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Marketing Attributes and how to get rid of them

Guus Dorenbos, 11 juli 2012

In SAP CRM the use of marketing attributes is a great way of enriching your customer data with freely definable attributes. The use of marketing attributes can be widespread in your organization and serve different purposes. Most commonly organizations use them to create customer profiles and segment customers to target them for marketing purposes.

A successful organization goes to great efforts to maintain their marketing attributes and makes sure that customer-facing employees constantly update important customer data. The creation of new attribute sets and the underlying attributes and values is quite easy and flexible. Deleting attributes, on the other hand is not as straightforward and for a good reason too.

If you could delete an attribute that is already assigned to a customer then you would lose essential customer data along with it. Fortunately SAP CRM prevents you to delete those attributes but it is often not very clear on how to safely remove the attribute. This week’s blog will give you some tips on how you can remove attributes without losing valuable customer data.

 

Example

Let’s assume you want to delete marketing attribute Z_INDUSTRY (Industry) for whatever reason. First you have to check if this attribute is assigned to customers. In table AUSP you can run a check as in the example below. Enter the attribute name in field Internal char. If you also want to check which customers have a specific value assigned, then you can enter the attribute value (not the description) in the field Char.Value.

Press F8 (execute) and you see how many customers, identified by their guid, have the specific attribute and attribute value assigned. You can now safely decide if you want to assign a different attribute to these customers or to delete all the attribute assignments for these customers.

Note: Before you delete the marketing attribute assignments it is always a good idea to save the output in Excel so you can revert back to the old situation. By using the BP guid in table BUT000 you get the BP ID’s.

SAP CRM has some handy tools in transaction CRMD_MKT_TOOLS with which you can maintain attribute assignments for business partners. This so-called Expert Tool we use is called “Deletion of an Attribute for all BP Assignments to a Target Group”.

For this you first have to create a Target Group in the Segment Builder. I suppose you already know how to do this so I won’t go into that now. More important is that you use this Target Group to delete the attribute for all Target Group members as in the example below.

A word of advise is to do a Test Run first to make sure you don’t run into any errors and to see that the correct number of customers (from table AUSP) is affected. Press F8 (execute) to start the deletion process. Check In table AUSP again for your deleted attribute assignments to make sure there are no more assignments of the marketing attribute to any customers.

Now you have deleted the attribute assignments but when you try to delete it from the attribute set you get the message: “You cannot delete an attribute from the attribute set in the dialog”. So how do you do that? The trick is to run program RMCLMDEL in transaction SE38. Enter the attribute set in field Class with Class type BUP and fill the field Characteristic with the Attribute name as in the example below.

Run the program in the background and the attribute is deleted from the attribute set.

 

 

Benefits

I think you will agree that in organizations the use of Marketing Attributes and Attribute sets is dynamic. Attributes come and go, values change or attributes move to different attribute sets. With the help of the SAP CRM Expert tools and this blog you can remove all the old stuff and aid your sales and marketing employees in maintaining correct and valuable customer data.

 

Guus Dorenbos

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