This is the first in a series of blogs designed to give you technical and business process background information on the SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence rapid-deployment solution.
General Information on SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence
SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence encompasses a suite of solutions that allow you to gather and consolidate customer engagement intelligence. For a high-level solution overview, you might want to check this blog on the speed of deployment (weeks), the low risk deployment methods, the scope, customer pain points and business benefits.
For details on two of the available solutions, refer to these articles:
- SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting: Target the relevant audience with the right offer at the right time!
- SAP Customer Value Intelligence: Optimize your profitability by identifying your customers' values
General Information on SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence rapid-deployment solution
The rapid-deployment version 1.11 that is currently published has been released based on SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence 1.1 SP00. Customers and partners can find detailed information in the SAP Service Marketplace: https://service.sap.com/rds-cei.
- Navigate to Solution Discovery for overview information and offline demos.
- Navigate to Solution Deployment to download the step-by-step guide that contains all relevant implementation documentation.
On this page you can also find a link to a software requirements document with detailed information on the required software components.
In the following paragraphs you can find information on the relevant software components, on data load options, and on backend systems for the rapid-deployment solution.
Base Software Components
To implement the rapid-deployment solution, the following minimum software components must be installed:
- SAP NetWeaver 7.40 SP03 with SAP HANA DB 1.0 SPS6 Revision 61 (or higher)
- SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence 1.1 SP00 (as add-on installation on SAP NetWeaver)
Data Load Options
Since SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence is an analytic application, you must load the data you need for your analysis into the application. There are several options involving SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and SAP HANA to do this:
- In the best practices content of the rapid-deployment solution, use the detailed documentation to understand how to replicate data via SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server (SAP LT) from SAP ERP and/or SAP CRM. If you want to use SAP ERP, SAP enhancement package 1 for SAP ERP 6.0 or higher is mandatory. For SAP CRM it must be SAP enhancement package 1 for SAP CRM 7.0 or higher.
- Alternatively, you can install SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence on an existing SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA or SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA system. In this case, data replication via SAP LT is only required if you want to load data from both SAP ERP and SAP CRM.
- If you want to load data from a non-SAP backend system into SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence, you can do so via SAP BusinessObjects Data Services. For this option, refer to the rapid data load for SAP HANA applications rapid-deployment solution.
- You can also load data into SAP HANA via the spread sheet upload. This option is most likely only of interest during the development phase.
Optional SAP BusinessObjects Software Components for Additional Analytics
With the SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence rapid-deployment solution a variety of additional SAP BusinessObjects Web-Intelligence reports and dashboards are made available. Please refer to SAP note 1820507 for download instructions.
To implement the additional SAP BusinessObjects content, you need to install at least SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 4.1 and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 or higher. If you also want to implement the “Customer 360” dashboard that is one of the dashboards available in the additional rapid-deployment solution content, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1 is required to be installed.
Here is an overview model that shows the applications used in SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence rapid-deployment solution:
Processes and Backend Data
With SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence rapid-deployment solution, the following scope items are covered:
- SAP Customer Value Intelligence
- SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting
- Integration into Sales and Marketing
Per default, you can make use of the following backend data per scope item:
| Scope Item | Backend Data |
|---|---|
| SAP Customer Value Intelligence | For this solution you need an SAP ERP backend system. The following data can be consumed:
SAP ERP Sales and Distribution (SD) master data: Customers, materials, prices. SAP ERP Sales and Distribution transactional data: Sales quotations, sales orders, sales contracts, billing documents, debit memos, credit memos. Optionally, SAP ERP Controlling – Profitability Analysis line item data can enrich the analysis.
Additional SAP BusinessObjects content can be integrated into SAP Customer Value Intelligence and also makes use of SAP ERP SD data. The “Customer 360” dashboard can consume both SAP ERP and SAP CRM data (for example, SAP CRM accounts, activities, leads, opportunities, sales orders). |
| SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting | This segmentation solution makes use of customer data including diverse customer attributes such as country, city, language etc. It also offers key figures that are used during customer segmentation. In the rapid-deployment solution it is documented how to make use of customer data residing in SAP ERP or SAP CRM.
Optionally you can connect SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting to any non-SAP backend system. The SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence rapid-deployment solution does not cover the implementation of data replication from non-SAP applications. |
| Integration into Sales and Marketing | With this process you segment SAP CRM customer data. For the defined segments you define target groups in SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting that are automatically replicated to SAP CRM. The target groups are used in SAP CRM campaigns.
In addition, you can trigger the automated creation of SAP CRM activities based on SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting initiatives. |
In my further blogs I will give you more information on business backgrounds per process flow.
