SAP Sales & Service Clouds 2205 Release (May 2022) is here. Let’s see what SAP has to offer this time around!
Before we delve into the nitty-gritties, here are links to a few of major documents/recordings for this release:
Sales & Service Clouds
Release slide deck & Documentation page
Demo_Customer Insights_2205 Release Briefing_SAP Sales Cloud Intelligent Sales add-on
Demo_Guided Selling_2205 Release Briefing_SAP Sales Cloud Intelligent Sales add-on
SAP CPQ
SAP CPQ 2205 Breaking Changes and Announcements
Planned timeline: With Test systems already upgraded a week back on the 7th of May, it is now time to get ready for the Production system upgrade on the 21st of May.
SAP does not divulge/provide documentation for what gets included in HFC(HotFix Collection). It is never a bad idea to have your testing/Production support team test the Productive tenants right after the hotfix is delivered to ensure no inadvertent surprises.
Let’s see in a bit more detail about what’s new/changed by area:
Sales Cloud:
Intelligent Sales Add-on has 13 new improvements ranging from enabling Customer insights for Individual Customers with view restrictions for Business Users, adding Purchase Orders view from S/4HANA under Key Metrics, improving filters for Opportunities & Engagement timelines, enabling Auto assigning of tasks in Playbook as a planned activity, improved guided selling, and an all new Graphical representation of HugRank(Strength of relationship) of an account/contact as a notable few.
Email Add-in/Groupware integration has an improved color theme for Fiori design and allowing the users to save tasks, phone calls and appointments(even if attendees aren’t found).
Dynamic Visit planning add-on has an enriched visibility & determination of Start location & time zone in Cockpit and an overall improved visit planning by adding a few useful filters & options.
Sales Orders have a very handy improved (Customer Idea) Schedule Line management that allows for multiple delivery dates to be created per product line.
Sales Quotes have a bunch of improvements in Quote ODATA , mashups, search capabilities, output settings, enhanced CPQ quote views, creating follow-up documents, the ability to add products from Past Quotes, adding E-mail subject using templates, and setting the CPQ quote creator/owner as user of the quote along with color coding progress status.
Opportunities also have color coding progress status along with improved fields that bring good value to users.
Visits now allow creation of tasks from within and using Visit location instead of the account address of the visit to pin a visit.
Agent Desktop now provides Integration of Messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter with Interaction records being created like transcript and channel information in Timeline along with support for Attachments’ storage. This can also be done manually.
Also included in Agent Desktop is the multi step confirmation of Account/contact which enables customers to pick correct Account & Contact combination for the interaction record.
Other notable improvements include new Extension scenario for business partner, product recommendations in opportunities and quotes by machine learning models & product sorting in Surveys based on product lists.
Service Cloud:
Odata services have new enhancements like using $skip and $stop to avoid all attachments of a particular collection being read together(Customer Idea) and adding a new Contract External ID in Contracts Odata.
Quotes support OAuth 2.0 only with Cloud Connector 3.0 version and in a Quote-to-Sales-Contract Scenario, the payment terms in a quote is predefined with information that should be applied in the sales contract.
Contracts have a new Installation Point External ID field in Covered Objects to help replicate functional locations from an external ERP system.
Maintenance plans improvements come as part of Customer Ideas like making visible Threshold/Value information as reason for Ticket’s creation and improved Ticket Data Source by adding Maintenance plan information.
Registered Product replication to external systems now allows replication on Registered Product ID including for those that have Serial ID missing.
Machine Learning text Summarization models will help in summarizing asynchronously the Email interactions between an service agent and a customer.
Product assignment is now allowed for product categorization and is included in Product Search.
SAP CPQ:
- CPQ CX AI Integration
- Cross-Sell & Price Recommendation Scenarios currently supported (Up-Sell possibly in the future?)
- Quote 2.0 – Margin Health – Tool for Sales Representatives to get a visual indication of whether their profit margin is within the healthy limits.
- Pricing Attribute Determination – Configure which quote fields will trigger pricing determination when changed. Performance improvements.
- Quote 2.0 – Resynchronize Pricing Procedure – Manage changes in S/4HANA pricing procedures to CPQ, including recalculate open CPQ Quotes.
- Business Partner Permissions Concept – Set different visibility permissions for Business partners, grouped by several criteria’s such as Country, City, Name or ID.
- Business Partners Search Enhancement – Search for Business partners on Quote is now simplified by using new search screen.
- C4C Integration Quote owner – As of 2205 release, there will be no limitation that Quote owner must be the same as logged in user that creates Quote. Users can now create Quotes in name of other users.
- KB Sync Improvements – It is now possible for administrators to disable the automatic daily KB sync jobs.
- VC Product Versions Enhancement – Display additional info in Product Version overview.
- Proxy Access Administration – Additional features when granting access to support (specific users, ticket number, etc.)
- Accessibility – Various improvements.
- Data Deletion – Mass Deletion of Quotes by status / company + default deletion period.
At Bilot, we have the know-how and experience in assisting you with SAP Sales & Service Cloud implementation, support, and development. Do not hesitate to contact us.
