Territory Management - Rules based on relationships?

[Former Member]

Hello Experts!

We are going to study the implementation of Territory Management in SAP CRM 7.0 EhP2, mostly because it will be necessary for authorization management in the near future. However we currently manage this in an custom external tool that does other things related to TM as well, and replacing it is not an option for the moment.

The way things currently work is that the data is coming from SAP R/3 and has a relationship linked to the Customer that is considered its Territory.

The Sales Territories have Business Partners currently in our system, and we have a relationship automatically updated from R/3 that is created between the Customers and their given Sales Territory.

The idea would be to create an automatic rule based on this relationship (one for each Territory node then). We cannot duplicate the rules that we have in our external tool as they are not only based on Business Partner classifications, but other non-objective criteria so rules don't really exist currently. Is that possible? Documentation is fairly generic on this topic and quite complicated to test it out and figure it out by myself (or if you have a tutorial to point to that would be good).

An idea would be to have a custom program update the Territory ID field based on this Relationship I guess, but if we can craft this rule in SAP CRM Territory Management that would be better.

Another point, is the way "Employee Responsible" would be managed this way.

We have two Sales groups, one is directly managed by the Sales Territory hierarchy that we will implement, the other one is more for very specific Customers. These two groups work together if Sales Reps are assigned to the same Customer (it's not one or the other).

We are not sure yet how to manage this. Whether doing it in our external tool, and working it's way to SAP CRM using a Partner function/Relationship as we're already doing. Could we create a second Territory hierarchy for these specific sales reps that have their own worlds? It would mean having 2 Sales Territory assigned to a Customer, which would probably be impossible? Maybe not?

The issue here is the authorization for both groups, and the fact that they should be able to find quickly their own Customers in SAP CRM, update their Appointments, Tasks etc.

TL;DR version:

- SAP CRM 7.0 EhP2 Territory Management: can we create a rule for Customer assignment to a Territory based on a specific Customer relationship?

- Can a Customer be assigned to multiple Sales Territories (one being the real Employee Responsible, the other one being some "VIP" sales with absolutely no automated rules)?

Thanks a lot for ready through this, I hope you have some feedbacks or ideas to share. I'm open to any suggestions.

JB.

Added TL;DR points.

[former_member267933]

SAP CRM territory management has rule-based assignment functionality. CRM allow user create its "if, then'' statement to drive the Account assignment within territory management. The mechanism is the SAP CRM rule engine which is part of SAP CRM package. The business users only need to define the business rule how to assign the accounts.

With the rules, user can define conditions following whatever the business rule fit to your sales territories. Standard SAP CRM provide 3 condition groups, Account (who are your customers), Product (what do you sell) and Sales Area (which channel you sell). Within each condition group, SAP provide certain attributes allow users to set up Territory rules. for example, Account ID, zip code, country, customer group, product type, product hierarchy/ category, sales area etc,

SAP CRM does allow one account being covered by multiple territories. if there are multiple territories for an account, when leads/ opportunities are created, the system will pop up sales employees of the territories and user can select one of the employee as the employee responsible for the transaction.  ( The assumption is the territory is used for partner determination of the transaction)

In simple statement, you don't need a custom program to do rule-based territory assignment as long as you use the condition available provided by SAP CRM, otherwise the enhancement is needed for the rule assignment. Also SAP CRM does allow an account covered by multiple territories. However, how you want CRM application process when there are multiple territories will be driven by your business needs