More transparency in rebate agreements using SAP CCM

In many industries, the sales and purchasing departments frequently use rebate agreements with business partners as a standard practice that has a major impact on prices. This is especially true in the food and beverages industry. Up to now, however, it was not possible to adequately map the often complex contracts with customers and suppliers in SAP. As a result, contract maintenance and settlement were time-consuming and error-prone. SAP Condition Contract Management (SAP CCM), formerly also known as Condition Contract Settlement (CCS), now provides a solution. The tool is available with SAP S/4HANA and replaces the legacy rebate processing in SAP Material Management (MM) and SAP Sales and Distribution (SD).

SAP CCM replaces CCS: Self-explanatory terms, clearer structure

SAP CCM is a component of Settlement Management in SAP S/4HANA, offering companies an easy-to-use solution for mapping and managing their rebate agreements, and allowing them to store and view all their condition contracts in a single place. The applicable revenue basis can be displayed at any time using the transactions and Fiori apps delivered in the standard system, letting users directly determine the relevant underlying documents. The new settlement calendars, which provide a range of settlement controls for each contract, provide for improved settlement flexibility; and already initiated payments, as well as those still outstanding, are also transparent at a glance.

Condition Contract Management is the successor of Condition Contract Settlement, which was developed in SAP ERP as an add-on for handling rebates in purchasing. Since some of the CCS functions originated from the agency business, the designations it uses are not always self-explanatory. With the switchover to SAP S/4HANA, SAP defined essential terms more intuitively. Already the name Condition Contract Management shows that the functions extend beyond just the pure settlement of condition contracts.

CCS installations easy to migrate to S/4HANA

Besides more self-explanatory designations, SAP CCM also makes rebate processing easier through its clearer structuring. In CCS, the settings were not always arranged ergonomically and, as such, not always immediately apparent. To expedite access to as many settings as possible in SAP S/4HANA, SAP has implemented a more user-friendly structure for the menu trees in Customizing and some of the maintenance dialogs. As a result, the entire condition contract management structure tree is now located under “Logistics General > Settlement Management”. Nothing changes in the underlying settings, and – apart from the detailed innovations in SAP S/4HANA – there are also no differences between the functions of SAP CCM and CCS. Companies can thus migrate their legacy CCS installations and customizing effortlessly to the new ERP.

SAP CCM Simplification List: Innovations at a glance

• In SAP S/4HANA, final settlement replaces “subsequent settlement”. Existing rebate agreements can thus only be processed until the end of the validity period and must then be closed by a final settlement. After that, new agreements can only be created on the basis of condition contracts.
• The material field length extension in the SAP S/4HANA landscape results in a change to the S111 table structure. This can have repercussions if the sales data need to be rebuilt in the SAP S/4HANA system.
• CCM allows an additional export to a spreadsheet. This function can be used to export the list of documents while keeping the same column settings and sorting.
• Default values can be defined for new parameters in the user settings in the SAP Fiori launchpad and are then applied as filters in the relevant apps in Sales.

API for sales contracts: The OData service API_SALES_CONTRACT_SRV can now also be used to create, update and delete sales contracts. The service can be extended accordingly under Business Needs.