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What’s new in Customer OnDemand 13.02 & Customer OnDemand upgrade process.

Nick van de Hulsbeek, 10 april 2013

Last year on August 15th we introduced Customer OnDemand with 3 blog updates.

The first blog was http://blog.acorel.nl/2012/08/customer-ondemand-part-1.html

Now in April 2013, SAP introduced the newest release (13.02) of Customer OnDemand.

In this blog I will provide you more details about the new features in Customer OnDemand and give you a clear explanation about the upgrade process provided by SAP and address some important upgrade questions.




 

New in Customer OnDemand 13.02

Partners



SAP Customer Ondemand now provides the functionality to manage your business relationships with partners. In the workcenter Partnersyou can create and edit partners and their partner contacts. An administrator can make this workcenter available for specific sales roles.
You can add partners and their contacts to Sales Leads and Opportunities. You can find the partner information on the partner tab within for example a Sales Lead.

Relationships



Where are the new relationships visible? Open an Account and click on the tab Relationships. If the tab is not visible you can add the tab via personalizethis screen option and flag the Relationship checkbox.
                        
All business relationships of an Account are stored here. Here you can add a relationship as well. Business relationships are really common within the SAP CRM on Premise solution. So if your integration scenario is with a CRM back-end this is a really nice new feature.

Visit reports



A commonly used feature by salesreps is the use of visit reports. Often these are Word templates manualy attached to an appointment. With this new feaure you can generate a visit report which includes all relevant account and appointment information including your own notes. You can generate a Visit reports in an appointment via the action button. If you click on the button Generate visit report a PDF will be generated.

In the Attachmentssection you can see the PDF document link.
In the picture below you see an example of the default Activity Visit Report template. You can however adjust or extend the report in Adobe Lifecycle Designer, here you can for instance add a company logo or include custom fields available on the report. SAP Customer OnDemand provides two Adobe Lifecycle Designer Add Ins either for offline editing of templates or do minor enhancement with the in application Adobe Lifecycle designer tool.
Once the Visit Report is generated you can send the Visit Report to attendees and involved parties for the appointment.

There are also some minor, but useful, new features:

Opportunities approval



Users can now submit opportunities to sales managers for approval. Within the new Approval tab, sales managers can review submitted opportunities and approve them individually, based on predefined criteria, or have the solution approve them automatically if desired. Sales managers can also return opportunities to sales representatives for revision if needed.

Marketing Leads



Users can now post feed updates from any marketing lead. Advanced search is also supported for marketing leads. Users can drag products from the Products side bar and drop them onto any marketing lead to assign that product to the lead.
See the picture below, just search your product and drag and drop to the lead.

Lead Routing



Set up rules to automatically assign leads to sales representatives based on criteria such as geographical location or lead source.

Upgrade process for Customer OnDemand



Beside the new available functionality it is important to know how SAP will upgrade your CustomerOnDemand system on your request. First of all SAP will perform internal tests and will do a validation of the new realease. Then SAP will make a system copy of your productive system and upgrade that system (1). You will receive a new system URL to the system copy which is upgraded to the latest release (2). Here you can perform test scenarios and report incidents. Later on your productive system will be upgraded (3).


In case you identified an issue with your SAP Customer OnDemand test system you open a support request via your SAP Customer OnDemand system. SAP will confirm the business impact and the possible consequences of your upgrade schedule at least 3 days before the productive upgrade.




What if you identified a business critical issue which has been verified by SAP?
If needed, SAP will postpone your productive upgrade.
 
Is it possible to choose another upgrade weekend?
As several customer tenants are on one OnDemand system, all customers on the specific system will be upgraded at the same time.
Thanks for reading my blog. We will post more SAP Customer OnDemand blogs during this year. Hopefully this blog will give you a better idea of the new features in SAP Customer OnDemand 13.02 & the upgrade process. If you have questions, please feel free to ask.

Nick van de Hulsbeek

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