Sales Contracts with SAP CLM - Part 2: First steps & implementation approaches

[Former Member]

In our last blog post, I touched base on the business process of Sales Contract Management. With the help of our experienced SAP Consulting
group in particular Jagamohan Padhy, we will now expand our blog series with a lot of interesting topics around Sales Contracts deployment through CLM.

What is the process flow in SAP CLM ?

Following up on the more generic business process of sales contract management, the question of how the actual business process in SAP CLM would look like is coming to mind. Below is a diagram to explain (NOTE: bear in mind that the mappings through PI are non-standard and need to be custom created) 

What are the first steps ?

In order to guarantee that all the steps are in place, the following perquisites have to be taken into consideration:

• Supplier Management & Customer Management Supplier management information has to be renamed considering that now the focus
  is on Customer Management information; this is typically done through changing all localized resources containing "supplier" in the system to "customer".

• Master Agreement types: The Sales Master Agreement should have custom fields/tables enabled to support business process and integration scenario for Sales Contract Management. This can be achieved through Page customization in SAP CLM.

• Global Search: To take advantage of the full capabilities in SAP CLM, all sales contracts and master agreements need to be searchable by types which are typically achieved via creation of queries.

• Data replication to integrated systems: When publishing master agreements on the buy-side, the information is going to ECC-MM whereas in the sales side scenario, the published information needs to go to ECC-SD. There is some custom work which needs to happen in PI to enable publish to SD.

What are the different deployment options?

There are four different implementation options in SAP CLM

1. Standalone implementation for both sales and procurement contract
2. Standalone implementation for sales contract and integrated for procurement contract
3. Integrated implementation for sales contract and standalone implementation for procurement contract
4. Integrated implementation for both sales contract and procurement contract

In a standalone scenario and non-integrated case, SAP CLM can be used for both procurement and sales contracts (case 1). Different sets of master data needs to be replicated into SAP CLM from workbooks, in addition to the standard set for procurement contracts, there would be a need to add also customer master data needs to imported e.g. through workbooks.

In the integrated scenario, once the contract management needs to be also published into the transactional systems such as ECC-MM for procurement and ECC-SD for sales contracts, there is some additional mapping to be done (for ECC-MM integration, please see these blogs). For sales contracts integration to ECC-SD, there is some custom design required.