Multilevel Categorization
Multilevel categorization is a powerful feature that enables you to individually design the categorization of business transactions, such as incidents or change requests.
Furthermore, it integrates the functions auto completion and item determination based on categories.
By using multilevel categorization in business transactions, it is also possible to search for related problems, knowledge articles and change requests.
You can also use multilevel categorization to determine Business Partners in Partner Functions like Support Team by using the Business Rule Framework (BRF+) or CRM dispatch functionality.
Multilevel categorization enables you to flexibly design categorization, and to integrate the functions of auto suggest and content analysis in your applications.
Multilevel categorization is available in varying scope for the following applications:
- Service orders
- Service order templates
- Confirmations
- Complaints
- In-house repair orders
- Service requests (incidents)
- Problems
- Requests for change
- Knowledge articles
- Case management For more information, see Multilevel Categorization in CRM Case Management.
- Interaction records For more information, see Specifics for Interaction Center: Service.
- E-Mail Response Management System (ERMS)
What are the Essential Requirements for implementing MLC (Multilevel Categorization) ?
- You have set up multilevel categorization in Customizing for SAP CRM under
Customer Relationship Management 
CRM Cross-Application Components Multilevel Categorization
Basically application areas are used to assign categorization schemas to applications,
for example to service orders, service tickets or service requests.
Additional parameters are assigned to the application areas to further define how
categorization schemas can be determined by the applications.
You can assign the application areas and parameters to a categorization schema in the
CRM WebClient UI on page Categorization Schema in the page area Application Areas.
For each application area, you can make settings for content analysis used in the
E-Mail Response Management System (ERMS).
as next step you had to define the attribute of the relevant transaction category:
please note for service request (incident/problems) (BUS2000223 & BUS2000224)
only category C (Overview of Damage/Defects/Reason) and D (Defect Locations/Object Parts)
are destined.
Analogously you can define the catalog categories for relevant item categories:
"Find Related OBj." means Find related objects these function is relevant for incidents, problems and
Request for change (RFC)
If you use the find related objects function, the system proposes objects with the
same category assignments.
If you want to display the related objects, you have to
choose More -> Find Related in the business transaction (for example, incident) in
the CRM WebClient UI.
"Auto Complete" means Automatic completion via templates, for example service order templates
In the category modeler, you can assign service order templates to categories.
If you select the relevant category in the business transaction, for example incident,
you can choose More -> Auto Complete to transfer the data from the
relevant service order template.
You can found the relevant Categorization modeler under
Service Operations --> Categorizations Schemas in the Standard business role
ITSERVICEPRO.
In these example you are assigning an existing incident template to a dedicated category in the assignment block Service Request Template.
This means in detail, that you must create an incident template in which you maintain all relevant fields an information and afterwards this
template will be assigned to a category of your MLC. Once this is done you can use the Auto Complete option.
- Create new incident
- Select the category to which you have assigned the template
- In the 'More' menu you will now find the active function 'Auto Complete'
"Automatic item determination" The automatic item determination is relevant for incidents and problems and
means in the category modeler, you can assign service products
to categories.
If you select the corresponding category in the incident or problem and save
the business transaction, this linked service product is used as the item
in the background.
If the system cannot determine the item for the corresponding business transaction
via the categorization schema, the BADI Product Assignment for Creation
of Service Items is called.
For the assignment/defintion of the catalog categories the following applies:
You can activate the find related objects, auto complete, and auto item determination functions only
once per transaction type (for one combination of transaction type and catalog category only).
This ensures that the system can identify which schema to use for which function, in the case
of multiple schemas per transaction type.
4. Enable Schema Imports via RFC
The functionality is required if you want to transfer a categorization schema from one system to another.
A categorization schema can be imported in the category modeler of the target system via RFC, as shown
in the figure below.
In the IMG Customizing activity you maintain the RFC Destinations for Schema Import in the Target system.
The relevant RFC connection should appear in the category modeler on the target system.
In case of Import of schemas or categories you can influence the behaviour of linked objects with BADI CRM_ERMS_CATEGO_OBJECT
(More information are avaialble in the document to IMG-Node "BAdI: Merge/Import Linked Objects"
5. Create Categorization Schema in the WEB-UI.
Start the Categorization with the relevant business role (ITSERVICEPRO, SERVICEPRO, SOLMANPRO ...)
Press Button "New"
Enter the General (Header) Data of the Schema
Particular attention should be paid to field "Logical Structure" - here you can choose between 2 types of
Categorization: hierarchical or attributive.
- hierarchical
is a strict hierarchical arrangement of categories, and each category describes a subject.
Higher-level categories merely represent the context of each subject.
- attributive
Attribute categorization is not strictly hierarchical and allows you to use category duplicates
to map value combinations. With attribute categorization, each category is a property of a subject,
without which a subject would not be fully described.
After specifying the general data, you have to define the hierarchy of the schema by creating categories on
different levels, which can be up to 10 levels.
Enter the relvant description of these category.
Typical example of a categorization schema with hierarchical structure
As next step you had to assign the Categorization schema in the categorization modeler to the
relevant application
You can assign business transaction types to a categorization schema in the category modeler of the WebClient UI
in the assignment block Application Areas, as shown in the figure below.
Application areas are used to assign categorization schemas to applications (business transaction type), for example to service requests/incidents (for incidents) or service orders (for change requests).
Parameters are assigned to the application areas to further define how categorization schemas can be determined by the applications.
Activation of the Categorization Schema
In order to activate the schema, you should change its status in the page area General Data.
The status should be changed from Draft to Released. The schema is activated automatically on the date and time specified in the Valid-From Date and Valid-From Time fields. It is important to mention, that you can't specify date in the past.
Change an Active Categorization Schema
To change an active categorization schema, you have to create a new version of it:
- Select the active categorization schema
- Choose Version, as shown in the figure below.
The status of the active schema is set to Deployed and this version cannot be changed anymore.
Versioning enables you to determine the categorization schema on which a document was based,
by comparing the created on time stamp of the document with the validity of the schema versions.
Further information are avaialble in SAP-Help for these topic under:
