Preface by Ursula Becker 5
My journey with SAP began in 1998 in the Development Support department, where I worked on customer tickets in the area of the pricing and condition technique. In addition to the occasional genuine programming errors that were to be corrected, the majority of the support tickets dealt with inquiries in which the questioner just lacked the right knowledge about the possibilities and (perhaps) the pitfalls of pricing. Initially, I often went into the office of Manfred Hirn, who fortunately sat right next to me. I soon learned about the rich functionality and flexibility of the pricing and condition technique and how many requirements can be fulfilled when you have the right knowledge. Actually, there is hardly any requirement that cannot be met. After two years, I moved out of support and into the Development department and on to other applications. However, pricing never completely let me go, since it is closely linked to so many other areas. Therefore, a few years later, I happily took the opportunity to return to pricing as a development architect. When the inquiry came if I would be available for a second edition of the Germanlanguage book, I agreed immediately. As luck would have it, after years of relative quiet, there were some interesting new developments that—in my opinion— deserve to be presented to a wider audience. In this book, you will learn about configurable parameters parameters and formulas, for example, which increase the flexibility of pricing and bridge the gap between the pricing and condition technique on one side and SAP’s Business Rules Framework on the other. A detailed section on rebate processing has also al so been included. Although this is not a new application, it lacked a truly comprehensive view before now. This may be due to the fact that rebate processing is so highly dependent on the condition technique and pricing application that a description outside this context is always
Personal Copy for Fl€vio Santos J•nior,
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