the information shown on the screen.

  • An overview of promotions with issues (grouped by higher-level promotion, by default). Only promotions with a start date for promotion sales that is in the future or today are shown. For each promotion, the sum of different due and overdue issues is shown separately, and it is indicated whether there is a blocking issue. A process step that is due or overdue counts as only one issue per promotion, even though there might be hundreds of articles affected by this issue.

    A symbol with an exclamation mark next to the sum of issues per urgency category (due/overdue) indicates that the process steps with issues contain processing errors in ERP. If you click the symbol, information about how many different processing errors are contained in those issues is shown. There is also a maximum of one blocking issue counted per promotion.

  • Display of the earliest overdue date per promotion in the issue list. This information helps to determine the most urgent promotions where somebody needs to start working on the issues. It can be used for sorting by the user.

    For each process step which is not yet successfully completed, an overdue date is determined individually, as described below. The overdue date per process step contains the date when this process step becomes overdue - respectively when it became overdue if this date is in the past. The earliest overdue date per promotion is the earliest of those overdue dates of the individual process steps.

    Whether a process step that has not yet been successfully completed is due or overdue is calculated based on validity dates and relevance indicators (states) in the promotion, as well as lead times defined in Customizing for promotion types with the following exception:

    Procurement documents can be created as part of follow-on activities based on an allocation table:

    • Purchase orders for external procurement from external vendors and

    • Stock transfer order for internal distribution from distribution centers to stores

    The worklist for procurement documents is stored for each allocation table (tables AUBSI und AUUMI), including the latest date by when the documents need to be created (purchase order date). This date is used to decide whether the creation activity is due or overdue. It is calculated backwards from the promotion start date, taking the following parameters into account:

    • Lead time goods receipt in store before start of promotion of the promotion type (database table field TWAA-VWEFI)

    • Planned delivery time in days (database field MARC-PLIFZ)

    • Goods receipt processing time in days (database field MARC-WEBAZ) of the site data for the article

    • GR lead time in distribution center which is entered when creating the allocation table in transaction WAK5

    In general, issues in subsequent processing steps of the promotion itself (not of the allocation table) are shown only if not all affected articles are manually blocked, and if there is no header block. If there is a processing error in ERP, the appropriate process step is at least shown as a “due” issue (which means that someone needs to take care of it), even though the “due” time window to complete this process step might not yet be reached.

    Note Note

    For blocking issues, the earliest overdue date is set to December 31, 9999. If a promotion header is blocked, the overdue date for the whole promotion is set to December 31, 9999.

    End of the note.

    For each process step, an overdue date is determined individually, as described below. If the overdue date is today or in the past, then the process step is “overdue”. A process step can be due only if it is not yet overdue.

    Process step

    Overdue determination/calculation of overdue date

    Due time window determination

    Purchase Price Activation

    The overdue date is the start of the purchasing period in the promotion header.

    This is relevant only if the indicator Create Purchase Price Condition Records is set in the promotion item.

    Subtracting the Leadtime Purchase Price Activation Due in promotion type Customizing from the overdue date. This is relevant only if the indicator Create Purchase Price Condition Records is set in the promotion item.

    DC Price Activation

    The overdue date is the start of the purchasing period in the promotion header. This is relevant only if the indicator Create DC Condition Records is set in the promotion item.

    Subtracting the Leadtime Purchase Price Activation Due in promotion type Customizing from the overdue date. This is relevant only if the indicator Create DC Condition Records is set in the promotion item.

    Sales Price Activation

    The overdue date is determined by subtracting the Leadtime Sales Price Activation in promotion type Customizing from the start date of promotion sales in the promotion header. This is relevant only if the indicator Create Sales Price Condition Records is set in the promotion item.

    Subtracting the Leadtime Sales Price Activation Due in promotion type Customizing from the overdue date. This is relevant only if the indicator Create Sales Price Condition Records is set in the promotion item.

    Listing

    Overdue date is the start of promotion listing in the promotion header.

    This is relevant only if listing check in the promotion item is not blank, otherwise it is assumed that no promotion listing is required.

    Subtracting the Leadtime Listing Due in promotion type Customizing from the overdue date. This is relevant only if Listing Check in the promotion item is not blank, otherwise it is assumed that no promotion listing is required.

    Source of Supply Determination

    This is never overdue as a separate process step because this is automatically started by other process steps of the promotion.

    Earliest overdue date = December 31, 9999

    Set to “due” only if a processing error occurs in ERP (supply source determination status of promotion item has error status)

    Allocation Table Generation

    The overdue date is determined by subtracting the Leadtime Allocation Table Generation in promotion type Customizing from the start date of promotion sales in the promotion header. This is relevant only if the allocation table type in the promotion header is assigned, and the item category of the allocation table has a valid type for follow-on document generation.

    Subtracting the Leadtime Allocation Table Generation Due in promotion type Customizing from the overdue date. This is relevant only if the allocation table type in the promotion header is assigned and the item category of the allocation table has a valid type for follow-on document generation.

    Blocked

    Never overdue, shown separately as a “Blocking issue”. Earliest overdue date = December 31, 9999

    Never due, shown separately as a “Blocking issue”

    Stock Transport Order Creation

    The overdue date is the purchase order date in the worklist for stock transfer order (follow-on document) generation of the allocation table (AUUMI) plus one day. It is only relevant if the allocation table item has no blocking reason that does not allow a vendor purchase order.

    The due date is the purchase order date in the worklist for stock transfer order (follow-on document) generation of the allocation table (AUUMI). It is relevant only if the allocation table item has no blocking reason that does not allow a vendor purchase order.

    Vendor Purchase Order Creation

    The overdue date is the purchase order date in the worklist for purchase order (follow-on document) generation of the allocation table (AUBSI) plus one day. It is only relevant if the allocation table item has no blocking reason that does not allow a vendor purchase order.

    The due date is the purchase order date in the worklist for purchase order (follow-on document) generation of the allocation table (AUBSI). It is only relevant if the allocation table item has no blocking reason that does not allow a vendor purchase order.

    Goods Receipt from Vendor

    The overdue date is the scheduled delivery date of the schedule lines (EKET) of the vendor purchase orders linked to the promotion plus one day; only those schedule lines with no delivery, or underdelivery, and that are not marked “completely delivered” are taken into consideration.

    The due date is the scheduled delivery date of the schedule lines (EKET) of the vendor purchase orders linked to the promotion; only those schedule lines with no delivery, or underdelivery, and that are not marked “completely delivered” are taken into consideration.

    Goods Receipt from DC

    The overdue date is the scheduled delivery date of the schedule lines (EKET) of the vendor purchase orders linked to the promotion plus one day; only those schedule lines with no delivery, or underdelivery, and that are not marked “completely delivered” are taken into consideration.

    The due date is the scheduled delivery date of the schedule lines (EKET) of the vendor purchase orders linked to the promotion; only those schedule lines with no delivery, or underdelivery, and that are not marked “completely delivered” are taken into consideration.

  • User-specific grouping and sorting of rows

  • Personalization:

    - Hide columns

    - Saving and applying personalized variants, for example with specific filter values.

  • Navigation to the promotion fact sheet by selecting the hyperlink on the promotion number and name, and choosing Display Promotion Fact Sheet

Master-Detail Screen for All Process Steps of a Promotion with Issues

For each promotion with issues, navigation to the master detail screen is offered, which contains an overview of all process steps of this promotion with issues, on the left-hand side. For the selected process step, detailed information is offered on the right-hand side. The master detail screen offers the following key features:

  • View of header- and item-level information, containing details specific to the process step of a promotion containing issues, such as the overdue date for the process step, number of days since a process step has been overdue, error indicator for a process step, validity dates and status information from the promotion header, as well as a detailed status and further information on the promotion items affected by the corresponding issue.

  • View of detailed information in the relevant fact sheets, such as the promotion fact sheet, article fact sheet, allocation table fact sheet, and site fact sheet. The fact sheets also contain details for contacts with whom you can collaborate to resolve issues.

  • Option to directly take action to resolve an issue via the “insight-to-action” capabilities, for example List All for the process step Listing, which triggers promotion listing for all articles of the promotion in the background, in the back-end system. For all process steps, action can be taken by using the Open In... button, which provides process-step-specific WebGUI access to the appropriate ERP transaction where the issue can be solved.

  • Ability to share information for issue resolution, using integrated SAP Jam functionality. For more information, see SAP Library for SAP NetWeaver at http://help.sap.comInformation published on SAP site under Start of the navigation path SAP NetWeaver Next navigation step User Interface Add-On for SAP NetWeaver Next navigation step Social Media Integration. End of the navigation path

Additional Master-Drilldown Screen for the Process Steps Goods Receipt from Vendor and Goods Receipt from DC of a Promotion with Issues

The process steps Goods Receipt from Vendor and Goods Receipt from DC offer an additional master drilldown screen, which can be accessed via the line items of the corresponding master detail screen. This additional master drilldown screen contains the overview of all process steps in this promotion with issues, on the left-hand side; for the selected process step, additional drilldown information is offered on the right-hand side. The additional drilldown screen offers the following key features:

  • View of all schedule items for the selected article/vendor combination (for process step Goods Receipt from Vendor) or the selected article/DC combination (for process step Goods Receipt from DC).

  • As an analogue to the master detail screen, you can view detailed information in the relevant fact sheets, such as the article fact sheet, vendor fact sheet, and site fact sheet. The fact sheets also contain details for contacts with whom you can collaborate to resolve issues.

  • As an analogue to the master detail screen, you have the ability to share information for issue resolution, using integrated SAP Jam functionality. For more information, see SAP Library for SAP NetWeaver at http://help.sap.comInformation published on SAP site under Start of the navigation path SAP NetWeaver Next navigation step User Interface Add-On for SAP NetWeaver Next navigation step Social Media Integration End of the navigation path

Generic Drilldown Screen Issues in Promotions: Per Area of Responsibility

From the KPI tile Overdue Issues in Promotions: Per Area of Responsibility described above, the drilldown leads to this generic drilldown screen. This is intended to be a manager’s view of the issues. It provides the following key features:

  • Bar charts and table views for issues per area of responsibility:

    - by sales organization

    - by distribution chain

    - by purchasing organization and purchasing group

    - by promotion type

  • Stacked bars showing the number of overdue issues, blocks and due issues separately; in the drilldowns By Sales Organization and By Promotion Type the bars are sorted by the number of overdue issues, in the other two by the IDs of sales organization resp. purchasing organization

  • Multi-step drilldown into areas of responsibility

  • Selection of multiple bars for follow-up actions

  • From the selected areas of responsibility, a drilldown leads to the overview screen Issue in Promotion Preparation. The selected areas of responsbility are used as filter criteria in the overview screen for promotions with issues.

System Landscape Requirements

SAP Smart Business Product

SAP Smart Business 1.0 for retail promotion execution SPS 2

For more information about the system landscape to run SAP Smart Business cockpits, see Installation.

Navigation Targets

The app offers the possibility to directly access other apps, which then access further apps for details.

Note Note

These linked apps have to be already available in your system landscape or you have to implement them along with this app

End of the note.
  • Retail Promotion Fact Sheet

  • Article Fact Sheet

  • Allocation Table Fact Sheet

  • Site Fact Sheet

  • Vendor Fact Sheet

These fact sheets need to be installed/configured in addition to the SAP Smart Business for retail promotion execution app. For more information, see the implementation documentation for these apps in SAP Library at http://help.sap.comInformation published on SAP site under Start of the navigation path SAP Business Suite Next navigation step SAP Fiori for SAP Business Suite Next navigation step SAP Fiori Apps Next navigation step SAP Fiori Apps for SAP ERP Next navigation step Apps for Logistics Next navigation step Retail End of the navigation path.