SAP Credit Management (FIN-FSCM-CR) 

Purpose

The creditworthiness and payment behavior of your business partners have an immediate effect on the business results of your company. Efficient receivables and credit management reduces the risk of financial losses and helps you to optimize business relationships with your business partners. SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) supports your company in determining the risk of losses on receivables from your business partners early and in making credit decisions efficiently and partially automated. It also supports you in a heterogeneous and distributed system landscape; by using system-independent XML interfaces, you can also connect external non-SAP systems.

With SAP Credit Management (FIN-FSCM-CR) you can operate a centralized credit management. The business systems connected (for example, Sales and Distribution, Logistics Execution, Financial Accounting) report the commitment of a business partner to SAP Credit Management (FIN-FSCM-CR) via XML. These reports are then consolidated into the credit exposure in SAP Credit Management (FIN-FSCM-CR) and checked against the current credit limit for the business partner. In addition to the credit limit check, you can also carry out other checks, such as oldest open item, maximum dunning level, or last payment.

SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) is part of the SAP Financial Supply Chain Management (FIN-FSCM) solution.

Implementation Considerations

SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) will eventually replace the existing Credit Management (FI‑AR‑CR). FI-AR-CR is a purely internal FI credit management application, whereas SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) provides you with a comprehensive, integrated, and cross-system form of credit management.

We particularly recommend the use of SAP Credit Management (FIN-FSCM-CR) for the following companies:

●     Companies that, due to a heavily distributed system landscape, frequently have problems consolidating information for the credit decisions.

In contrast to the Credit Management (FI-AR-CR) component, the component SAP Credit Management (FIN-FSCM-CR) can collect and process information about the credit exposure of a business partner from different SAP and non-SAP systems. The number of financial accounting or SD systems your company uses is not relevant. SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) consolidates the information from these systems into the credit exposure for the respective business partner, and this enables you to monitor the business partner’s credit limit centrally.

●     Companies with a large number of business partners

These companies can use SAP Credit Management (FIN-FSCM-CR) to automate a large part of their credit management processes, such as scoring and rating of business partners, proposal of credit limits, notification of credit analysts, monitoring of credit limits.

●     Companies that want to combine internal and external data for a business partner in a separate scoring or rating

The integration of external information providers is very important here. You can access this external information automatically through XML interfaces and use it in SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR).

Integration

SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) enables your company to operate centralized credit management even in a distributed system landscape while taking account of both internal and external credit information.

System-independent XML interfaces enable you to connect internal systems such as SD and Financial Accounting as well as the systems of external credit information providers (external credit information). These systems report credit-relevant data to SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) on request.

The data reported is consolidated in SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) and is available for many types of credit checks at customer or customer group level. You can access the analyses and results in SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence or the Credit Manager Portal.

Integration with Other SAP Components

SAP Application Components with Release

●     SAP Credit Management 6.0 (Financial Basis 3.00) ●     SAP NetWeaver Application Server 2004s ●     SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure 7.0 ●     Accounts Receivable Accounting (FI-AR) 4.6C; SAP R/3 Plug-In 2004.1; mySAP ERP 2005 ●     Industry releases 4.72 and 6.00 of Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable (FI-CA) for the following solutions: ○     mySAP Insurance ○     mySAP Utilities ○     mySAP Telecommunications ○     mySAP Media ○     mySAP Public Sector (Public Sector FI-CA) ○     SAP Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable (FI-CA) ●     Sales and Distribution (SD) 4.6C; SAP R/3 Plug-In 2004.1, mySAP ERP 2005 ●     SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence with Business Content 3.5.2 ●     (optional) SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 4.0 with CRM Industry AddOn; 5.00 ●     SAP Enterprise Portal 6.0 (optional)

 

Prerequisites

For more information about the SAP components and release versions required, see System and Component Landscape.

Features

Business Partner – Credit Master Data

You manage all credit-relevant master data of a business partner in SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR). This data includes the current credit limit, one or more externally determined rating values, the risk class, and an order limit. Each of the master data fields has a change history that gives information about the time of the change, the user, and the old and new value. There is also a note function that the credit analyst can use to enter additional information about the business partner. Alternatively, he or she can use a document storage function to store information such as press articles, correspondence, bank information, and rating information.

SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) also enables you to include collateral defined for a business partner in the calculation of the credit exposure, meaning that you can also monitor your own company’s risk.

Credit Information and Business Partner Rating

The credit analyst can determine and manage both external and internal credit information for a business partner. This information is used mainly as input parameters for the Credit Rules Engine that companies can use to carry out automatic business partner ratings (scoring), making credit decisions, or calculating credit limits.

●     Processing External Credit Information

Requesting external credit information is completely integrated in SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) and enables companies to request information electronically using appropriate XML interfaces. Since credit departments often use several external credit information providers, SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) can save the information provided by such an interface separately according to the data provider. The XML interface is designed to allow the user to call up information about both business partners and private customers.

●     Processing Internal Credit Information (Score)

The credit analyst can also extract internal data for a business partner from the legacy systems and use the company’s own rating rules to determine a score. You can have these score values determined by the following factors:

○     Master data of the business partner (for example, country of origin of the business partner)

○     Payment behavior (for example, average days in arrears)

○     Dunning history (for example, number of dunning notices in the last 12 months)

○     SAP Dispute Management (for example, the number of dispute cases in the last 12 months)

The external and internal credit information determined is stored in the master data of the business partner. The system monitors the validity of the data determined periodically. The score data can be updated manually or automatically.

Score and Credit Limit Calculation and Credit Limit Check (Credit Rules Engine)

SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) enables you to automate certain processes by applying certain rules. These rules are controlled by the Credit Rules Engine and hence support the subsequent automated business processes.

●     Rating of Business Partners

A procedure is assigned to each business partner; each procedure has a formula for calculating the rating value. You can define the formula to meet your own requirements using various data that is available as input parameters for the formula. SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) also has mass processing functions that enable you to recalculate the rating value or change the rating procedure simultaneously for a large number of business partners.

●     Determining Credit Limit

You can calculate the credit limit of a business partner automatically. Using SAP Workflow, you can implement an approval procedure where changes to a credit limit can be checked and approved by a superior.

●     Rules for Credit Check

You can define rules for determining which credit checks are carried out. Here you can choose whether, in addition to the check for the credit limit utilization, other checks are to be carried out, for example, the maximum age of the oldest open item, or the maximum number of dunning transactions of the business partner.

You can also define what consequences a negative check result is to have (for example, block sales order, block customer account, or trigger workflow).

Credit Information and Credit Decisions

The credit analyst requires information from different systems to make decisions quickly and efficiently about blocked orders or the amount of the credit limit. SAP Credit Management (FIN‑FSCM‑CR) supports credit analysts in determining the required customer-related data and analyses in SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI), and, optionally, in the Credit Manager Portal.