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Activity Management

process component

Definition

The recording of all activities, that is, business activities and tasks, undertaken on behalf of the company.

Technical Data

Software Component Version	ESM CRM 7.02
Technical Name	ActivityManagement
Namespace	http://sap.com/xi/ESM/CRM

Business Context and Use

Throughout an organization, employees constantly and continuously create and manage their own activities in their mail and related systems. This data is important as it allows each employee to work efficiently on their own tasks. So when a group of employees come together to work on a shared business objective, such as creating and delivering a major campaign, the individual data of each employee involved becomes important to all the employees in that group. To work collectively to achieve their shared business objective, data saved by each individual needs to be accessible to all relevant employees.

The Activity Management process component makes data from individual professionals shareable across an organization. This includes data from:

appointments activities
activity tasks
email activities and
interaction activities.

The Activity Management process component enables activities to be:

planned, logged, monitored and analyzed
sent to internal colleagues for action or information and
shared with business partners and customers for collaboration.

Specifically in CRM, Activity Management process component can be used for example as follows.

To administer activities undertaken by staff to plan and support marketing-related customer interactions.
To allow collaboration throughout Marketing to enable proper campaign execution, action planning and opportunity development.
To integrate with third-party or custom-built applications so that data can be quickly and easily shared internally with all relevant staff such as those from Sales and Service.
To integrate with groupware like Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes allowing collaboration ensuring that all involved parties, internal and external (eg channel partners and customers) , can always keep track of their activities no matter where they are.
To be applicable generically in all industries where sales, marketing and service professionals use activities to plan and log their CRM-related customer interactions.

This process component enables processes and applications to work with the data in the CRM back-end system, such as in the following examples.

1. Connection to 3rd Party marketing tools for execution.
2. Connection to 3rd party groupware solutions not supported by SAP CRM for integration.

3. Connection to free/busy servers for publishing over the internet.
4. Connection to route optimization tools.
5. Connection to industry-specific applications such as:

homemade shelf management tools in Consumer products or

custom built OTC (over the counter) applications in Life sciences.

6. Integration with 3rd party reporting tools.

Use Case

To provide an understanding of how the range of service operations in the Activity Management process component can be applied in practice here is a business scenario broken down into steps with the appropriate service operation indicated.

After returning from visiting an important customer, the Chief Sales Director is convinced that the company's latest product would particularly benefit this customer. The Chief Sales Director emails the Marketing and Sales Managers and asks them to come up with a corporate strategy for selling this new product to this customer.
( Create Email Activity service operation)
The Sales Manager and Marketing Manager meet together with their teams. As a result a Sales representative and a Marketing representative are delegated to review all the information on the product and the customer then devise a sales strategy.
( Create Appointment Activity and Create Activity Task service operations)
The Sales representative and the Marketing representative review the information and devise a plan. A series of appointments corresponding to customer visits required to implement the sales strategy are created by a Sales Representative.
( Find Activity Basic Data by Elements , Read Email Activity , Read Interaction Activity and Create Appointment Activity as Bulk service operations)
After all the customer visits have been completed, the Sales Representative updates the details of each interaction from notes.
( Change Interaction Activity as Bulk and Complete Activity Task service operations)
Later when other employees, such as a Sales or Service Representative, need to visit the same customer, they are able to look up the data previously saved. In that way, important details can be shared such as names, titles of employees met and future interests.
( Find Activity Basic Data by Elements and Read Email Activity service operations)
Finally the Sales representative reports progress back to the Chief Sales Director.
( Create Email Activity service operation)

Terminology

In the following list, the term shown at the end in parentheses is the corresponding term used in the CRM back-end system.

Time Point Terms, Period Terms, Duration Terms (Dates)
PriorityCode (Importance)
InitiatorCode (Direction)
ExternalDocumentReference (External Reference)
Sales and Service Business Area (Organizational Data)
Text Collection (Notes)
Business Transaction Document Reference (Transaction History)
Attachment Folder (Attachments)
Processing Type Code (Transaction Type, Item Category)
Party (Party, Partner)
Employee Responsible Party (Employee Responsible)
Contact Party (Contact Party)
Products (Products inside Activity Journals)
ProductJournal (Activity Journal)

Integration

This process component communicates with other process components using the following interactions:

Structure

Activity Management process component view diagram

The following entities are part of this process component:

Service Interfaces

Activity Task Action In	An interface to complete an activity task.
Appointment Activity Processing In	Group of asynchronous inbound operations for Appointment Activity
Appointment Activity Processing Out	Group of asynchronous outbound operations for Appointment Activity
Interaction Activity Processing In	An interface to create and change interaction activities as bulk.
Interaction Activity Processing Out	An interface to confirm interaction activities as bulk.
Manage Activity Task In	An interface to create, read and change activity tasks.
Manage Appointment Activity In	An interface to create, read and change appointment activities.
Manage Email Activity In	An interface to create, read and change email activities.
Manage Interaction Activity In
Query Activity In	An interface to retrieve basic data from activities.
Query Appointment Activity Processing In	Group of asynchronous operations to retrieve a list of Appointment Activities based on different criteria.
Query Appointment Activity Processing Out	Group of asynchronous operations to retrieve a list of Appointment Activities based on different criteria.
Query Interaction Activity Processing In	An interface to find interaction activities by elements.
Query Interaction Activity Processing Out	An interface to retrieve the data from interaction activities.

Business Objects

Activity	A structured view of various types of activities, such as letter, e-mail, or fax activities, for the purpose of planning and documenting all actions and interactions related to business partners.
Activity Task	A task used in Activity Management containing information about anything an employee needs to do within a certain time frame, and which can be related to a business partner.
Appointment Activity	Type of activity that is recorded in an employee's calendar, including scheduled meetings, and external events.
Email Activity	Type of activity that records text and graphics sent via groupware or the Internet. Emails can include attachments, and can also be sent automatically to a large number of recipients.
Interaction Activity	Type of activity that records any type of interaction with a customer such as a telephone call, or call report from a customer visit, or information on a trade fair.

Constraints

The service operations in the Activity Management process component do not currently support the following attribute.

Survey (questionnaire)

Notes on SAP Implementation

Configuration

To use the service operations in the Activity Management process component ensure that the CRM back-end system has been customized as usual to create and manage activities.

More Information

For more information see the activity management documentation in the help portal at http://help.sap.com .

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