This blog provides you with the latest and greatest innovations that our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002 release has in store for you in Sales. To name just a few highlights:

Contract Down Payment
Enhancement in Manage Customer Returns
Analytics for Sales Scheduling Agreements – Product Demand
Analytics for Trade Compliance Issue in Delivery
Influence Tax Fields in Sales Documents
and more.

In detail, this blog covers the following highlights:

Contract Down Payment
Analytics for Sales Scheduling Agreements – Product Demand

Contract Down Payment

With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002 release we go a step further and we introduce a new process to enable the down payment on quantity contracts. The down payment process is required when advances are received from customers to fulfill sales orders before the actual sale has occurred.

With this release, we enable the down payment on quantity contracts, facilitated by the milestone billing plan. As a reminder, a quantity contract is an agreement between the company and customer for the customer to purchase a specific quantity of a material at a certain price within a specific time period.

The overall process starts with the billing plan, and down payment requests are generated and posted to the customer’s account when payment is made. Deliveries can be called against the value contract throughout the validity period. At the end of the contract, the down payment balances are used to clear the open balances from the deliveries, and the contract can be closed or extended.

Picture 1: Business process overview

In SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002, the process starts with the creation of a sales quantity contract with down payment billing plan lines, and contract release orders with reference to the contract. The contract release orders are blocked for delivery before all agreed down payments are made. Once the customer has made the payment completely, the system removes the delivery block on schedule lines. You can then continue the delivery processing and invoicing.

Key Feature Overview

Billing plan is enabled on the contract item
New status (down payment status) is introduced on the contract header and contract item
It is possible to search for sales contract by down payment status and the down payment status is displayed on the search result
Automatically determine delivery block on sales order based on the down payment status of sales contract
Automatically remove the delivery block on a sales order when the down payment is fully posted in FI
Application log to record sales contract update and sales order update
The prepaid down payment is considered in the delivery based final invoice
Monitor and reprocess blocked message for the update of contracts and sales orders

Benefits and Business Value:

Provide new End-to-End process of to handle down payment on quantity contract in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Introduce an automatic mechanism to set/remove delivery block based on down payment clearing status
Supporting both normal material and BOM material in the down payment process

Want to know how this looks in a demo, check to see the full process in action:

Analytics for Sales Scheduling Agreements – Product Demand

With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002 release, we extend the always delivered features in delivery schedules for the sales scheduling agreements process with a new analytical SAP Fiori app.

Just as a reminder: Delivery schedules are documents sent by customers to release a certain quantity of one or more materials defined in the sales scheduling agreement. Customers can send delivery schedules in the form of electronic data interchange (EDI) messages or through other traditional methods, such as email. In the more general context of outline agreements, delivery schedules may also be referred to as scheduling agreement releases.

Note: Sales scheduling agreements can be released in forecast delivery schedules, just-in-time (JIT) delivery schedules, and planning delivery schedules. The delivery schedules contain information about requested order quantities and dates.

With this new SAP Fiori app, the internal sales representative can monitor product demand from sales scheduling agreements. For example, you can view customer demand for one given product or product demand from one particular customer based on a time frame and look into further details on different dimensions. Such an overview offers valuable insights into how product demand fluctuates over time and may unfold in the future.

Picture 2: Sales Scheduling Agreements – Product Demand

You can use this app to do the following:

Define analysis parameters.

You must specify a release type for sales scheduling agreements, a date range for scheduled delivery, and a time scale for how product demand will be analyzed. For example, you can view weekly product demand in the coming month based on sales scheduling agreements released in forecast delivery schedules. To focus on demand for one particular product or from one particular customer, you can additionally specify the product or sold-to party.

Display product demand in chart view, table view, or hybrid view.

In chart view, you can view overall product demand over time. You can sort and drill down further by dimensions, such as sales organization, product, and sold-to party, and set additional filter criteria.

In the table view, you can view product demand details. To quickly find out demand details about a product or customer, you can group demand by product or customer.

In a hybrid view, you can view overall product demand in the chart while checking details in the table. For example, if you select a bar in the chart that shows product demand by sales organization, the table then lists the demand details of the selected sales organization.

Note: The product demand displayed in the chart or table is an aggregation of requested order quantities at schedule line level.

This new SAP Fiori app is built using Analytical List Page (ALP). Watch the video to learn more about the general functions offered by ALP.

Outlook (see roadmap for SAP S/4HANA Cloud)

In future versions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we will improve and Increase sales force efficiency with new options:

Create sales orders by uploading spreadsheets with the required data. You can use this process when creating sales orders as a result of mass upload capabilities
Automatic creation of sales orders from unstructured data in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Monitor the delivery performance using predictive analytics in SAP S/4HANA Cloud – in-time supply of procurement processes to transportation processes