You can use the IP-Related Sales Material product relationship to associate an Intellectual Property (which you define in SAP CRM) with a material on which the Intellectual Property is exploited (which you define in SAP ERP).
To use this function, you must activate the business function Intellectual Property Management (CRM_IPM_1
).
To use this function, you must activate the business function IPM, Download to CRM of Material-Related IP Information (ERP_IPM_BACKEND_2)
in the ERP system.
This relationship is represented using the Related Sales Material
relationship type.
Example
When you sell a mobile phone (a material), you typically include the software required to operate the phone. If the software is in fact someone else’s Intellectual Property you might be required to pay royalties to the IP owner for each mobile phone that you sell.
You can view Intellectual Properties and materials that have this relationship type when viewing the Intellectual Property or when viewing the material:
Viewing an Intellectual Property
When viewing an Intellectual Property (product type 04) you can see related materials in the following assignment blocks:
Related Sales Material
Displays the related sales material directly associated with the Intellectual Property
Header IP Related Material
If the current Intellectual Property does not have an underlying component relationship with a superordinate IP, then this assignment block also displays the related sales material directly associated with the Intellectual Property.
If the current Intellectual Property is an underlying component of one or more hierarchical levels of superordinate IPs, this assignment block displays the related sales material associated with the top-level superordinate IP.
For example, a series of IPs are hierarchically structured as follows:
|
The Underlying Component
relationship exists between each of the IPs.
IP 1 has the relationship IP-Related Sales Material
with material MAT_1.
IP 2 has the relationship IP-Related Sales Material
with material MAT_2.
IP 3 has the relationship IP-Related Sales Material
with material MAT_3.
When viewing the details for IP 3, the Header IP Related Material
assignment block displays MAT_1
.
Note
These assignment blocks are for display only, meaning that you cannot use them to maintain the relationships between Intellectual Properties and related sales materials. You can only maintain relationships by way of the SAP ERP system.
Viewing a Material
When viewing a material (product type 01), you can see related Intellectual Properties in the assignment block Related Intellectual Property.
When the material master defined in SAP ERP is downloaded to SAP CRM, information about the assigned intellectual property (IP) information is also downloaded.
Note
In media systems (that is, where the business function Title Lifecycle Management is activated), you can also define a media product master in addition to a material master.
The following prerequisites have to be fulfilled to enable the download of the assigned intellectual property (IP) information together with the download of the material:
Assign the interlinkage type IP-Related Sales Material
(IPSMATD) to the base categories of the IPs that shall be assigned to materials.
Assign the interlinkage type Intellectual Property
(IPMSMATS) to the base category for the materials that shall be downloaded to the CRM system.