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Sales Support: Optical Archiving of Incoming/Outgoing Documents

Description

Outgoing documents

Optical archiving and the assignment to the SAP document is carried out for outgoing documents by means of output control. Maintain values for the archiving mode and archiving document type on the detail screen for the output types for sales activities in Customizing. The standard SAP R/3 System contains the outgoing archiving document type SDOACTIV.

Incoming documents

Incoming documents include:

a) customer letters as a reaction to a direct mailing (for example, a questionnaire campaign)

b) documents which are brought back from a sales call

c) written customer inquiries requesting to information or a sales call

The procedures required for archiving the above examples (a-c) are described below:

1. Early input of incoming documents
'Early input' involves the optical archiving of an incoming document before an SAP document exists to which it can be assigned. For each archiving document type, you specify in the administration menu of the optical archive (in the Customizing for Basis) which SAP transaction is to be carried out after the document is scanned into the system.
The following document types and corresponding methods are defined in the standard system for sales activities:
Standard document types Method
SDIACTINQ customer inquiry (sales activity) ,create
SDIACTRESP responses to sales activity create
SDIACTINFO sales activity information ,change
An E-MAIL is sent after a document of one of these document types is scanned into the system.
The recipient of this E-MAIL can be:
This E-MAIL can now be processed. For the above document types, you then branch to sales activity processing (create/change sales activity) by means of the method. The scanned document is assigned to the sales activity automatically.
2. Simultaneous input of inbound documents
'Simultaneous input' is a special case of 'Early input'. Here, a document is scanned and optically archived, and, at the same time, the SAP transaction (in this case create/change sales activity) is executed in another window. Thus, an E-MAIL is neither sent nor processed.
3. Late input or subsequent assignment of incoming documents
'Late input' involves the optical archiving of an incoming document if an SAP document already exists to which it can be assigned or to which it is to be assigned during the 'Create document' function.
In this case, the starting point is the SAP document. In Customizing for sales activity types, you can store a default archiving document type for the subsequent assignment of an archived document.
The following default archiving document types are defined in the standard version of the SAP R/3 System:
0003 LETTER: This case corresponds to scenario a).
0001 SALES VISIT: This case corresponds to scenario b).
0002 TELEPHONE: This case corresponds to scenario c), that is, a sales activity is carried out by telephone (for example, to arrange an appointment) for an incoming customer inquiry, the inquiry is then scanned and assigned to the sales activity.
4. Collective processing of incoming documents using bar codes
Assign the incoming documents using a bar code. Then create sales activities. Depending on the settings in administration for the optical archive, a dialog box appears into which you can enter the bar code of the scanned object or the object to be scanned (manually or using a wand).
Users, who do not normally work with bar codes, are not entered in the control table for the optical archive. These users do not obtain the dialog box for bar code entry when they save the sales activity, but they can request bar code entry in the sales activity using a function code.
Note
Observe the following sequence:
1. Assign bar codes to the incoming documents
2. Create sales activity and enter bar codes
3. Scan the incoming documents (document is assigned to sales activity automatically)

Change system parameters in customizing

You must make two settings in Customizing:

1. Sales activities
Assignment of the default archiving document types to sales activity types (detail screen Sales Activity Types using the Implementation Guide in the step "Define sales activity types")
2. Administration for the optical archive
Document types and user-specific settings are determined in the administration menu of the optical archive.

Further notes

Information on optical archiving can be found in the following manuals:

Further information on the settings of sales activities and on optical archiving from the SD view can be found in the Implementation Guide in the sections "Sales activities" and "Optical archiving".