Gert-Jan Stolmeijer
Read all my blogsAll 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
- The user should decide when the prospect will become a real customer
- The system should support the mechanism of requesting mandatory fields before converting the prospect. This should replace the current manual form which should be filled within the company (all companies have such a form)
- The master data team should receive a request for creating a customer from SAP C4C into SAP ERP.
- The customer number should be generated by SAP ERP and not by SAP C4C!
This can be very important, because for the standard scenario SAP C4C will define the customer number. - The requester should receive a message when the customer has been converted.
The Solution
- 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.
- Prospect is created with several fields
- Request for customer is selected and phone number becomes mandatory
- After saving all fields are blocked and status is change to customer requested