New Options for Accessing ECC SAP GUI Transactions from SAP CRM Web Client

[Former Member]

Many companies have implemented SAP CRM for the Inbound Contact Center scenario. One of the biggest challenges that they find is the integration with the backend ECC system for quote and order creation at the time the customer is in the phone line waiting for the confirmation number. In this aspect, SAP offers to implement different standard approaches.

List of Standard Solutions:

1. Implementing SAP CRM Sales integrated with SAP SD Backend, the agent of the contact center will create a sales order object in SAP CRM  during the inbound call. This order will get replicated into SAP ECC. For this option you need to make sure that SAP CRM has configured all the pricing, material master and order customizing properly. If the company has implemented SAP SD for many years, a harmonization of SAP CRM will be necessary for all the validations applied in user exits/badis in the SAP ECC SD module.
2. Another solution would be the SAP CRM Lean Order WebUI Interface with a backend SAP SD module instead of SAP CRM. SAP CRM offers a Web Interface that routes the information through RFC into SAP SD and vice versa.The approach considers many validations of the backend of SAP SD because the RFC calls points to the same places as you were creating the order in the VA01 (except module pool screen validations). One of the biggest challenges of this solution is the performance, since we are calling the SAP SD from SAP CRM as many times as the user is hitting “enter”. Another challenge could be that Lean Order does not support configurable products into the maximum extent as you were implementing SAP SD.
3. The last option would be the so-called “transaction launcher”. This solution is a technique to call SAP ECC through a HTTP request session that shows the SAP GUI in a web-browser. This solution will cover all the scenarios of your pricing and order creation but the performance is not good if you consider a customer in the line waiting for the order confirmation. Additionally, there is no standard way to configure the linkage between the order confirmation and your interaction record object.

Besides the standard solutions, I would like to share a new technique for integrating the SAP CRM with SAP ECC. This method is based on the SAP shortcut sending parameters to the process of Order/Quote Creation or any transaction you desire.

Features:

• Ability to call any transactions of SAP ECC from SAP CRM
• Multiple SAP logins available
• Roundtrip or callback information to SAP CRM. For example, an order gets created, and SAP CRM could trace the order from the interaction record. The order confirmation is sent back to SAP CRM
• SAP GUI shortcut has magnificent performance in the integration with SAP CRM during a telephone call
• Implemented in more than five contact centers

Please "click" on the following slides:

As you can see, we have inserted a button in the account overview that calls the VA01 (Order Creation in SAP ECC) sending over the parameters such as Customer number, Order Type, Contact Person. The order creation will be very fast. As soon as the interaction with the client is finished, we can connect the order number with a particular interaction record of SAP CRM.

Now let's take a look at the scenario for displaying past orders/quotes created from SAP CRM.

We have created a web ui component in the account overview that lists the previous orders of the customer. In this particular component, we can click on the quote/order and jump again into SAP ECC for visualization.

Additionally, we have implemented a component in the Account overview where you can add categories and transactions or websites for your convenience:

The user can click over the transactions and the SAP ECC GUI will open the corresponding transaction or Website URL.

Please feel free to connect me if you need any advice on how to implement a similar approach.

Federico Kamelhar

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