Explain Account Management in SAP CRM ?

Answer

• Almost all business transactions in an organization involve certain stakeholders like employee, contact person, organizational unit, etc.
• Within SAP CRM these participants involved in a business transaction are maintained as CRM Business Partner. Following can be involved in a business transaction as Business Partner

• In SAP CRM, business partners are created centrally. Also the roles that a business partner play, such as sold-to party and ship-to party are also maintained centrally
• Thus a business partner created in SAP CRM can be involved in any of the business transaction in different modules like sales, marketing and service. This involvement of the business partner in a business transaction depends upon the role assigned to the business partner and the partner functions involved in the business transaction
• Creating and maintenance of the business partner in the SAP CRM is included in the Account Management application within CRM Web UI. In order to work on the business partner, the user need to have access to the Account management in the Web UI

For a particular business transaction, involved business partners can be found within the Parties Involved assignment block:

• Within SAP GUI, business partner maintenance is available with transaction code BP. SAP has now stopped supporting GUI for CRM transactions and thus Web UI is used for the business partner creation and maintenance
• Account management in CRM Web UI provides 360⁰ view of the business partner data which means it represents complete data of the business partner including:
  • the header details of the business partner
  • relationships to other business partners in the business processes
  • account life cycle of the business partner
  • business transactions in which the business partner is involved
  • change history of the business partner data
• Using CRM Middleware it's possible to populate business partners in SAP CRM using data maintained in SAP ERP. Also updates in the business partner data in any of these systems (ERP or CRM) can be synchronized through the CRM Middleware
• Below is the SPRO path for Business partner customizing. The Partner Processing implemented for a particular business transaction also depends upon the customizing settings implemented for the business partners. Thus the customizing settings for the business partners in CRM are implemented in the SPRO and once done, CRM Web UI is used to create and maintain the business partners