Best Practices for Transferring Data from SD to SAP CRM

You can use SAP CRM to perform order processing and pricing tasks you used to perform in R/3. Find out how to move this data from your R/3 system to your SAP CRM system so you keep any enhancements you made to the R/3 data to support your business requirements.

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Key Concept

To move data from R/3 to SAP CRM, you use a pair of user exits. On the R/3 side you use CRM0_200, which is the standard user exit in the R/3 back end that sends data to the CRM Server. On the SAP CRM side, you use SMOUTIL3, which is the standard user exit in the CRM Server that performs the final check of the incoming data before accepting it into SAP CRM.

Perhaps your company is considering implementing SAP CRM to take over functionality you currently carry out in R/3 Sales and Distribution (SD), such as pricing. Regardless of which SAP CRM component you plan to implement, downloading the R/3 customer and product masters ensures consistency between your planning and sales support system (CRM) and your finance and execution system (R/3).

If you have had your SAP system for a while, you may have enhanced your R/3 system to support specific business needs. In general, these enhancements support specialized pricing requirements or other requirements that lead to adding new fields. Let me show you how you can incorporate these enhancements into the CRM environment so that a move to CRM is a step forward for your company and not a step backward.

You should use these processes if:

• You need your data for order processing and you plan to take orders in SAP CRM
  
  
• You use your data for pricing and you plan to carry out pricing in SAP CRM
  
  
• You use your data for workflow or sales assignments

I’ll describe the three methods you can use to move data from R/3 to SAP CRM and enhance it in SAP CRM, and then show you the options for the data flow processes. I’ll also point out some differences between R/3 and SAP CRM data, such as transactional and pricing differences. In general, this article applies to R/3 4.6C and above, including SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and SAP CRM 4.0 and above. SAP changed the Internet Pricing and Configurator (IPC) significantly with SAP CRM 2005, so comments concerning pricing are most relevant to that environment.