You use this business process to prepare subscription items from order processing for periodical deliveries. The system selects the orders with subscription items and generates a contract for them. This contract item forms the basis for delivery when further product components are published.

The contract for series sales contains the contractual data for delivering looseleaf collections and series to a sales customer. A contract item contains all the contract data required for processing sales and logistics for a series product.

You use this business process to plan and generate the issues (publication calendar) for a media product. You can create the issue sequence using a preassignment rule, by copying another issue sequence, or by selecting the publication dates in a calendar.

You use this business process to define the operative data for order generation and outbound delivery, such as the billing and delivery dates. You can also schedule subsequent issues and backdated orders in shipping planning.

The status of the shipping planning records controls the order generation process. A new shipping schedule record has the status Initial , and you must replace this with an operative status manually. Shipping planning must be performed before you can carry out order generation.

You use this business process to generate orders for the delivery quantities for each retailer based on the quantity plan. The orders generated by the system contain the information for logistics processing for each media issue. You execute order generation in background processing.

You use this business process in order to create customer invoices in SAP CRM. Here, one or more than one billing due list item is copied into a billing document. You can either create the billing document with reference to the delivery, or to the sales order. It is also possible to create billing documents with reference to contracts. You make the necessary setting in Customizing. The following describes delivery-related billing.

Tracks established procedures for passing complaint information into the enterprise for resolution so that dissatisfied customers become satisfied customers and companies can plan and manage return material costs.

You can create a credit memo request if customers are charged too much, or a defective product is returned, or a complaint is made about a service performed.

After a detailed check, you can either release or reject the credit memo request. If the credit memo is released, the customer receives a credit memo for the full amount to be credited.

You use this business process to perform sales analyses based on Profitability Analysis ( CO-PA ). The data from Sales and Distribution is enriched with data on the product (media issue) in the operating concern in CO-PA . This interplay gives you a comprehensive view of the sales data on a product.

You can perform detailed profitability analyses on an individual product using separately listed key figures, which are sorted according to criteria such as revenue and sales deductions, discounts, and gross and net sales. If you analyze the overall profitability of a title in the analyses of results, the sales analysis focuses on the quantities sold and sales volumes reached, minus any sales deductions granted on sale.

You use this business process, which runs in SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP BI) , to obtain sales figures and monitor transactions affecting live subscriptions, as well as subscription runtimes. This allows you to draw conclusions about your customers’ loyalty to you as a publisher, or to specific media products, and to filter out customer groups with high customer retention, as well as potential improvements.

In addition, you can use this information to make statements on the link between promotional activities and the length of your customer relationships. This allows you to identify successful promotional activities and campaigns, so that these can be used more effectively for a positive future business performance.