Table of Contents

Overview 

This article provides a detailed explanation into key functionalities of the Organizational Model in SAP Sales Cloud.

The Organizational Management reflects the entities and aspects of your enterprise: Legal, operational, and functional. It provides basic functionality like determining attributes during transaction processing as well as determination of Sales Organization and Sales office. 

Organizational Structure

The Organizational structure plays a fundamental role within the Sales Cloud. For a proper configuration, it’s crucial to have the most important user stories elaborated, when implementing with agile methodology. This will ensure leveraging most capabilities, e.g. access restriction of transactions based on organizational attributes, automated determination of attributes in transactions or visibility of data in reporting.

Using the Organizational Hierarchy view, the Organizational Structure gets visualized in a hierarchy.  To display the Hierarchy view, select Administrator → General settings → Org Structures.

Then change the OWL icon and select query Organizational Hierarchy

Figure 1: Path to Org Structure - Organizational Hierarchy

Figure 2: Organizational Hierarchy (graphical view)

SAP Sales Cloud accesses Organizational Management to determine information on the Enterprise’s Organization. It defines which Sales Team and Organization an employee belongs to. It defines what Sales Team an Employee manages and its direct reports. The hierarchical structure is used to represent the Organizational Units, their Employees and their respective Managers. It facilitates the determination of an Employee’s Manager e.g. for approval workflows.

Figure 3: Organizational Structure - General

General Organizational Data defines the Parent unit, an organizational unit rolls up to. The root organizational unit does not have a Parent unit. In this section address details are also maintained.

                  

Figure 4: Organizational Structure - Functions

In the functions section, it’s defined whether the Organizational Unit represents the Company, a Sales Organizational Unit, a Sales Office or/and Sales Group.  In this section, it can be specified, that an Organizational Unit is a reporting unit. In Reporting, sales data can be aggregated on Organizational Unit level.  

An Organizational Structure can contain multiple Companies, depending on the customer’s legal entities. Company attributes are used within transactions to determine e.g. the Seller's Party as well as to determine form templates. A Companies legal structure could, for example, consist of Company A in North America, Company B in Germany and Company C in Italy. Depending on the Employee’s assignment to the respective Company, the Company A, B or C is determined as Seller as well as their respective form templates.          

Figure 5: Sales Order - Involved Party - Seller

The company specific template will be determined for transactions like Sales Order or Sales Quote.

 Figure 6: Sales Order - Template Preview

Currency determination can consist of multiple validation steps. The system will first check in transaction if currency defaults from the account’s sales data. If a default currency is not maintained, system checks if currency is maintained at the sales organization in the organizational model. If this is not the case, it takes the currency related to the org. unit marked as Company.

Administrator → General Settings → Org Structures → Hierarchical view → Select the top unit → Expand the view   

                

Figure 7: Currency setting in Organizational Unit - Company

The Employees are assigned to the Organizational units in the Employee section. They can hold attributes like job description and validity. Employees can be assigned to multiple Organizational Units, while they have at least one Organizational Unit flagged as the primary Organizational Unit.

Before assigning an Employee as Manager, this Employee needs to be assigned in at least one Organizational Unit as Employee, first.  Organizational Units can only be managed by one Manager. On the other hand, one Manager can manage multiple Organizational Units.

The hierarchical structure determines authorization for transaction data. With the respective configuration, an employee will be able to see his transaction data like Leads, Opportunities, Sales Quotes and his teams’ transaction data. Whereas a user, that is assigned as Manager to multiple organizational unit will be able to display transaction data of all his employees. 

Figure 8: Organizational Structure - Employees

Sales Data Restriction view provides the ability to restrict distribution channel and division. 

Figure 9: Organizational Structure - Sales Data Restriction

External identifiers section facilitates to add an external Identifier, e.g. the DUNS ID of an Organizational unit.

Figure 10: Organizational Structure - External Identifiers

User validity

Administrator → General Settings → Business User → Employee data

Employee records are linked to Users. The User has a validity that controls access to the Sales Cloud. Expiring the validity of a User, will lock the user and prevent login into the Sales/Service Cloud.

Figure 11: Business User – Validity dates

When a locked User tries to log on below message will be displayed, and access to Sales/ Service Cloud be denied.

                       

Figure 12: Log on error message for locked user

Export function

The Organizational hierarchy can be exported into Excel Spreadsheet from within the Organizational structure object work list (OWL).               

Figure 13: Export function

Best practice to create the organizational structure

Below depicts the best practice approach for building the organizational structure, that you can use as a guiding template. Once the steps are executed, you should be able to use the organizational structure capabilities.

1. Set a start date for your organizational structure
2. Start top-down with the consisting legal entities (companies) given in the customer’s enterprise
3. Set the Unit below company as Sales organization. In cases that the Organizational structure is used for Sales and Service processes, a second Organizational Unit should be defined as Service Organization. It is recommended to use only one Sales Organization and one Service Organization per Organizational structure.
4. Continue bottom-up with the “departments” located at the single company.  This organizational units can be set as Sales or Service Units, but the Organizational Units below the Sales and Service Organizations don’t need to be defined as Sales or Service Unit. Multiple Sales or Service Units can be allocated hierarchically.
5. Assign Employees to the organizational units, where it applies.
6. Assign Managers as it applies.
7. Flag the Organizational units, that are relevant for reporting.

Integration

Mapping to ERP and S/4 HANA: While S/4 HANA and ERP have the capability to cover m:n cardinality when mapping Sales Offices to Sales Organizations, Sales Cloud has the system limitation of a 1:1 cardinality of Sales Offices to Sales Organizations.

Consider this limitation when designing the integration with ERP and/or S/4 HANA.

Conclusion

Now, you know how to set up the Organizational structure and leverage the powerful key functionality. Consider provided details when analyzing project requirements and user stories. You will be able to leverage this powerful key component for Sales and Service Cloud processes.

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