You can use survey catalogs for launching campaigns and doing market research. You create surveys containing questions and once you receive the answers, you evaluate the answers to better market your products or services. SAP provides templates in the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) survey tool (transaction crm_survey_suite). You generally need to enhance these existing templates or create your own templates for individual campaigns.

The IDs that you use for various surveys or for various template versions for the same survey differ. When you add a new question or answer or change an existing question or answer, you generate new IDs. The results of the survey are extracted and uploaded to SAP NetWeaver BI, You can analyze and compare them with the results from other surveys or survey versions. However, you may need to be able to compare the answers semantically from various surveys.

To enable you to evaluate survey answers by comparing the answers to questions from various surveys or survey versions, there is a layer of survey catalog objects. The survey catalogs consist of three InfoObjects that contain master data and textual attributes:

The layer of survey catalog objects is not extracted from DataSources in SAP CRM. You need to maintain the objects directly in SAP NetWeaver BI. You can maintain the survey catalog objects using the catalog maintenance tool where catalog objects are defined as attributes of existing SAP CRM survey objects. Survey objects from different templates have different IDs. You can link to these IDs using catalog objects. For example, two similar questions in two different survey templates can be mapped to the same question in the survey catalog. The question catalog is used in reporting as a common attribute to analyze the results of the questions that are semantically the same.