Introduction: 

This content  shall help Duet sales management consultants, sales management implementation team at various customer projects to set up the right data distribution rules (a.ka. replication rules) for sales management based on the business needs.

Customers in the process of implementing sales management, prospects who want to implement sales management in the near future often have queries about configuration of replication rules. In my opinion, the first step towards the successful implementation is the selection of the best data distribution rule (a.k.a replication rule) that satisfies the business needs of the customer. In the first part of this write-up, I shall illustrate (with few business case examples) the best practices that can be followed by customers/prospects to configure accounts and contacts replication rules supported by sales management.

Few sentences about the application scenario before I illustrate the best practices, sales management is a MSFT Outlook based business scenario supported by Duet (joint product by SAP and Microsoft). This business scenario integrates with SAP CRM and helps end users to execute critical business processes like managing customer and contact information, managing customer visits via the more familiar MSFT office environment. Additionally, sales management also helps end users to access business critical reports from the SAP system.

SDN has few resources that you may want to visit to know more about this application scenario:

1. Few words about "Sales Management": https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/duet?rid=/webcontent/uuid/30b32246-c09c-2910-3cbe-8bc8d5337805  
2. Duet WEBINARS (check out "Feature enhancements in Duet applications"): https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/duet?rid=/webcontent/uuid/80fbf741-9f70-2b10-a282-b09a75f0ab35

Customer case 1:

“Sales representatives/managers in my organization are assigned to customers via the concept of relationships supported by SAP CRM. Contacts are related to these customers; hence a sales representative gets a complete snapshot of the customer information (along with all related contact data)”.

This is a classical example of the most abundant customer case. In this case, customers should follow the steps outlined below:

1.  Use “Accounts based replication rule”.
2. Assign appropriate relationship categories, these relationship categories shall be used by the system to replicate accounts between SAP CRM and Duet (for every Duet user).
3. Assign appropriate relationship categories for account-contact relationship. These relationship categories shall be used by the system replicate contacts for all the replicated accounts from SAP CRM to Duet.

Customer case 2:

“Sales representatives/managers in my organization are assigned to customers via the concept of relationships supported by SAP CRM. Contacts are related to these customers and assigned to sales representatives; hence a sales representative gets a complete snapshot of the customer information (along with relevant contact data that the sales representative is responsible for)”.

This is another good example of a customer case where the business administrator not just wants to replicate accounts and contacts from SAP CRM to Duet but also wants to control the number of contacts (based on relationship between the sales representative/manager and the contact) replicated between SAP CRM and Duet. In this case, customers should follow the steps outlined below:

1. Use “Accounts based replication rule”.
2. Assign appropriate relationship categories, these relationship categories shall be used by the system to replicate accounts between SAP CRM and Duet (for every Duet user).
3. Assign appropriate relationship categories for account-contact relationship.
4. Assign appropriate relationship categories for contact-sales representative/sales manager relationship.
5. Relationship categories (between account-contact) along with relationship categories (between sales representative/sales manager-contact) shall be used by the system to replicate contacts for all the replicated accounts from SAP CRM to Duet.

Customer case 3:

“In my organization, a sales organization works on few accounts where as we have many contacts assigned to every account. We want our sales representatives/sales managers to interact with the contacts directly hence the data distribution from SAP CRM to any other solution must follow this basic business logic”.

This is a classical example for contacts driven replication of business data from SAP CRM to Duet where-in contact assignment to the end user plays pivotal role in the replication of information. Customers want their sales representatives/managers to concentrate operating with few contacts working for a specific account to achieve their sales mission. In this case, customers should follow the steps outlined below:

1. Use “Contacts based replication rule”.
2. Assign appropriate relationship categories, these relationship categories shall be used by the system to replicate contacts between SAP CRM and Duet (for every Duet user).
3. Assign appropriate relationship categories for contact-account relationship
4. Assign appropriate relationship categories for account-sales representative/sales manager relationship.

Customer case 4:

“In my organization, we use territory management extensively and want to leverage this investment in the context of Duet meaning we want the data distribution to use this business logic”.

This is a classical example for a business case where a customer wants to leverage existing SAP CRM investments in Duet i.e. use a custom business logic in SAP CRM to distribute relevant data from SAP CRM to Duet

1. Use custom replication for accounts (this is a published BADI which customers can use to derive list of accounts relevant for replication between SAP CRM and Duet).
2. The rest of the steps to derive contacts are illustrated earlier.

By the way, Duet also supports custom replication rule for contacts but customers can only use custom replication rule for accounts or contacts at any given time.

I hope this post is useful for planing your implementation. I shall cover activity management replication rule in the second part of this post.