Outline Agreements in Sales
Outline agreements enable customers to release products or services at special, previously agreed conditions. The agreements are used to increase customer retention. Customers benefit from outline agreements with suppliers, since they can take advantage of better prices and terms of delivery. In this way, contracts and agreements help to improve customer satisfaction, and make it easier for the suppliers to trace customer behavior, and to plan.
In CRM sales, outline agreements comprise the following types:
Sales agreements
Sales contracts
Integration
Contracts and agreements are based on the concept of business transactions. You use business transaction categories to determine the characteristics of a contract. For more information, see Business Transaction.
Prerequisites
You have set copying control so that the required data from the sales agreement or sales contract is copied to the appropriate follow-up (for example, contract release order). You make the settings for copying control in Customizing, under 
Customer Relationship Management
Transactions
Basic Settings
Copying Control for Business Transactions
.
Features
The following functions are available for processing outline agreements:
Releasable products
At item level, you can define the products that a customer can release against the contract or agreement. For more information, see Releasable Products.
Target values or target quantities
In sales contracts you determine how much of the product the customer can release. You do this by entering a target monetary value if you are working with value contracts, or a target quantity if you are working with quantity contracts. For more information, see Sales Contracts.
Price agreements
You can specify special price agreements by entering conditions in the outline agreement, such as a reduced price for a particular product. Note, however, that the system does not calculate individual prices in the agreement itself, but in the contract release order.
Partners
You enter partners, such as the sold-to party, ship-to party, and employees responsible. You can also define several sold-to parties or ship-to parties who are authorized to release products. For more information, see Authorized Partners.
Cancellation procedure
You can use a cancellation procedure to specify who is authorized to cancel a contract, and to determine the notice period. For more information, see Cancellation.
Completion rules
You can use completion rules to define how the system reacts once the customer has released the total target quantity or target value of products. For more information, see Completion Rules.
Dates
You can enter contract start dates and end dates, as well as a contract duration. You can either enter this information manually, or you can create date rules for determining a default start date or a default duration. For more information, see Dates in Business Transactions.
Actions
You can automatically plan and trigger follow-up activities, for example, informing the employee responsible for a contract of its impending expiration. For more information, see Actions for Contracts.
Payment cards
You can add payment card information to the contract, but the system does not run an authorization check from the contract. When you create a contract release order, the system copies the payment card details to the release order, where the authorization check then takes place.
See Also