Sales order approval for customer service

How to create outlook signature

hello everyone welcome to this month's edition of webinar Wednesday my name is Juliana Pluto I will be moderating two session today we have German begonia our relationship manager out in Ontario to talk to you about SVP business Juan alerts and approval procedures so we'll leave some time for Q&A at the end of the session but you can feel free to submit your questions using the questions panel on the right side of your screen at any point throughout the session Derwin I'll pass it over to you okay thanks very much Jailene and welcome everyone again to another edition of Wednesday webinar so today's session is on approval procedures and alerts so you know this is something that's been around forever since day one and I'll be demoing this in nine-point-two patch level 8 the most recent version of Sapa business 1 but like I said these are features that have been around forever but a lot of customers still asked me for a little bit of a refresher on how to set these up how to use them and today I'm just going to go through some some features on setting up approval procedures alerts and we're going to go through some of the ones that our system defined that come right out of the box and we're also going to look at how we can build our own approval procedures and alerts okay and some of the main benefits behind this is that it actually helps us to eliminate errors and it can increase customer satisfaction because having an approval procedure is basically a second pair of eyes think of it as document validation so for example if there's an illegal discount on a document it can be sent to our manager for approval and that helps us to eliminate errors we can decrease our customer returns and credit notes to customers and ultimately increase customer satisfaction also what's an alert while it basically notifies someone about something and again their system define alerts and there's also user-defined alerts that we can create on our own and we can actually schedule these and again it's just better visibility into our key data so that we can make quicker and smarter decision the agenda today is we're going to take a look at some of the prerequisites needed you in at ap business want is set up these alerts and approval procedures we're gonna look at what comes out of the box and we're going to look at creating some our own and then like jayleen said we're going to end it off with some Q&A so let's get right into the demo all right okay so what you're looking at like I said this is the latest and greatest version of Sapa that's one so there are some prerequisites to consider so the first thing you want to do is going to administration go into system initialization and go into general settings and all we're going to do under the services tab is we're going to check a couple of boxes here so what we want to do is this box here that's a display inbox when new message arrives okay we want to make sure that's checked there's also some other little boxes that we can check as well but we also want to update messages in my case every minute now you can change that to every 5 minutes every 30 minutes whatever your preference is but for today's demo we're going to update messages every every minute okay now if some of you are running the Hana version of s ap than this one there is another prerequisite so under the software landscape design make sure that you have that you go under alert settings under the job service configuration and you make sure that this alert service is running okay so with that being said let's take a look at my message alert inbox now as you can see in my inbox and if your case you're wondering how do I show this inbox you can actually go into Windows and you can show messages in order to review and you can see in my inbox I've got some alerts and some maybe some approval procedures that are awaiting for example this one here that's highlighted it's renew contract so this is a system defined alert that's reminding me that this particular customer has a contract renewal it's actually already ended his his existing contract ended on April 3rd 2007 so the nice benefit behind this is that this is an upsell opportunity for me it's an opportunity for me to contact this customer and upsell them on a contract renewal so this is an example of the system generating an alert automatically to remind me of something okay that's a system alert and we also have some user-defined alerts as well and we're gonna get into that in a little bit but let's start things off with approval procedures okay so we'll just minimize this so if we go under administration and we go into the approval procedure and then approval stages this is the first step to creating an approval first we need to define who are authorizer is so let's say for example we have a scenario if you want to alert the alert the sales manager if a user creates a quotation with a discount of 20% or higher right so in this case I actually have one Cree to find here I'm going to do search here I have one called the legal discount so I give it a stage name it's called a legal discount give it a detailed descriptions where the discount is greater than 20% and I have the option of making one approver or multiple approvers in this case I only want the sales manager approved to approve the quotation but I could have the CFO be approve be an approver as well similarly I could also have one or more people to reject this document in this case I'm only going to have one person that can approve or reject the sales quotation if there's a 20% discount or more in this case it's my manager step is to create the approval template so I have one that's defined predefined here call the legal discount give it the same name now all we're doing here under the originator tab is we're specifying which users need approval so for example I have three users here and if any of these three users create a quote 20% or more it's going to go to the sales manager for approval I also have a couple of checkboxes up here I want to make this active because I want it to be in effect straightaway I can also have this active when a user is either adding a new document or updating an existing document under the documents tab this is where I actually define which documents are subject to this approval in this case I only want the sales quotation but basically any document in the system can be subject to an approval the stage tab is where I relate this stage that we just created which in other words the manager is the approver we're relating this manager to this template we're saying this manager can approve or reject these quotations that have it just kind of 20% or higher now under the terms tab we have some system defined approvals that are already set up here so let me just actually show my screen look at my columns here so as you can see system comes with some predefined terms here in this case we have a pretty defined term where it's gonna look at the discount percentage on the header of the document and we can specify a rule here or a ratio that says whenever it's greater than and I give it a value in this in this case greater than 20% there's also some other terms here so we can also look at if there's you know a quotation or a document where the deviation from the credit limit is greater than or equal to let's say 25% right or you have a deviation commitment so we've got the customer has more deliveries that are committed in the system we can define a value behind that and we can set that for approval also girls profit percentage if there is a document where you know the girls profit percentage is less than a certain value certain percent we can have that sent to approval as well there's also deviation from budget budget and also of course a total document approval procedure - so the total document is that's a greater than or equal to $50,000 it goes to an approval procedure as well so in this case we're only concerned about this room here so just to recap there's a discount that's greater than or equal to 20 greater than 20% we want to flag that for an approval so with that set all we're going to do now is log in as one of these originators one of these users so I'm logged in as CRM one and now I'm going to create a sales quotation I continue to discount 20% let's take an item let's just say any item here okay and as you can see if I scroll to the discount percent column or sorry discount percent field here at the footer I'm going to put in let's say a pretty high discount list to say 30% and now if I click on add it's going to invoke this pop this prompt that says generating this discount of this document require the authorization of other users so their approval template as you recall called it legal discount so I'm gonna send a remark to my manager please approve this quote and we stay okay so what's going to happen now is the system is actually going to send this to the manager for an approval so in the managers inbox he's going to get our request we to approve this quotation so now let's go log in as the manager and check out his inbox and we're just going to give it a moment because it updates every one minute okay let's give it a moment and it should come any second here there it is so you can see because I defined my system to alert me every one minute it's going to show within a minute so I have this request for approving document generation I highlight it I can see the remark from my salesperson that please approve this quote and I can also drill into the quote you can see it's actually a draft is draft number 27 so let's drill into that draft okay and I can see the details I can see it was requested by user CRM one the documents a quotation the current status right now is pending and I can even drill into the quote itself so I can see okay well this particular user is giving a 30% discount on this item but I want to check out my girls profit calculator and I can see you know the girls profit percentage of 72% that's not bad so I still feel like it hi so I'm gonna actually reject it and I'm gonna say you can only offer a 15% discount so in this case I have a couple of options for my decision I can say approved or not approved so I'm gonna reject it I'm gonna say no please decrease discount to let's say what did we say let's say 15% alright and what's gonna happen is now in this in that user serum users inbox he's gonna get a message in the inbox saying that document has been rejected one thing I also want to point out though is there's also some reports here so I have something called an approval status report and if I open that I can actually run a report based on different document statuses so I can say show me all my documents with these particular statuses I can pick a specific user that I want to run it against if I leave a blank it's gonna run it against all users and I also want to run it for specific documents so show me all the documents that are in the approval process for quotations and sales orders and if I say ok I can see I've got currently 3 documents and here's the last one we did this one is in draft mode because it hasn't been approved yet ok and I can see the status here is that it's been rejected I also have another report here that someone is called the approval decision report so there's three decisions there's no decision yet there's approve there's not approved and again I can hit or by a specific user I can filter by specific authorizer or even by template and even by date range if I run it you'll see some rows are in red right and some are in black the ones that are in red are the ones that have been rejected or not approved okay so let's go log back in as the sales user and let's check out their inbox sure enough there's a message in his inbox here says operation and approval process has been rejected the comment I made please decrease discount to 15% so now because remember it's in draft mode at the top left here it's still amendable so I can change it if 30 to 15% and now I can add it and now it's no longer in draft mode as you can see at the top left it's actually committed to the system it's a real sales quotation okay so that's an example of how we can use an approval procedure to catch information to make sure that documents aren't being processed that shouldn't be processed in this case where there's an illegal discount so that was an example of a system defined approval procedure but what if I want to create my own approval procedure based on my own criteria how do I do that so let's go back to administration we're going to go to approval stages here and again we're going to go into fine mode and here's an approval stage that I created here so the scenario is that the customer has an existing or outstanding balance of 100,000 or more any sales order or quotation has to go into approvals and so again we have our sales manager who's going to be the approver and now we're gonna go into our approval template so again let's find our template we have one called VP balance greater than 100,000 in this case I'm just going to make it active now here are all the users that are subject to this approval the documents I want to look at our quotation and sales orders stage again that's the stage we just created we're going to relate it to this approval template and now the term at the bottom of the screen you see something called terms based on user queries so I actually wrote a query let's take a look let's just take a back step here and look at that query that I wrote it's a very simple query so all this query says is if a customer has a balance of a hundred thousand or more and if that if it's true then I basically want to identify that that customer if it or that order if it's true I want to stop that order from going through if it meets that criteria on the query right so it's looking for any customer with a balance of a hundred thousand or more and now all we're going to do is apply that query all I got to do is double click in here go into the quarry manager and select that query why that to this approval template so now I'm just applied a custom query that I wrote to this approval procedure so let's go back and log in as the salesperson and all we're gonna do here is create an order for any item but we're gonna pick a customer that has a balance of a hundred thousand or more so there's a customer you can see I actually have a four-minute search that returns his balance in here you could also drill into the customer code and look at their balance directly from the business partner so in this case this customer has a really big balance they've got over four million dollars outstanding so that's not good so we actually want this to go into an approval procedure so we'll just pick any item here I can actually go into recommendations for this customer I can add let's say this item here ok and what's going to happen is if I click on add it's going to invoke the request for document approval so here's their approval template VP balance greater than 100,000 K and I'm going to say please approve he's my brother say ok so again that's gonna go back to the sales manager in a minute or so but the idea behind that is now you have the ability to actually customize your own approval procedures right so you can create any query you want on how to on how on any criteria and that's just going to basically invoke the the approval procedure now we do have other webinars on using the query generator if you want take a look on our website and look up some of our past videos on how to create some of these queries what you can do is actually if you go on to our website here ww project line CA and you go under support and then webinars you can actually see a whole bunch of videos that we've done in the past so here's one called using si P business one query generator in case you're you're curious about how to write your own query we have some very great tools so let's go back and log in as our manager and sure enough we have another request here for a document approval we see the comment please approve he's my brother looking drill into it and we can say fine approved and we'll put a little comment prove one time okay all right so that's an example of using an approval procedure based on a custom query now one thing you may have noticed is these approvals for example the first one where we did an approval at the document header level so let's go back to this one here we're sorry it was a quotation go back to the last quotation so this last approval procedure looked at the discount at the document level in other words at the header level over the footer level but what about discounts that are applied at the row level so one thing you should be aware of is the SI p and so on approval procedures at the moment only validate information at the header level does not yet have does not yet look at the information at the matrix or the grid level so anything that's on the row level it doesn't go into a document approval procedure yet they might do so in the future but not right now so one way to get around that is to you could actually create if you are savvy with equal your sequel expert you could create something called a stored procedure or a transaction notification and write a transaction notification or sorry a stored procedure that basically stops this quotation and looks at different the the different criterion that the row level and you can actually have a read error bar and that could that could stop a document from being added for example if there is an illegal discount or another option is if you will you have the be one-up add-on from Boam which is a wonderful add-on by the way you could create something called a line loop now a line loop is basically feature that looks at every single line basically loops through every single line in a document and it looks for specific rules and validates specific lines and it checks to see if certain criteria are met for example is there a discount at a legal discount is there information missing on the road I want to calculate or sum all the rows it can do all of those things so let's just go through some really quick example so again today's purpose is not to show you how to create line loops but line leaves can create those popup message is create error messages it could actually validate information at the row level and if you want to learn more about using line loops again go to our project line website and check out our video here on line loops there's actually tons of videos on here that we've done on features of functions because he people it's one okay so what we're going to do now is we're going to go into let's say a sales order or maybe even a quotation and the scenario is this I want to create a validation if there is a row discount that's greater than or equal to 25% okay so what we're going to do is open up a sales order I'm going to right click here and I'm going to turn on that little line loop feature called line loop prompt if discount is greater than or equal to 25% okay let's go ahead didn't create sales order we can't pick any item here okay so let's say for example I put in a discount of 30% okay and I click on add the system - gonna send assistant message prompting me check discount on Row 1 you are not authorized to discount 25 percent or higher increase discount or you're dead I don't want to die so I'm gonna decrease that discount but did you actually notice it actually told me which rows so let's say I had multiple rows let's say I had you know another roll on here and I had a discount of 30% on there as well and I click on add it's actually a tell me Row 1 Row 2 are my offending rows so this is great if I have let's say a document with a hundred rows it's actually going to tell me which offending rose out of illegal discounts so I can go into these roads and I can change this one to zero and then I can decrease this one to say ten percent now I can add that okay so the benefit here is instead of having to go through an approval procedure because that's still manual is it has to be reviewed by your manager they got to drill into it maybe they got to check out the girls profit they've got to actually send a message back to you saying to change it there's still some manual work in there so what if we could actually automate the entire process where the system validates that information and it forces you to correct the information on the spot this way errors don't get missed right so another example of that is we have let's do another I'm going to show you another line loop that I have here this one's called check rolls without price okay so again I have a row let's say by accident this is a big item here $63,000 I accidentally delete that unit price for whatever reason and I click on update the system is gonna warn you it's gonna say the falling rows do not contain a price on Row one click yes to proceed click no to enter our price well I definitely do not want to sell this expensive item here without a unit price so I'm going to put you know a price of $54,000 in there okay so again another great weight another example of using a line loop validation is we can actually tell the system to insert a row automatically for us so let's add Freight to a sales order roll for example okay so I'm just going to delete this row so the scenario is if I'm selling an item that weighs less than 100 kilograms so you can see this this item here only weighs not even a pound so if an item weighs less than 100 kilograms then we want to add a shipping charge automatically so if I say update I get a prompt that's as weight is less than 100 kilogram do you want to add a free charge well I can say sure yes absolutely so now you can see the system automatically puts a freight charge in the roll for me right um there's another one here another example of this Oh actually let's do another so let's say for example I add or that weighs a lot this one does this row is 275 kilograms so let's let's see what happens here if I update this you can see I no longer get that prompt because the system know that this order is more than 100 kilograms so it's not going to prompt me for free this customer actually qualifies for a free freight right so there's no free charge one more example real quick of how a line loop can help you out here is what if I want to automate a free gift of something so in this case if a customer purchases more than $10,000 they get a free gift right so let's just maybe we'll just do any update to this order here we update the order execute a line loop and it says this customer is eligible for a free six-pack of beer this item will be added to the order automatically and we say ok so now you can see there's a new row in here for a six-pack of beer so again this is this is some way this is one way to use a system to help you automate certain things it prompts you it alerts you you don't have to go through an approval procedure in this case because certain discounts can be handled illegal diskens can be handled at the onset during the creation of the order so those are some really great benefits here if actually creating more efficiency in your company it's decreasing potential mistakes decreasing customer returns and credit notes because of incorrect orders that replaced ok alright so moving along let's move on to some alert I'll talk about that so I think I showed you earlier there were some system defined alerts in here so for example a system defined alert like that one here the renewal contract right or the order recommendation these are reporters that come right out of the box informing me in this case that I need to create some purchase orders for some of these items because we're running low on stock right so wouldn't it be great if that system actually told you when you should create these purchase orders or even production orders for a certain item so those are some system alerts let's take a look at some other system alerts real quick so go to administration and we go into alerts at the very bottom and I do an asterisk here while we're in flying mode I'm just going to sort by type you can see there is some some system alerts here and there's some user alerts that I've created so you have everything from aviation from girls profit deviation budget deviation from commitment limit etc etc but what if I want to create my own alerts based on my own specific criteria an example of that would be this one right here ap invoices number of days before due date so this alert basically is a nice proactive alert it notifies me of upcoming vendor invoices that I have to pay and it tells me the amount of days before their due date you can see here on the alerts management I set this as a high priority alert I want the finance person notified and I also want the sales manager notified I can also specify the frequency of this alert maybe I want it every one hour right but you could also set it so that it's every day at say 8 a.m. okay and what you would do is you go to this button here you click open saved query and all you're going to do is point to that particular query so for example and believe I have it under here ap invoices number of days before due date ok so I'm basically assigning that query to this alert ok let's take a look she have it that it's already run here so let's take a look I can double click on it it's going to tell me this subject it came from the server and the date and the time that it ran and within the data tab here you can actually see it tells me 29 days for the due date tells him to do date the AP invoice number the vendor code the vendor name and the document total I can even have a snapshot of that here so anytime I highlight it I get the snapshot over here okay another one that I created was this one here they are invoices number of days before a due date so again this is a great alert because the system is automatically telling me which customers are going to be paying their invoices very soon so it's like a snapshot into my cash flow right so I can drill for example into one of these err invoices and look at the details if I wanted to and I can see like I'm expecting you know about was that about 150 thousand dollars so coming in in the next month this one's going to be within two days and these other invoices I'm expecting payment within the next thirty days okay I also have one here called daily sales report and this is a nice way of the system doing the work for me so the system is basically sending in your report daily on on my sales numbers so if we take a look at how to create that one for example right again I'm setting up the alert to be sent to the manager it can be an internal message that appears in s AP or it can even be in the email I can send an email and in this case I want this to be activated every day at exam ok again I have a query behind that if I run it or look at it this one right here and I can assign it to this particular alert ok so that's really those are some examples of I'm system defined as well as user-defined alert so the idea behind this is let's be proactive and let's get some proactive alerts in the system as opposed to us reacting and having to make you only created reports when we need them right the system is doing the work for us it's automatically generating reports so it's giving us some key information and visibility into our data all right so with that being said that's the end of today's webinar so I would like to open up the fort any questions thanks Germany maybe you commit yeah yeah you bet so again if you have questions just type them into that questions panel on the right side of your screen and we'll we'll read them out and give drouin a chance to to answer them for you I just want to reiterate something that German touched on a couple times in the session our webinars are all available on our website so you know if you ever have questions about business one any of the features our website is a great place to start because that's every webinar we've ever done there's also some great how-to articles there so make sure that you make use of those resources thanks again to Derwin and thanks to everyone for attending