Dispute management is part of FSCM which means the process is designed from the accounting department point of view, not sales. The main features are:

The solution begins with the receiving of customer payment. If it’s an underpayment (or short payment), the dispute case, the central business object, will be created. And then make clear the reason and deal with the dispute case, by creating credit memo or continuing collection, or just writing off the residual. I think that should not be the common practice. In most cases, the dispute process will begin from the sales staffs who will get informed the dispute from customers at the very first time and create credit memo which will adjust the receivables before accounting department receive the payments.

Secondly, it features the workflow concept. The process can be driven by workflow mailbox across different departments and responsibilities. Of course, it’s not the function special for this process. The workflow-featured function is quite common now in web application environment.

Thirdly, SAP also makes it enterprise service enabled in EHP4, including the creation, change, read, and search of dispute cases. As to the utilization of these ES, please refer to the post “ credit limit change...”.