Product Master in SAP CRM

Concept of CRM product master
SAP CRM provides product master for the management of products part of different business processes in your organization
In terms of SAP CRM, Products are goods that are the object of your company’s business activities. Products can be tangible, such as a PC, or intangible, such as services like PC maintenance
SAP CRM Product master can be used to maintain and retrieve all information on the products that your organization purchases or sells

• It works same across all processes involved in the three modules of SAP CRM, i.e., sales, service and marketing
• The role selected to access the Product master within CRM UI determines the product types that can be maintained by current user
• SAP CRM supports up to six different types of product

• Following are the SAP standard Product Types:
  • Material
  • Services
  • Warranties
  • Financing
  • IP
• Out of these product types IP and Financing are industry specific
• Example of products:

• SAP CRM supports synchronization of ERP material master data with CRM Product master
  • ERP material master consists of various data and views. Some of these views cannot be processed in CRM. In general, only General data, Basic data and Sales-specific data can be transferred to the CRM system
  • Also, minimum changes can be made within CRM if product data is transferred from ERP to CRM
• SAP CRM provides functionality to maintain relationship between products. For example, for an available product we can have service parts, accessories or services, etc. These relationships can used in the Product Proposal functionality
• In Product Proposal, system reads the Product data and using certain properties like relationships maintained, it proposes other products that can be used in the business transaction
• Following are examples of available relationship types that can be maintained in the CRM system:
  • Components
  • Services
  • Service Parts
  • Competitors
  • Accessories
• SAP CRM also provides functionality to maintain a product as configurable

• In this case, the product contains variants (can considered as variables) which can hold the value assigned during the product configuration. For example, for an product “Monitor”, we can have a variant for “Screen Size” where we can assign value for the size of screen during the product configuration
• Customizing settings related to the product configuration are maintained in the SPRO settings
• The product configuration application in SAP CRM has a JAVA based front-end. This application is called as Internet Pricing and Configurator. It is also involved in configuring the pricing for the products in the SAP CRM system
• SAP CRM provides functionality to link this IPC Application with the product master. Thus, for a configurable product, we can call IPC Application from the CRM Web UI
• Product Master can also be maintained with SAP GUI using following transactions:
  • COMMPR01 – Product Master
  • COMM_HIERARCHY – To maintain hierarchies and categories
  • COMM_SETTYPE – To maintainSet Types and Attributes

    Hierarchies, Categories, Set Types and Attributes

• SAP CRM enables structuring of Products with the help of Categories and Hierarchies maintained as part of the SAP CRM Product Master
• There are 3 main predefined Hierarchies in SAP CRM system
  • R3MATCLASS
  • R3PRODHIER
  • R3PRODSTYP
• Custom Hierarchies can also be created within SAP CRM as per the requirements in the business scenario. Similarly, we can create custom Categories for the Product Master
• Categories can be arranged in a tree form such that one category contains other categories
• In order to maintain properties, Set Types are used within the Categories
• In the Category tree, one Category inherits the Set Types from higher level categories
• Set Type can be assigned more than one category within a Hierarchy but only within the same Hierarchy. That is, Set Types cannot be assigned to different Product Hierarchies
• Thus, within SAP CRM arrangement or collection of the Set Types are created to maintain specific data related to Products. Along with this, we can also maintain relationship types within the Categories
• SAP delivers standard Set Types for data necessary for the business transactions
• Also, it is possible to create custom Set Types as per the requirement in a business scenario. These Set Types are assigned attributes which actually store the value
• Following constitute definition of an attribute:
  • Attribute Type
  • Attribute Length
  • Range Value
• Thus a Set Type is a collection of attributes and can be assigned in the product master to a category and hierarchy.
• It is not possible to change the description of a Set Type that is assigned to a Product Category. Also, CRM system does not allow to delete the Set Types that are assigned to Product Category. A category or hierarchy contains properties represented by the collection of Set Types assigned to it and inherited from the higher levels. For example following is an example of categories and set types:

• In this, highest level category is maintained as “High Tech” and “Set 1” is assigned as a Set Type
• Next level categories will inherit this Set Type (Set 1) and can also have its own Set Types assigned for additional data
• Products can be assigned to any of these Categories. Products assigned to a Category get attributes from the available Set Types, i.e. Set Types of current Category and its higher level categories
• Thus in abovefigure , following will be the Set Types available for Product “Standard PC”:
  • Set 1
  • Set 3
  • Set 5

    Products in Web UI

• Product Master in SAP CRM is integrated with the CRM Web UI. Thus, depending upon the role used to log in to the CRM application a user can perform creation, modification and deletion for Product Master within CRM Web UI
• Following figure shows the Search page for the Products

• In the Product Details assignment block we can see the general data maintained for the Product
• Mainly this includes:
  • the base unit of the product
  • status of the Product
  • Base Category
  • Checkbox which indicates if the product is configurable

• There is a separate assignment block to maintain the categories relevant for the product:
• Also there are generic assignment blocks like attachment available for product

We can also maintain categories and hierarchies within the CRM Web UI:

• Hierarchy Details:
  • In this assignment block header detail related to the hierarchy is maintained
• Categories:
  • Categories assigned to the Hierarchy can be seen in this Assignment Block
  • This is maintained in a tree structure as we have seen in the previous section
  • For each type assigned we can define the Product Type
  • Also we can maintain Object Family for each category
    • An object is a globally unique object that an organization can sell or provides services for
    • It can be tangible or intangible object
    • Object family is another criteria to group product
• Assigned Set Types:
  • In this assignment block, Set Types can be assigned
  • Set Types from the above level category are inherited automatically
  • Inherited Set Types are disabled in this assignment block

For selected Category for example “Desktop” in above screenshot, there are further assignment blocks in the Hierarchy Overview page as shown below Also we can maintain Relationship Types for the selected Category: