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Trade Promotion Management in SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer

Thijs van Sleeuwen, 06 juli 2016

What exactly is trade promotion management? The term ‘trade’ refers to the relation between manufacturer and retailer, accordingly trade promotion refers to marketing activities taking place between these parties. In fact, trade promotion is a marketing technique aimed at increasing demand for certain products in retail stores based on incentives such as special pricing, value added bonuses and volume discount.

Trade promotions can offer various benefits to businesses; they can be used to acquire brand awareness, customer loyalty, customer retention and an increased revenue. Furthermore, trade promotions can increase a product’s purchasing figures and enlarge a product’s market segment penetration. Moreover, trade promotions can be used to improve distribution of a company’s products at retailers and strengthen the relationship with those retailers. Finally, one of the benefits of trade promotions is also that they can be utilized to introduce new products into retail stores.


From the 1505 release of SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (from now on: SAP C4C) onwards, Trade Promotion Management is part of the solution. While the functionality in that release merely considered replication of promotions from SAP CRM on premise to SAP C4C, a lot has happened since then. Nowadays it is possible to create and maintain promotions in SAP C4C, which paves the road for promotions related scenarios in SAP C4C only. In this blog I will start with the basic setup, followed by a scenario showing how promotions can be used to support your day-to-day sales activities.


Basic setup
First step is to activate the scoping elements for promotions in the C4C Business Configuration. In order to do so, launch C4C in Microsoft Silverlight, navigate to the Business Configuration work center, select the project it concerns, enter edit mode and go to Scoping where you can adjust the scope. In the list of Scoping Elements make sure to select both Promotion Management and the underlying element of Promotions. There are no review questions (yet) for these elements so after this step the scoping adjustments are finished.


The promotions functionality is now added to the scope so the next step is to assign it to a business role in order to make the promotions view available in the C4C marketing work center. This is also done in Microsoft Silverlight by navigating to the work center Application And User Management. There, select Business Roles under User And Access Management. In the list of business roles, select the role to which you want to assign the work center view of promotions and enter edit mode. Then go to the tab Work Center And View Assignments, scroll down and assign the marketing work center view COD_PROMOTION_WCVIEW to the business role. Repeat these steps for all business roles in scope and make sure to save and confirm.


Now the scoping element for promotions is activated and the respective work center view is assigned to a business role it is important to ensure that the access rights are assigned correctly. For this you can use the Actions button, select the option to Check Access Rights Consistency. Of course it is also possible to maintain specific access restrictions on promotions for a business role. This can be done by opening the business role in edit mode, go to tab Access Restrictions and edit the line for work center view COD_PROMOTION_WCVIEW where various restriction rules to read and write can be maintained.


Once all these settings are done the promotions functionality is available in C4C which enables the users to create and maintain promotions, assign products from promotions to sales quotes and orders and view promotions on accounts and visits. Let’s continue with a straightforward business scenario.


Scenario: Order product from Promotion
In this scenario we will create a promotion, assign a target group to the promotion and enter an order with a product from the promotion.


For creation of a promotion, navigate to the Marketing work center and open the Promotions view. There, click on ‘New’ in the top-right corner to create a new promotion. A quick-create menu opens where you can enter various details for the promotion, such as the name, the account type to which the promotion applies, the buying start- and end-date and a short description in free text. The account type can be either an individual account, a hierarchy node or a target group. For this scenario we will use the target group as account type.


After various details are added to the quick-create menu, save and open the promotion. More details can be added to the promotion header, such as the type (e.g. price promotion / long term promotion), the objective (e.g. brand awareness / customer loyalty / customer retention / increase revenue) and the tactic.

Once the header data is entered, it’s time to add a product to the promotion. In this scenario a single product ‘Product ABC’ is added to the promotion. Once the product is added the external status of the promotion has to be set from created (default) to released, otherwise you will not be able to use it.


 

Now the promotion is released it can be used in a sales scenario. In this scenario we will create a sales order for an account from the target group assigned to the promotion. From the quick-create menu you can click the ‘Add Product’ button. A pop-up for adding products appears, here you will now see an option to add products from promotions.


When you click to add a product from promotions another pop-up appears showing the active promotions for the account including the products it contains. Here you can select a product, enter a quantity and add them to the order.

Running a few tests using promotions will enable you to quickly get a grasp of the functionality and how it is best applied to your sales scenarios.

Thijs van Sleeuwen

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