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Optimizing your prospect to customer process with C4C

Gert-Jan Stolmeijer, 28 juni 2017

All companies have a process for converting prospects into customers. This is always an important but complex process. This blog will explain a possible scenario for converting prospects into customers using SAP C4C and SAP ERP as the backendsystem.

Business Challenges

Let’s say your company has the following requirements:


The Solution

The total solution to support mentioned requirements is based on different solutions available in SAP C4C. This blog will not explain each step in detail, but will highlight the most importants mechanism’s to support this process.
The solution is build on a standard available scenario described in the Quick Start Guide from SAP. 
This scenario allows creating only prospects in SAP C4C. When converting the prospect to a customer the SAP ERP master data team will create a customer with reference to the SAP C4C prospect. This will ensure that SAP ERP defines the customer ID and converts the prospect automatically into a customer. 
For the complete scenario to work, the IDOC on SAP ERP side should be extended with an additional ID field (see oss note 577502) and the HCI/PI mapping should be changed according to the instruction in the quick start guide.  
To support the requested requirements use following solutions:
  • Create a custom role field (and remove the standard role field)
    This field should have the value’s: prospect, request customer, customer requested, customer
  • Create different page layout’s based on this custom role field
    • When prospect selected there should be only a little number of fields mandatory.
    • When request customer, all needed fields for creating a customer should be mandatory.
    • When customer requested, all fields should be display only, because now the customer should be created in SAP ERP.
    • When customer only the fields which the user is allowed to change should be editable.
  • Create codelist restrictions for the custom role field
    Using the codelist restrictions make sure that only the value’s prospect and request customer can be selected. All other values will be set by the system automatically
  • Create a workflow rule for setting the custom role field to customer requested
    When the user has set the custom role field to request customer and press save, the system should automatically set the custom role to ‘customer requested’
  • Create a workflow rule for sending an email to the master data team
    When the custom role field has set to ‘request customer’ send an email including all needed fields filled in SAP C4C to the master data team. Based on this information the customer can be created in SAP ERP.
  • Fill customer fields in SAP ERP using SOAP request (optional)
    When the customer does not like typing you can use a SOAP request to retrieve all customer data from SAP C4C and store this into the fields of SAP ERP. 
  • Enhance HCI/PI mapping to set the custom role to ‘customer’
    Immediate when the customer is created in SAP ERP, the custom role field should have the status ‘customer’. Using HCI or PI this can be set automatically
  • Create a workflow rule for sending a confirmation to the requester
    When the custom role field has set to ‘customer’ send a notification or email to the customer employee responsible to inform about the conversion.

Now the complete process has been automatized using different standard solutions from SAP C4C.

Following example demonstrates the solution (in dutch):
  1. Prospect is created with several fields
  2. Request for customer is selected and phone number becomes mandatory
  3. After saving all fields are blocked and status is change to customer requested
  1. Email is sent with customer information and link to SAP C4C
  2. SAP ERP customer is created with reference to SAP C4C ID
  3. Prospect is converted into customer in SAP C4C

Gert-Jan Stolmeijer

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