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Process documentationOrder Channel Management

 

You use order channel management to define your sales channels, and to create rules for assigning the order channels that you define to the transactional data stored by SAP Customer Activity Repository.

Examples of order channels could include the Web shop, call center, and retail stores. Once you define your order channels, you can specify rules to assign each order channel to the appropriate sales document type or POS transaction.

Once order channels are associated to sales documents and POS transactions stored by SAP Customer Activity Repository, you can perform various types of sales analysis. Many of the virtual data models, delivered with SAP Customer Activity Repository, query the system for order channel data.

Prerequisites

You have done the following in Customizing for SAP Customer Activity Repository:

  • Defined order channels under Start of the navigation path Retail Multichannel Foundation Next navigation step Define Order Channels End of the navigation path

  • Defined rules for deriving order channels for sales documents accessed from a source SAP ERP under Start of the navigation path Multichannel Enablement for Sales Documents Next navigation step Define Sales Document Order Channel Derivation End of the navigation path

  • Defined rules for assigning order channels to POS transactions under Start of the navigation path POS Data Management Next navigation step POS Inbound Processing Next navigation step Multichannel Enablement for POS Transactions Next navigation step Assign Order Channels to Sales Item Type End of the navigation path and Assign Order Channels to Profile

  • Optionally, executed task 0201 Insert Missing Order Channel in Transactions (SAP Standard profile) to assign an order channel to POS transactions if these have been created in SAP Customer Activity Repository prior to you performing the prerequisites listed above

  • Optionally, use task 0200 Update Order Channel in Transactions (SAP Standard profile) to re-assign order channels to POS transactions if you have modified the Customizing settings defined in the prerequisites listed above

Process

Defining Order Channels

You define one or more order channel that correspond to the actual sales channels in your business in Customizing. For example, if you sell products in your Web shop and in regular brick-and-mortar stores, you could define two separate order channels:

  • 1: Web Channel

  • 2: Walk In (store)

Once you have defined all the required order channels, you associate them to sales documents and POS transaction in the repository as described in the following sections.

Associating Order Channels to Sales Documents

You do not create sales documents in SAP Customer Activity Repository. You either replicate sales documents into the repository from a source SAP ERP system or, if SAP ERP and the repository are installed on the same SAP HANA database, you access the sales documents directly from the SAP ERP tables. Sales documents do not contain order channel values, so you must create derivation rules that allow SAP Customer Activity Repository to identify the order channel from which each sales document originates.

You specify the derivation rules in Customizing. The repository associates an order channel to a sales document based on the following attributes of the sales document:

  • Distribution chain

    This is the combination of a sales organization and a distribution channel. Distribution chains are defined in the source SAP ERP system.

  • Sales document type

    This is the classification of the sales document in SAP ERP. Sales document types are also defined in the source SAP ERP system.

The specified derivation rules are stored in table /CAR/SALESDOCOC. This table is accessed by views of the SAP HANA Content for SAP Customer Activity Repository, which associate sales documents to order channels. The sap.is.retail.car.SalesDocumentOrderChannel view is an example of such a view.

Since the order channel for sales orders is dynamically determined by SAP HANA Content for SAP Customer Activity Repository views, the order channels will be updated in near-real time if the order channel derivation rules are changed in Customizing.

Assigning Order Channels to POS Transaction Line Items

When defining rules for order channel assignment for POS transactions, you do so either at the POS Data Management profile level or the transaction line item level.

When SAP Customer Activity Repository assigns order channels, the system first checks if it is possible to assign the order channel to each line item based on its sales item type. If this is impossible, the line items are assigned the order channel specified at the profile level. The order channel is stored in the ORDER_CHANNEL field of the /POSDW/TLOGF table.

If required, you can use a Business Add-In (BAdI) to override the settings for order channel assignment on both the profile and transaction line item level. You can do this in Customizing for Customer Activity Repository under Start of the navigation path POS Data Management Next navigation step POS Inbound Processing Next navigation step Multichannel Enablement for POS Transactions Next navigation step BAdI Implementations Next navigation step BAdI: Implementation of Determination of Order Channel End of the navigation path.

More Information

Usage of External Data by SAP Customer Activity Repository

POS Data Transfer and Audit

SAP HANA Content for SAP Customer Activity Repository