We design and implement SAP CRM solutions for different clients, and one of the business requirements we often hear about from sales force managers is their need to monitor and manage the sales activities of their sales teams. With high-value customers, managers prefer to have more visibility and control over the sales activity for the account. A typical scenario involves a key account manager/strategic account manager (KAM/SAM) who has an account that is geographically distributed with various account managers. The KAM/SAM wants to plan sales activities across the sales team and also determine that the client receives the same message from each member of the team.

You can break such business scenarios into the following major requirements:

• Monitor sales force activities. This can be done through SAP standard reports, such as the pipeline performance report. Another option is to search for activities Belonging To My Team in the Activities search screen, which is taken from SAP CRM 7.0 (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Searching for sales activities

• Manage sales force activities. This requires the KAM/SAM to schedule activities for the team. Although the SAP CRM standard solution provides the capability to any user to create an activity for a user/business partner in the system, this is a time-consuming task. It requires the KAM/SAM to manually create an activity for each member of the team. Also, a consolidated view of these tasks is not available. As high-value customers have multiple people from the sales force team interacting with them, this leads to a situation in which many people update the same customer account details with new information collected from various visits and sales activities. Although SAP CRM provides the feature of account notes, the ability to have a notes log is not available.

Business Requirements to Address

To illustrate the solutions that are available, let’s walk through a case study that we recently worked on for a client regarding sales force activities. Below are a series of business requirements that the client mandated:

1. Managers should be able to see the day-to-day activities and tasks of their subordinates in a central and unified view using SAP CRM:

• Standard SAP CRM features — SAP CRM only displays the activities of a logged-in user in the My Calendar view. The standard allows searching on Activities Belonging To My Team. However, the search result is not very intuitive (i.e., it was not displayed graphically).
• Needed feature — Enhance the My Calendar view to provide a generic team calendar view for managers. 

2. Managers should be able to create new activities or tasks for their team members in easy steps with proper coordination among the team:

• Standard SAP CRM feature — The standard My Calendar view allows a user to create an activity by navigating from the calendar, but the user can only do this for himself or herself.
• Needed feature — Enhance My Calendar for managers to allow activity creation for other sales employee with simple drag and drop features.

3. Managers should be able to easily navigate to activity details from the calendar and then from the calendar to the account overview. This feature is standard and thus no modification was necessary for the client.

4. Managers should be able to easily capture notes for an account with log features that allow users to view history:

• Standard SAP CRM feature — Adding notes in the account overview screen is available. However, the system does not keep a log for these notes, and creating a new note deletes the old notes. This was the trickiest client requirement for us to deal with because the business partner account does not support this feature.
• Needed feature — Develop a workaround to allow managers to maintain a notes log.

To meet the above business requirements, we developed the following options, which the client later implemented.

Enhance Standard My Calendar View to Team Calendar

You can generally meet business requirements 1, 2, and 3 either by using a team calendar view or creating a workaround. Table 1 captures the available options with their pros and cons. This helps you understand why the client implemented the My Calendar option, as it provided a unified view and ease of use.

Table 1

Options to allow a team calendar view

Figure 2 shows the standard SAP CRM calendar view of a logged-in user. As you can see, it only displays the appointments of the logged-in user. We wanted to leverage the My Calendar view to instead reflect a team calendar for managers. From here on, I refer to the standard view as My Calendar view and the enhanced version as Team Calendar view.

Figure 2

Standard SAP CRM calendar view

At this point, to understand how the Team Calendar view was achieved, you need to understand how SAP CRM identifies managers. This will help in identifying users for whom the Team Calendar view should be enabled.

There are various ways to identify the managers in the system. For example, you can configure the business role as managers or use an organization model. Then the system identifies the team members of the managers from business partner relationships or from an organization model. Given that an organization model is a single place where both managers and team members can be identified, it keeps the design consistent to use an organization model as a source. This will also determine that updates to the master data can be read from one place. To read an organization model, follow menu path CRM > Master Data > Organization Management > Organization Model > Change Organization Model. 

We performed a custom development (technical details explained later) to enhance the My Calendar view to leverage it as Team Calendar view, which gives managers the capability to view his or her daily activities along with those of subordinates. The enhancement required the following steps:

1. Read the organization model to obtain the position of the user.
2. If the user is the head of the organization unit, the custom logic retrieves the users assigned to the organization unit as subordinates and displays their open activities for the current date in the calendar.

Figure 3 shows an example of an organization model. In the example, M Limited is a sales organization and there are various sales offices under the North Division. Employee 2 is division manager of North Division and can view, navigate, and monitor the activities of subordinate users (e.g., Emp 3, Emp 4, Employee 5, and Employee 1) from the sales offices listed (e.g., B1, B2, and B3).

Figure 3

Standard SAP CRM organization model

Also, when Employee 1 (who is the B3 Branch Manager) logs in, he or she can view, navigate, and monitor the activities for the subordinate users (Emp 3, Emp 4, Employee 5) because they are assigned to the B3 branch.

Figure 4 shows an enhanced view for the B3 Branch Manager. We needed to enhance SAP CRM WebClient UI component CRM_CALENDAR to achieve this, as we’ll explain later in the technical section. The B3 Team Calendar view displays the calendar of the team members to the manager (Employee 1), along with his or her own calendar.

Figure 4

Enhanced Team Calendar view

We capture the technical details of the Team Calendar view option in a later section of this article.

Update Team Sales Activities

Another business requirement from the client was to allow managers to create and update activities of their team members. The standard SAP CRM calendar feature allows a user to create and update his or her own activity using the drag-and-drop feature. The enhancement to the standard calendar offers the same feature for the manager when it comes to team member activities. Managers can use the drag-and-drop feature to do the following:

• Change the time of an activity for an employee
• Change the employee in the activity and keep the time the same
• Change both the time and employee of the activity
• Create a new activity for each employee, one at a time

We explain how to do this in our technical details in the next section.

Technical Details Behind the Calendar Enhancements

This section captures the technical details for the various calendar enhancements requested by the client. Given the technical details, a minimum understanding of SAP CRM ABAP is a prerequisite to understanding the concepts explained below. Users can choose to skip this section.

Following is the high-level flow process for the technical enhancement:

1. Log into SAP CRM WebClient UI and navigate to the Team Calendar (Branch Calendar) work center
2. Choose CRM_CALENDAR/Calendar view, which invokes Enhance CRM_Calendar/Calendar view
3. Create new method Retrieve_APPT in enhanced implementation class, which is a copy of private method Retrieve_appointments
4. Receive the list of users who are assigned to the logged-in user’s organization unit
5. Append the list of users in the existing variable lt_user
6. Call existing service to get the appointments of each user and store the list against each user in an internal table, which is a page attribute of Calendar.HTM
7. Change Calendar.HTM for Day event and loop at pt_attribute to generate the individual column for each user
8. Copy the CHTML library to pass the names of users to display on the header of each column

Let’s explain the high-level concepts in further detail:

• Superclass CL_CRM_CALE_CALENDAR_IMPL, which is of a generated enhanced implementation class of Calendar view, has a private method called RETRIEVE_APPOINTMENTS that cannot be inherited. Following basic ABAP, create a public method RETRIEVE_APPT, use the same code as in RETRIEVE_APPOINTMENTS in enhanced class initially, and comment the logic around month and week view. You need to pass the list of the users who belong to the same organization unit as logged-in users in the existing internal table lt_user.  
• Use SAP CRM function module BBPU_GET_ORGSTRUCTURE_OF_USER to get the organization unit of a logged-in user. Use function module RH_OM_GET_HOLDER_OF_POSITION to retrieve the list of the users who are assigned to the same organization unit. A logged-in user can be assigned to multiple organization units, so you need to retrieve the users in multiple branches (in this case using the same function modules described above).
• Perform an ABAP loop at exporting table DISP_TAB of function module RH_OM_GET_HOLDER_OF_POSITION where type = “CP” (employee). Get the username by passing disptab-objid to function module CRM_CENTRALPERSON_GET and call Lr_cale_cuco > Retrieve_appointments inside the same loop by passing the user name and begin/end time stamp.
• Retrieve the display text on individual appointments, which is standard ABAP functionality.  Append the result in the global table (GT_APPOINTMENTS) of type structure below. DispTab-text will give the name of employee. Make use of Clear and Refresh statements wherever necessary inside the loop.

Establish an Account Notes Log

Our client also wanted to use a notes log at the Accounts Overview Notes screen and have the ability to navigate to it from My Calendar. Although the My Calendar and Team Calendar views support the navigation, we evaluated the Accounts Overview screen and found that it does not support the notes log feature.

The client’s requirement further stated that the notes, once entered, needed to carry a time stamp and would not be subject to further editing. The standard Accounts Overview screen also did not support this feature.

Figure 5 displays the standard SAP account notes. Any new note entered by a user overwrites the old notes. Also, there is no time stamp maintained for the notes.

Figure 5

Standard SAP CRM Accounts Overview Notes view

To achieve the desired functionality of a notes log in the Accounts Overview screen, we evaluated the following options:

• Enhance the Accounts Overview Notes view to provide log capabilities
• Leverage SAP CRM activities and develop a notes log as an interaction log feature (an interaction log is a particular type of SAP CRM transaction)

Table 2 compares the above options. The client decided to leverage SAP CRM activities because doing so met the business requirements and needed the least development effort.

Table 2

Options to allow a notes log

Figure 6 displays a new activity type called New Note that we configured in the system. To achieve this, follow menu path CRM > Transaction > Define transaction type.

Figure 6

Custom button for New Note

We enhanced the interaction history assignment block as follows:

Step 1. Add a custom button for New Note in the Interaction History assignment block using Business Server Page Server Workbench, which calls the Outbound plug to create a new activity type (e.g., new note).

Step 2. When users wish to update the log with a new message, they can click the New Note button in the Interaction History assignment block of the Accounts Overview screen (Figure 6). The users can reach the Accounts Overview screen from the My Calendar or Team Calendar views. By clicking an ID or Description in the screen, users are navigated to a Notes details screen (Figure 7).

Figure 7

Notes details screen

Users can create a new note by clicking the New button, which navigates users to the screen in Figure 8.

Figure 8

New note screen

Step 3. The default status of the notes is set to Closed via status profile. Doing so determines that the notes activity directly pushes to the interaction history. Now a note log with date stamp and employee stamp is available as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9

Non-modifiable notes log with date stamp and employee stamp

Step 4. A user can navigate to one of the notes by clicking an ID or Description and have the relevant information to take proper action or to view the latest update to pursue an opportunity with a customer.

An Easier Job for Managers 

Our customized options for monitoring and managing the sales force can allow a manager or user to enjoy:

• A single view to monitor, assign, and transfer daily tasks within a sales force, providing greater flexibility to managers at the operational level
• An integrated view from the Team Calendar to activity to account details, determining that full information reaches managers and employees via the account notes log feature
• Better control over sales force activities, improving resource optimization
• Buy-in from the middle managers, who quickly found that the solutions reduced overlapping activities within the sales force and curbed confusion about these activities

Caveats With These Options

We evaluated the chosen options under the given client circumstances, thus they may not be the preferred options for all companies. We recommend that you evaluate the options carefully prior to using them. Also, because there was no groupware integration with the client, you may need to evaluate the effect of modifying the standard calendar on groupware.

In the case of leveraging SAP CRM activities as notes, there is an increase in transaction volume, so we advise you to discuss this aspect with your IT support team. Also, we recommend that you consider an archiving strategy to keep the data volume in control because if you use transactions as notes, the amount of transactions in the system increases, which raises the need to archive this information for better system performance.