Last month I wrote a blog post, "Where Should SAP CRM On-Premise Invest Next," asking SAP customers to vote for topic areas they would like to discuss during the ASUG CRM Influence Council at the SAPPHIRE/ASUG conference in Orlando. You have a look at the survey results here. From a pure technology perspective, the highest-ranked topic was Groupware with 48% of the survey votes. From a line of buisness perspective, CRM Service and Interaction Center had the most votes with 28%.
Of course, not everyone who voted in the survey was able to make it down to Orlando for the conference. However about a dozen customers and partners showed up at the design-thinking workshop to brainstorm ideas about how to improve SAP CRM On-Premise. Perhaps not surprisingly, similar to the survey results, a great majority of the improvement suggestions were focused in the area CRM Service. Below is a full list of the topics that were raised during the session.
Service Contracts
- Support for mass creation, mass change, and mass renewal for multiple service contracts
- Improvements for working with large service contracts containing e.g., several hundred line items
- Ability to specify certain high-price items as excluded from service contracts
Field Service
- Ability to track skills/certifications for field engineers in order to enable things like reminders for expiring certifications. Perhaps with SAP / Success Factors Learning Management System (LMS) integration
- Allow field service managers to view their team’s calendar (without having to use SAP resource planning)
- Allow field service technicians to see their own van stock, as well as the van stock of near-by colleagues
Service Order / Service Confirmations
- Support update/refresh of iBase directly from Service Confirmation
- Enable billing deferral for service order until all related service confirmations are closed
- Provide an “Easy button” to automate billing for service order e.g., once all related service confirmations have been closed
- Support workflow for approval of service orders (similar to what is already available for service requests)
Sale Order
- Provide better view of inventory from Sales Order
User Experience
- Enable a unified “omni-channel” desktop for agents that include contact center, social media, e-commerce
- Improve call-transfer experience with e.g., ability to add notes and comments when transferring a call
- Provide greater ease-of-user and user experience similar to what is offered by best-of-breed vendors
- Improve simple / enterprise search to make it easier to search for e.g., opportunities, activities, and other CRM objects from Interaction Center
- Make it easier to export search results (e.g., Opportunities) to Microsoft Excel
All of these suggestions have been shared with SAP product management and will be taken into consideration when planning future functionality and enhancements for SAP CRM on Premise. In addition, customers are encouraged to log these suggestions -- and to "vote" for the suggestions by using the Subscribe feature in the next round of the SAP CRM Customer Connection program that will opens in August.
For those of you who are not already familiar with the Customer Connection program, it is the main way that customers can influence the roadmap for stable and mature products like SAP CRM On-Premise. August will mark the 6th consective time that CRM On-Premise has participated in the customer connection program. You can read about the results of 2014 program here. And stay tuned for results of the 2015 program, which will be posted soon!
