Let’s say you are a sales rep and you visit a lot of stores during your working day, during which you need to calculate certain KPIs. Your customer support has set up a product survey with a whole lot of products assigned, based on product lists that apply to your customer. When you are in the store and you have about 100 products for which you need to check for example Share of Shelf, Out of Stock etc. that is quite a big survey to go through. Would it not be nice if you could just filter this list based on for example your top-selling products, or your promotion products?

SAP has recently introduced a rule framework for defining product classifications in a survey. I currently have the opportunity to work with this great new functionality with my customer, and since I really like this functionality I thought to share it with you.

Configuration

Before you start creating rules to classify your products in a survey so that you can filter on this, you have to do some small Business Configuration. For this you go to Business Configuration -> Activity List -> Survey -> Maintain Product Classification for survey.

SAP has defined some standard classifications already, but you can add some classifications that are important for your business.

Define rules

Now you are ready to create your rules. For this you go to Administrator -> Sales and Campaign Settings -> Define Rules for Survey Product Classification

As you can see, SAP has standard already defined a few variables based on which you can classify the products in a product survey. For example, on product category. You could decide for example you would only want to answer questions on products that are in promotion and that you have assigned a “promotion” category on product level. Or you can create rules based on certain account IDs for example. You have also the option to use any extension field that you have defined on the level of Account or Product. To include these variables in the rule framework, you need to go to Adapt Columns. Here you see standard fields on Account or Product (category is empty) or extension fields (category is Custom Customer Data or Custom Product Data).

Be aware you can only use max 20 columns in your rule framework. That sounds like a lot, but trust me, if you are setting up quite complex rules, like I am doing at my customer, this actually could be not enough.

Once you have decided based on which variables (fields) you are going to create your rules, you can start defining them by choosing Add Row. When you double click on the * in your variable (for example Product Category) you get the option to choose the value and operator.

When you then next click on * in the Classification field, you can choose the classification for this rule, for example “Promoted”

Be aware, if you include multiple variables in a rule, this counts as an AND statement!

So now I have created a rule that says, if my product in the product survey has product category ‘promotion products’, I want this product to be classified as ‘Promoted’.

Result

Now, when you create a visit for which a survey needs to be filled out, and in the product lists assigned to the survey are “promotion products”, you will see a filter added to your survey that says ‘promoted’. Which means you have the option to select only these products to fill out the survey for.

This looks as follows:

You select the checkbox for Promoted and enter, and only the products that have a product category ‘promotion products’ appear now in the survey. The other products will be ‘hidden’ until you uncheck the checkbox.

Is this cool functionality or what?

Please be aware, the rule framework has an upload functionality that works really well. However, it always uploads a complete file and overwrites the existing rules. So, it is always best to download your current rules, make necessary changes and/ or additions and re-upload the changed file!

Happy ruling!