Hello World, S/4hana for Customer Management 1.0

SAP CRM's Past life

Before me in the public number article? Can you tell me the three CRM solutions from SAP? I mentioned that I worked as a member of the CRM product development team at the Chengdu SAP Research Institute for some time.

I asked the German old-timers who worked at SAP's German headquarters when the earliest version of SAP CRM came out, and the answer was the beginning of the century.

As a PC game fan, I think of a lot of Chinese and foreign games to enjoy the Microsoft operating system DOS, Windows, 98, M, Me and XP,? The 20 was fleeting, and now they are far from our sight.

Back to the SAP CRM I used to work for. Whenever Jerry Debugs SAP CRM in SAPgui. Those created fields appear as the ABAP code at the beginning of this century, and the mind cannot help but emerge the image of the maxima of Cao's boss and his God:

Same? Can you tell the difference between these three CRM solutions from SAP? Another product developed by the development team of the SAP Chengdu Research Institute:S/4hana for Customer Management 1.0

Today (February 28, 2018), this product has finally unveiled the TA's mystery: In the SAP Chengdu Research Team and other SAP global colleagues of the joint efforts,S/4hana for Customer Management 1.0 came out!

SAP CRM on-premises Some of the sales and service functions (hereinafter referred to as SAP CRM) have been successfully integrated into the S/4hana and become part of the S/4hana. For SAP's flagship product S/4hana, you can use the word "four" to describe this fusion. I am proud that I am a part of this product development team and have contributed some of the code and technical challenges to the research and prototyping.

In the traditional SAP system Integration deployment architecture, SAP ERP and SAP CRM through the middleware for data synchronization, if improperly configured, data synchronization may occur in the form of XXX problems. Fortunately, SAP CRM middleware has a large number of users around the world, the product itself is very mature, so the SAP ecosystem has many middleware-related documents, so you do not helpless when encountering problems.

The good news is, in S/4hana for Customer management, the original CRM and ERP data synchronization process of the headache has been avoided from the design level, because in this product running CRM Sales and service business, The business data used and generated is, of course, stored directly in the S/4hana system, eliminating the need to use middleware for data synchronization.

For details on the sales and service features supported by S/4hana for Customer Management 1.0, please refer to the SAP official help documentation.

Let's see how this product looks. Click on the tile shown in Fiori Launchpad to open S/4hana for Customer management journey:

For friends who have used SAP CRM, the next is the familiar flavor. If you maintain the value of the parameter crm_ui_profile as * in the background user profile, you will be able to see all the available business roles in the login interface:

Now I log into the system with character S4C_SRV_ICAG and run a call center related scene.

Suppose a customer named Jerry called the call center and made a service request for a product he had purchased with an ID of 11.

When the agent receives the call, it first confirms Jerry's identity: it can be based on the account ID or other contact information provided by Jerry in the system, such as mobile phone number, email address, etc. (all supported methods are shown in the fields in the Identify Accounts area). The way in which the seats are used is to confirm identities based on the account ID.

Agent enter the account ID provided by Jerry and click the Search Account button:

Select the search results and click the Confirm button.

Then, based on the Product ID 11 provided by Jerry, search for this product and click the Create button on the toolbar to create a service order based on that product.

This is the final list of orders generated:

My public number backstage received a lot of friends of the message, asked about the product details. Here are answers to the questions I can answer.

1. What technology is the UI of S/4hana for Customer management developed?

A: The SAP CRM WebClient UI is still used, not SAP UI5. This is good news for friends who are familiar with the CRM WebClient UI development technology, which means that the time you've spent on this development skill has not been wasted, and you can continue to glow on S/4hana. For those who want to learn new UI development technology, S/4hana's CDs view+smart template is a combination that gives you the opportunity to use the new technology. If you want to try Smart Template, please refer to my public number article:? Jerry's Blog Collection, which developed Fiori applications through CDs view + Smart Template, contains specific examples.

2. What is the difference between the sales and service processes in S/4hana for Customer management and the corresponding processes in SAP CRM?

A: At least in the 1.0 version that has been released, the former is a subset of the latter. Subsequent releases will introduce more sales and service features in SAP CRM that are supported in S/4hana.

3. Answer question 2: The same business process, S/4hana for Customer management technology implementation, and SAP CRM compared to what is the difference?

A: The same function, such as the material master data search, although from the end user's eyes appear to be in the same UI click on the Search button, but the technical implementation of the two products are different. The differences are mainly reflected in the generic interaction layer and the lower data model of the middle green region, and the API for CRUD (adding and deleting) operations around these data models.

The changes to the database tables are most understandable, and in both products there are many models of the same concept that are actually described in terms of business, such as product for SAP CRM and Material (item)in S/4hana. In CRM we create a product with transaction code COMMPR01, and its related data is stored in a series of tables beginning with comm_. S/4hana, however, creates the item in the transaction code MM01, which is stored in the main table Mara and a list of tables.

The above description reflects a situation in which SAP CRM and S/4hana describe the same concept of the business in different technical models respectively. In this case, we are faced with the problem of model choice in the process of introducing the sales and service process of SAP CRM into S/4hana. The guidelines we use are: using the S/4hana model.

This means that in S/4hana for Customer management, the APIs used in SAP CRM need to be adjusted accordingly, and the operation of the SAP CRM data model in these APIs requires redirection to the S/4hana corresponding data model.

To give a specific example:

Take the database table that stores the item as an example. The first part of this article introduces the S/4hana for Customer management in the Appearance section of the Product ID 11, in SAP CRM we are going to table comm_product based on product_id to find the product. And in the S/4hana need to go to the table Mara find.

It is worth mentioning that, in the development of this new product, we are not simply to find all the code in the use of the SAP CRM data model, the place to replace the S/4hana data model. We have done many optimizations based on the S/4hana architecture to give full play to the powerful features and innovative technologies that the S/4hana system provides at the bottom.

A specific example is the product search feature mentioned at the beginning of this article. This feature is implemented by the SAP Chengdu Research Development team. The underlying implementation of SAP CRM product search is based on database table comm_product. In the S/4hana for Customer Management, my colleagues did not simply copy the ideas directly to the S/4hana Material database table Mara, but adopted a new model of S/4hana, designed a CDs view. When the user clicks the Search button, the underlying execution searches for the CDs view.

With CDs view, we've followed the familiar code Push down in the S/4hana modeling field, ensuring that as much of the logic is executed directly at the database level, leveraging SAP HANA's powerful data processing power.

If you are interested in the important modeling approach to CDs view in S/4hana, you can read the CDs view overview article on SAP community that has been accessed by over 20,000:

ABAP Core Data services–introduction (abap CDS view)

https://blogs.sap.com/2017/09/09/abap-core-data-services-introduction-abap-cds-view/

To learn more about the technical details of CDs view, please refer to my public article: Jerry's CDs View self-study series, which contains 14 articles, is all about the technical implementation details I learned by reading the CDS framework source code and debugging. And some of the examples and tools I've done.

4. How does the one order model in S/4hana for Customer management improve compared to the model in SAP CRM?

A: A lot of improvements, Jerry ate 3 months of potato + bread at SAP headquarters in Germany last year.

In SAP CRM, the data of an order is scattered in different database tables, the most well-known is the crmd_orderadm_h that holds the header information and the crmd_orderadm_i of storing the line item information. The ADM (Administration) in its name is a hint: the vast majority of business data for orders is not stored in these two tables, but in other exclusive tables.

As shown, the different color rectangles in the diagram represent the different types of nodes in the one order model, each with a dedicated database table, which may contain dependencies that are maintained in the Central database table Crmd_link.

All of these database tables add up to more than 200. This data model has proven to be very successful in traditional transaction applications: the fact that SAP CRM is widely used in many global customer segments explains everything. In the analytics usage scenario, the above data model needs to work in conjunction with another model, the index table crmd_order_index known to the CRM consultants.

As the name implies, the introduction of this table is a space-for-time strategy-the Index table holds some of the data from the Business data table, at the expense of partially redundant storage space, to reduce the time spent in analytics computing.

In the S/4hana for Customer management, one order's underlying storage model has been greatly simplified. All header level data for an order, such as order number, description information, type, creator, creation time, shipper, receiving party, etc. are stored in a new database table crms4d_serv_h .

The corresponding line item information is stored in the table crms4d_serv_i.

The CDs view, which is constructed on this flat-structured data sheet, minimizes the connection between the database tables needed to extract the data for the analytics scenario, giving full play to S/4hana's strong data processing capabilities, It also fundamentally avoids the waste of storage space caused by the introduction of index tables.

• From the user's point of view, the combination of S/4hana plus the CDs view is the best performance guarantee in the analytics scenario.

• From an architectural standpoint, the transaction and analytics applications of S/4hana's sales and service business use the same set of new data models, compared to many of the business-specific tables of SAP CRM on premise +crmd_link+crmd_order The design of the _index has been greatly simplified. More importantly, the introduction of the CDs view allows S/4hana for Customer management to benefit from the continued innovation of SAP in the field of CDs view.

• From the partner point of view, the simplification of the underlying model also reduces the complexity of the partner error. At the same time, thanks to the elegant layered design of the one Order API in SAP CRM, the changes to the underlying storage model described above do not affect the interface of the one order API. This means that if you have previously been able to run Crm_order_maintain and crm_order_save these APIs in SAP CRM two times, then you are engaged in S/4hana for Customer management and one There is no problem with order-related two development-there is no change in the usage of these APIs.

5. I am an SAP CRM development consultant. Will I lose my job in the future?

A: If you have the patience to read here, I believe you have the answer in mind.

On the one hand, in the S/4hana for Customer management, two times the technology used to develop, the foreground is still the CRM WebClient UI, plus the backend one Order series API, which makes everyone's previous years in this field of technology accumulation is not wasted. On the other hand, this new product is running on the SAP flagship product of S/4hana, which opens a door to every CRM consultant who wants to learn S/4hana.

I have a feeling, learn a new technology, or a new product, in the work and actual combat learning, its efficiency and knowledge of the depth of the mastery of more than in the spare time to look at the information this way of learning. S/4hana for Customer Management, to provide each CRM consultant a larger stage, so that we can not only continue in the field of sales and service, but also to learn s/4hana at work, I personally think this is a good opportunity for development.

Since Jerry continues to develop subsequent versions of S/4hana for Customer management projects, this public number will bring more introductory articles on this product in the future.

If you have other questions about this product, please comment in this article or leave me a message in the background directly. If you want to be part of the SAP Chengdu Development team and work with us to make S/4hana for Customer management better, please send me a message to the background of this public number. I'll get in touch with you.

Hello World, S/4hana for Customer Management 1.0