As a growing percentage of sales moves through indirect channels, semiconductor and component manufacturers must manage partner relationships more efficiently and enable their partners to sell more effectively. To be profitable, manufacturers require full visibility into all sales channels, and they must empower their partners with better tools to enable successful marketing, sales, and customer service.

SAP for High Tech covers the key activities involved in channel management, enabling you to:

• Collaborate with your channel partners on marketing, sales, and services
• Manage the entire partner life cycle, from channel partner planning to performance tracking and analysis
• Conduct liability simulations to optimize cut-over dates for components and ensure price protection
• Automate claims processing while increasing claim accuracy
• Automate the issuance of ship and debit authorizations, as well as approvals based on defined business rules
• Capture point-of-sale (POS) data from channel partners using EDI, XML, or Web-based interfaces
• Track channel inventory, and record price and validity dates for each channel partner for ship and debit validation
• Support your channel partners with Web-based self-services for registering, qualifying leads, requesting quotes, creating POS data and claims, and checking the status of claims

Channel management is enabled with SAP applications such as SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM). To find out how SAP CRM can help you improve your channel management, please complete the "Contact SAP" form and request information about customer relationship management.