Customer Master Data integration with SAP Cloud for Customer and ECC

Marco Meijs, 03 February 2016

Integration with your SAP ECC backend is one of the standard features of SAP C4C. The Integration options are flexible but this also requires you to make decisions on how you want the integration to work. One of the things you need to decide is how you want to cope with updates of your customer master data.

Some subjects to consider are:

Do you want to allow changes in SAP C4C to update your customer data in SAP ECC?
Do you want to allow users to convert Prospects into Customers in SAP C4C which in turn creates an account in SAP ECC?
Do you want to keep the creation of Customers in SAP ECC limited to you Master Data Management team?

The level of data that you want users to update is also important. For instance, will you allow the creation of new contact persons and relationships in SAP C4C and should they be sent to ECC?

In most of our projects we see that Prospects are allowed to be created and updated in SAP C4C, but Customer master data is not (excluding for instance the creation of new Contact Persons and Relationships). Changes in Customer master data, and creation of new customers, need to go via the Master Data Management team who in turn create/update the data in SAP ECC.

As different roles in your organisation have different views and opinions on the customer data, it is important to make sure that roles and responsibilities are properly defined in your processes and that the systems reflect these decisions. For instance, a marketeer might agree that the customer’s address should be the address where the buyers are located, while sales might agree that this should be the visiting address, while finance might say this should be the (legally) registered address.

Beside the fact that in the above example there are technical solutions for maintaining multiple addresses for different usages, you probably don’t want to trust your account managers with the ability to change the customer’s address, as this might result in misdirected invoices and dunning letters, risking legal issues.

Due to this you probably want to implement a handover from sales and marketing to the backend (finance) once a prospect converts to a customer. To do this, let me explain how to prevent changes in C4C once the owner of the data has changed to finance.

How to setup your SAP C4C to only allow changes on Prospects and not on Customers.

A Customer or Prospect in C4C is defined by the Role that is assigned. When you create a new account in C4C it will get the role Prospect. Customers created in ECC will get the Role Customer. By default the user will be allowed to update all data in C4C, which we do not want in our case.

What we need to do is:

Create a new Page Layout for the Customer Role with the required fields set to read only.
Assign this Page Layout to the Business Role(s) concerned (for instance Account Manager).

Create a new Page Layout

1. Make sure you are on the page you want to create a new Page Layout for. In this case the Account details page.

2. In the Adapt menu select “New Page Layout”

3. Now set all the fields to read-only that you do not want to be updated for a Customer in C4C

4. Save the Page Layout as: Z_Customer

Assign the new Page Layout to a Business Role

The new Page Layout is now created but still need to be assigned to a Business Role

1. In the adapt menu you select “Assign Page Layout”

2. Here you select Business Object: “Account“ and Instance Type: “Role”.

This will give you an overview of all the Business Roles and Business Partner Roles that can be used. In below picture we have the ACCOUNTMANAGER Business Role on the left and to the right we have the Customer Role.

3. At the moment the “Master” Page Layout is assigned, we have to replace it with the newly created “Z_Customer” Role.

After you have done this and you save the changes, Account Manager will no longer be able to update the master data for the fields that were set to read-only.

How to disable the change from Prospect to Customer in SAP C4C

If you want to prevent accountmanagers from changing prospects into customers, you can disable the functionality in the Business Role.

To disable the change of a prospect to a customer in C4C you can add Business Field Restrictions to the Business Roles you do not want to allow to make changes. In below example we will use the ACCOUNTMANAGER Business Role.

1. Go To “APPLICATION AND USERMANAGEMENT” -> “BUSINESS ROLES”
2. Select the ACCOUNTMANAGER Business Role
3. Press the Edit mode
4. Select “FIELDS & ACTIONS”