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Process documentation Activity Scheduling with CRM Mobile Sales Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

Purpose

 

You use this business process to schedule activities. You do this by maintaining scheduling data, such as the scheduling period and employee working hours, and then selecting business partners for activity scheduling. You can select business partners from various sources, such as open tasks, business activities, visit plans, the standard search or advanced search. The system generates activity proposals based on the employee working hours (which are maintained in the CRM Enterprise Customizing activity referred to below) and existing activities. Activity proposals are displayed in your calendar. From here, you can reject, accept and, if required, reschedule them.

Note

Note you can only schedule activities for transaction types belonging to the object type BUS2000126 (Appointments).

Prerequisites

You maintain the default values for your entire company for the following fields for activity scheduling:

·        Duration

·        Preparation time

·        Transaction type

·        Activity category

·        Period

In this field, you specify whether you want to schedule your activities on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

·        Working hours

Here, you set your employees’ working hours at company level. Activity proposals are generated based on these working hours.

·        Date type

This is used to determine standard colors and icons which are used to display to display activities in the calendar.

You do this in Customizing for CRM Transactions → Settings for Activities → Maintain Default Values for Visit plans and Activity Scheduling. The settings you make here are automatically downloaded to CRM Mobile, except for the date type. For more information, see the documentation for this Customizing activity.

Sales employees can, however, change these values during activity scheduling.

Note

Note that the changes you make during activity scheduling are only valid for this specific instance.

Process Flow

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text

 

 

 

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The following business process runs in SAP CRM:

       1.      Maintain scheduling data

You maintain the start and end date for the scheduling period for the activity, and your working hours.

       2.      Add business partners

You can add business partners from multiple sources, such as:

·        Open tasks

·        Business activities

·        Visit plans

You can only select business partners from visit plans which have been saved and set to Released.

·        Target groups

·        Due visits

·        Standard search, for example, by postal code

·        Advanced search, for example, by marketing attributes

       3.      Schedule activities

You specify the activity start date, duration, and preparation time required. Note that specifying the preparation time is optional, but if you specify it, it is considered for activity scheduling.

You can schedule activities for selected business partners through the entire scheduling period, allowing you to use the scheduling period to its full extent. For more information, see the SAP Library documentation under Customer Relationship Management  ® Components and Functions  ®Sales  ®Activity Management  ®Activity Processing  ®Activity Scheduling  ®Scheduling Activities for the Entire Scheduling Period.

       4.      Generate activity proposals

You can trigger the generation of activities manually at any time. Each time you do so, the system generates activity proposals, which are then displayed in your calendar. The activity proposals are displayed in a different color than the accepted activities, enabling you to distinguish between them quickly and easily. The activity proposals are generated based on your working hours and existing activities.

The following colors are used to identify the various types and statuses of activities and activity proposals in the calendar:

·        Activity proposals which have not yet been accepted or deleted, and for which no conflicts have been found, are marked in green

·        Activity proposals for which the preparation time cannot be taken into consideration due to lack of time available are marked in blue

·        Activity proposals for which no time slot could be found appear as all-day events in the calendar, and are marked in red

·        Activity proposals which have been accepted and have therefore been converted to activities, plus all other existing activities are marked in white

 

       5.      Modify activity proposals

You can reject, accept and, if required, reschedule activity proposals. You reject activity proposals by exiting the calendar view without saving. This deletes all newly generated activity proposals. You accept activity proposals by choosing Accept Generated Proposals in the calendar view. This accepts all newly generated activity proposals. If you do not want to save all or reject all newly generated activity proposals, you can save them all first, and then reschedule and delete them individually, as required.

You can check for conflicting customer activities after activity proposals have been generated, by choosing Check Business Hours in the calendar view.

You can also save the activity proposals to a new visit plan by choosing Save as Visit Plan. The business partners for whom activity proposals have been generated are automatically copied to the new visit plan, including the fields Start Time, Duration and Duration Units.

Note

Note that you can only save the contents of the activity proposal to a new visit plan. You cannot save the entire business partner list to a new visit plan.

       6.      Synchronize data

       7.      System replicates data

If you have scheduled activities based on a visit plan, the system only replicates this data for visit plans which have been saved and set to Released.

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