SAP CRM consists of 3 main modules.
- marketing – (presale)
- dirty
- service – (after sales)
Marketing: the marketing module helps the marketing department with customer acquisition. This includes one or more of the following activities
- Campaign Management – This includes different campaigns like email, phone, and other forms of customer engagement programs.
- Commercial promotion management –
- Segmentation – Segmentation is the process of segregating your customers / leads / opportunities into different segments. This is used to effectively use the time and resources available in a specific marketing plan.
Sales: Sales involve the OTC Cycle (Order to Cash) excluding the logistics part. So this effectively includes
- Order management: This includes order management, contract management, quote management, and other sales-related activities.
- Billing – This includes billing for created orders. Billing can be done in ECC or CRM. This is especially suitable for service-related billing.
Service: The service module involves most of the activities that are involved in the SM and PM modules of SAP ECC. Include
- Service order management
- Management of repairs and returns
- Contract Management Service
- Management of equipment and installed bases
Channel Management: There are many ways in which these services can reach the customer. In SAP CRM terminology, these “shapes” are called CHANNELS. And the management of these channels is called Channel Management. Channel examples include Internet, email, field applications, e-commerce, CIC, etc.
- Field applications – Examples of field applications include applications specifically designed for devices such as PDAs, mobiles and other devices that can be used directly in the field. For example, a large soft drink company uses a field application on a special mobile-based ordering device that scans stocks and orders directly from the device and interacts with the internal CRM server. Similarly, Seven-11 uses a field app that scans the stock on site and, depending on certain presets, orders directly the next time the device connects to the internet.
- electronic commerce – Depending on the situation, there could be B2B or B2C e-commerce applications (now called web channel) that provide sales to customers.
- Customer interaction centre – It has a very sophisticated call center management system called Customer Interaction Center or simply IC. In previous versions, there used to be a separate SAP client for this called the Win Client. The latest versions (including 2006, 2007) use IC WebClient, a fully web-based software used for call center management. This software interfaces with the SAP CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) module to manage incoming and outgoing calls.
Analysis: Together with a SAP BW system, statistics and key figures can be extracted in CRM and is called an analysis module.
Using a combination of core modules (Sales, Marketing, Service), Channel Management (Different Channels), and Analytics, you will probably hear multiple variants like:
- E-commerce marketing (marketing through the web channel)
- Ecommerce sales
- Mobile sales (sales through the mobile channel)
- Mobile analytics
- IC Sales
- IC service (service using the call center channel)
- IC analysis
- and many more
Versions – See the release notes to find out the difference between the different versions.
- 3.0
- 4.0
- 5.0
- 6.0 (2007)
- 7.0 (2008)
