SAP Safari

Today we had an account determination issue that made the day interesting... The problem was that the invoice document was not posted to accounts because of the 'Account Determination Error'. When there is an Account Determination Error, the first place to look at is the 'Account Assignment' field in the Customer and Material Masters, whether anything had been changed? Because if a smooth working system suddenly stops working the first casualty could be the master Data. When I checked that there was no change in the Customer Master. However there was a change in the Material Master Data that it was set for deletion. I was tempted to buy that reason but I realised that the efforts to post to Accounts was done much ahead of the deletion flag indication being set. However that was also a learning point - when you can't process an article that was marked for deletion in Sales Order itself, there is no way that the article came via Sales Order.

Cross Selling is a concept where the companies / sellers try to maximise their revenues by proposing materials that are related the products which their customers buy. Example - If a customer buys a TV set, the seller can propose additional materials like Speaker System, Extended Warranty at extra cost etc. This is also an useful feature in SAP SD that was not mentioned anywhere in the TSCM60/62/64.

SAP SD Course (TSCM60/62/64) touches the concept of Item Proposal in the Sales Document types topic. The "Implementing SAP SD" written by Glynn C Williams, normally called as 'Bible of SAP SD Consultant', elaborates more on this Item Proposal through the document type PV. However I feel that SAP Academy is missing out an intresting topic / concept of Dynamic Product Proposal and Cross Selling in its course. Wherever I showed this demo to my SAP Academy students, I was always asked "Why SAP didn't include this functionality in the course?" What is there in these topics that fascinated the students.

Once there was a scenario presented before us which was as follows:- The customer places the order over the phone and the whole subsequent processing must be actioned only after the receipt of full amount in advance. In other words the client wanted the goods to be "invoiced" before delivery creation. We were asked to address this scenario with least or almost no standard deviations/developments and we came up with the following responses.