Implementation of SAP Opportunity and Pipeline Management for a Retail Company
The client is one of the largest Electronic Appliances retailers in Southeast Europe, headquartered in Croatia, with subsidiaries in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Slovenia. Their main business areas include the distribution of computer and network equipment, electronics, software solutions, and IT services. The company's portfolio features more than 200 international brands, including Lenovo, HP, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco, and others.
Retail
Southeast Europe
Challenge
The client approached IBA Group with a request to implement SAP Opportunity and Pipeline Management — a solution for managing and tracking sales deals, projects, and tenders — in order to centralize opportunity management, increase deals’ success rate, and achieve their set business goals.
Prior to this, the client relied on internal Excel reports and isolated SAP modules, without a single centralized tool to manage the sales process—from the initial opportunity to deal closure, as well as managing the sales pipeline and tender projects. This led to data duplication, a lack of transparency around sales statuses, and a heavy reliance on manual operations.
The following issues also prompted the search for a new solution:
- No unified source of sales deal data across all group companies;
- Inability to analyze conversion rates or forecast revenue;
- Difficulties in collaboration between sales teams and management;
- High volume of manual operations and risk of data errors.
Solution
The client required a unified solution for managing sales opportunities, which needed to be integrated into SAP S/4HANA and had to demonstrate:
- Full transparency of the sales pipeline across countries and business units;
- Automation of key stages in the sales process — from initial opportunity to deal closure;
- Margin analysis and revenue forecasting;
- Control over statuses, timelines, and competitors.
The client also set their priorities in advance. The solution must have contained minimal customization and leveraged SAP standard functionality (OOTB – Out of the Box). It needed to unify business processes, and set up reports for managers and department heads. The project’s budget was limited, and the deadline for PoC/MVP was tight – 6 weeks. The IBA Group team was also tasked with ensuring data security between subsidiaries by ensuring different levels of data access based on organization and business unit.
As a result, SAP Opportunity and Pipeline Management was deployed on SAP S/4HANA using the built-in S/4CRM module to resolve the challenges. The IBA Group team chose the PoC/MVP approach to quickly demonstrate standard capabilities and allow further functional expansion based on user feedback.
As a part of the project, the IBA Group team has performed the following tasks:
- Conducted AS-IS analysis and prepared a Blueprint (TO-BE processes);
- Configured four opportunity types: Offer, Tender, Offer Multi Prospect, Tender Multi Prospect;
- Implemented integration with SAP Master Data Management (MDM);
- Set up the organizational model and the roles/authorizations system;
- Deployed activity management (Tasks, Appointments, Interaction Logs);
- Created reporting and data visualization (search function, Excel export, charts creation);
Developed 13 custom enhancements, including margin forecasting; linking multiple clients to a single project; customer type classification (public/private); success probability calculation by deal stage; automation of change history and status analytics, and more.
Results
The project was completed successfully and on time. The SAP Opportunity and Pipeline Management solution was rolled out into production across the client’s headquarters and subsidiaries. The IBA Group specialists trained the business users on a new solution, fully integrated into the SAP landscape.
As a result of the project, the client gained:
- A single centralized system for managing sales & business opportunities;
- Full transparency into sales stages and team workloads;
- Real-time deal reporting;
- Prioritization of high-probability deals, enabling more accurate sales forecasting and performance analysis;
- Improved accuracy in sales and margin forecasting;
- 30% reduction in time needed to prepare proposals, including tenders;
- Minimized data duplication and errors.
Additionally, the implementation of SAP Opportunity and Pipeline Management achieved the following business results:
- Were covered all relevant business users: more than 120 employees from 5 countries;
- Opportunity processing time reduced from 3 days to 1 day;
- Sales pipeline transparency at the group level increased by 100% (and centralized for the first time).
The client was satisfied with IBA Group’s professionalism and achieved results, as the development and consultations were delivered timely and reliably. IBA Group remains their SAP trusted partner, ready to assist in any SAP-related developments.
IBA Group is a long-term partner of SAP SE, utilizing SAP products in custom projects since 1996. The team includes over 300 certified SAP professionals who have extensive experience working on a broad variety of SAP projects with clients from more than 50 countries.
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