Competitor Products (WETT) in CRM 5.2

[Former Member]

In the past year our company has implemented CRM 5.2. We are currently working on Opportunity Mangement. In preparing our system for testing we wanted to download materials of type WETT - Competitor Products from our ERP system to CRM. Initially, we found this would not work. Upon posting a message to product support we were told that this functionality was available up until Release 2.0C but was removed from Release 3.0. We use these materials extensively in our existing ERP system and would like to use the same materials in CRM. We were advised by SAP to make a minor mod to the system by commenting out 5 lines of code in Include LCOM_PRODUCT_MAT_R3_ADAPTERF10 where the WETT material type was being specifically excluded via an IF statement.

Making this mod does allow the products to be transferred to CRM via the middleware. However, we found after doing this that the materials were still not fully usable in CRM; for example, they could not be found via a search help. However, we did find we coudl create these products directly in the CRM system and they would be usable. After further research we learned that there is a field in table COMM_PRODUCT called COMPETITOR_PROD that must be set to a "1" for the material to be usable as a competitor product. We believe we can solve this problem for our downloaded products just by making this setting.

I have several questions:

(1) Is there anyone who used CRM prior to release 3.0 that had experience downloading these via middleware?

(2) Does anyone know why SAP, as of 3.0, removed the download capability for WETT products and required they be created in CRM?

(3) Does anyone have any useful experience to share on making the mod (as described above) and attempting to restore the capability to download WETT products from ERP and using them successfully in CRM?

Thanks.

[Former Member]

Hello Russ,

It would be great if you can expalin me what is the exact scenario in CRM,that you need to use competitor products.

May be this functionality was removed because competitor products are not meant to be sold in CRM!

And its also true that product search would not include competitor products.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Shanthala Kudva.

[Former Member]

When creating an Opportunity in CRM we want to assign the competitor and competitor product to the item on the opportunity. When we are trying to gain business with a new customer or offtering them a new product we want to document who we are competing against and the product they are selling to the customer.

Competitor products (material type WETT) are a standard material type delivered by SAP in ERP. They have only a Basic Data view, no sales or plant views. Basically, they provide just a material number, short text description, and a link to the competitor number. We have used these for a long time in quotation document items in ERP. These are not products to sell, they are just a way to establish master data for your competitors products.

We do not understand why SAP apparently supported these via middleware download up until CRM 3.0 and then removed the capability; then, they give us a response to an OSS note on this issue with a small mod to allow them to be processed via the middleware to bring them over from ERP to CRM. Then, we have to figure out the additional customizations in the middleware so they will function as they should.

Apparently, you can create materials with product subtype WETT directly in CRM, but we do not wish to do that. We have a couple of thousand of these already created in ERP, wish to download via middleware, and use the same materials in CRM. Why SAP would not support this, or removed the support from an earlier release, is hard to understand.

[Former Member]

Hello Russ,

I am trying to find out from development team about why this functionality has been removed from CRM 3.0 onwards.

I will let you know at the earliest.

Regards,

Shanthala Kudva.

[Former Member]

Hi,

How to create competitor product in CRM, I mean do we have any function module to create

Thanks.