CRM Offline - A Unique SAP-.

NET Solution at Derstines

CRM Offline
An Innovative SAP-.NET Solution at Derstines Food Service
Table of Contents
Introduction The Challenge The Solution Using the Solution Order Guide Territory Management Lite Customer Information Controlled Synchronization Looking Ahead More Information

Introduction
Today we face an onslaught of thin-client or web applications - a rising wave of dominance that the entire world is eagerly bowing to. 3G connectivity is said to be near universal while telcos show maps with 4G covering more and more of the continental US. Web applications are all the rage since they can be run from any device that has a browser - as long as they are connected. While that is all true, there still remain many requirements for client-server applications, that cannot be met with an application that is mostly server-based. (Yes the Chrome Books have a market, but it's not that big yet.)

A case in point was the requirement at Derstine's Food Service (DFS). DFS is a wholesale food distribution company. As is typical for organizations in this business space, the order

CRM Offline - A Unique SAP-.NET Solution at Derstines entry system was highly optimized for their system of working and order taking. The DFS Sales Representatives (DSRs) carried a laptop with them which they used, to take orders from customers. The laptop had an application that regularly synchronized with the back-end legacy ERP - customer, material, inventory and price updates were sent to the laptop, while sales orders were sent back to the ERP. The order-taking usually happened at the customer locations - usually restaurants and small stores.

The Challenge
When implementing SAP at DFS, an online solution-based approach was first considered for remote order entry . There were several issues with that option: 1. Connectivity: Many customers were in areas where the DSRs did not get 3G coverage. Some areas do not even have EDGE, and yes some do not even have cell phone service. Much of the US is covered by 3G, but not all of that area is covered by the same service provider. Last but not the least, cellular data service is not nearly at the level that wired service is at. Sometimes you are connected but the speed is very low. The customer needs answers (stock availability, price, product info) even before the question is asked - a split second delay there could mean a lost sale. Other times you cannot even connect: maybe the data card or device needs to be "re-booted" or "re-plugged in". Maybe you need to restart the device software on your laptop. Or even restart your laptop. These were actual issues we heard from the users.

2. Data Volume: While connectivity forced the issue, in hindsight even with full connectivity, the amount of data needed was huge enough to be a challenge: you needed to be able to download a customer's "order guide" - essentially a material listing - fully priced, with inventory information and order history for that material, on demand - in less than a second. Plus you needed to be able to list the entire product catalog with prices and inventory information, again on demand.

3. Dropped Signal: Another issue that was considered is the possibility of losing connection in the middle of

CRM Offline - A Unique SAP-.NET Solution at Derstines the order. Orders often had dozens of lines (think of your weekly grocery list if you were buying for really big family). Imagine hitting save and realizing you lost your entire 50 line item order. "Errr Mr Customer? We seem to be having issues with our system - can we go through the last 20 minutes of haggling again? As usual I will run around behind you as you check your stock and give me orders."

So the next solution that was evaluated was SAP CRM Mobile Sales. We encountered issues here too - some only after the project had started. 1. Solution Footprint: SAP CRM MSA has a huge footprint - three instances of the CRM middleware server (DEV, QA and PRD), two instances of MDX and three comm station machines. Despite being a relatively small company, DFS agreed to this huge overhead.

2. Order Entry: This was the main issue that rendered MSA unusable. CRM MSA offers a very powerful order entry screen. However it was not like the screen that DFS users were used to, which meant it was not optimized for their order entry process. Data that was on their main screen now needed drilling down. This was not practical because customers needed immediate answers to make decisions. Customizing this screen is a very specialized skill set within the SAP developer community, and relatively rare. Even then, there were some must-have items that just could not be achieved. MSA development is not as simple as "add an element to screen and link it to database". There are layers between the screen and the database - which serve a useful purpose but also make development and changes difficult and expensive.

3. Data synchronization: Being a wholesale food company, prices of items changed every day. A business requirement was that some of the pricing components should not be displayed on the order entry screen, so we used a "front-end" condition type which would be updated every evening based on the value of a range of "constituent" condition types. Somehow this created a huge number of condition records that needed to be synchronized each day, resulting in synchronization times that were simply not acceptable to the customer. In hindsight this might have been a solvable issue, but it would not fix issue #2, and this was a fast-track AIO implementation so time and resources were at a premium.

CRM Offline - A Unique SAP-.NET Solution at Derstines

Thus the solution that was finally arrived at was an Occam's razor of sorts: replicate relevant chunks of the SAP ERP database to the DSR laptops into a local database and give the users a slick and light .NET application to take and transmit orders.

The Solution
The .Net application, code-named "TinyMSA" did three things: 1. Sync with SAP It called standard and custom-built function modules in SAP ERP to get master data like customers, materials, material lists and prices and saved them into a local Access database. 2. Light Desktop Application It provided the users with a light application that would read these tables and assemble an "Order Guide" - a single screen with material details, a bit of order history for that customer, inventory, customer-specific pricing and commission calculation among other things. This order guide would enable the customers to create and save a sales order request. 3. Transmit Orders It transmitted the sales order request to SAP calling the standard sales order create BAPI, and saved the acknowledgment back in the Access database.

Using the Solution

Order Guide
The order guide itself was the single biggest piece of functionality. 1. Users can easily build an order from a Product Proposal and also search for and add new materials to the order.

CRM Offline - A Unique SAP-.NET Solution at Derstines 2. It allows users to change a unit of measure, and re-calculate pricing (including a breakage charge where applicable), and handled catch weight material units appropriately. 3. Users can "hide" a material so they never have to see it again, easily see the margin on each line (including total commission) 4. Users can set a "margin" for a price (so it would automatically be priced based on this margin regardless of SAP suggested price) 5. Users can set a "preferred unit of measure" for an item for a customer (e.g. customer always buys mayonnaise in Eaches, and never a case.) 6. Users can also print forms (quotes and order acknowledgment) from the application.

The application starts up in 1-2 seconds and transmission times are in seconds too, except for the material list. Users can also print forms (quotes and order acknowledgment) from the application.

Territory Management Lite

SD organizational elements were used to distribute customers among the Sales Team in a two-level hierarchy. Thus a DSR could only see her own customers, but a manager could see customers for herself and all her reporting DSRs.

Customer Information
Users get an easily accessible and searchable customer database that includes information like: 1. Customer names and addresses 2. Customer ship-to information 3. Customer delivery days and times

Controlled Synchronization
Users can control what they want to synchronize: 1. Customer Master

CRM Offline - A Unique SAP-.NET Solution at Derstines 2. Material Master 3. All Customer Order Guides 4. Selected Customer Order Guides

Looking Ahead
Possible future enhancements would include using ALE to streamline the master data synchronization process (especially for materials) and adding more features as they are enabled in the ERP system.

More Information
If you found this paper interesting and would like to know more about the solution, please feel to contact: Anthony Tauro, YASH Technologies (anthony.tauro@gmail.com) Zach Derstine, President, Derstines Food Service (zach@derstines.com)