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Month: September 2014

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Service Management – One Repair with Multiple Serial Numbers

This one is near and dear to my heart, because I’ve been trying to come up with a better to handle this (likely to be a new JaveLLin product soon, once I finalize my plan).  But I’m starting to see more and more business that get one call, but will have 10 units coming back for repair.  In general, SAP doesn’t handle this out of the box.  If you follow the standard return and repair model, you would need to create 10 different notifications (at least if you wanted to quick check warranty status and maintain some history).  Well, no business I’ve ever worked for wanted to do that.  Especially since you may be on a call and need to provide a notification number immediately upon call completion.

What I’ve seen in the past, is that normally, the call center just types the first serial number into the notification, and then puts the rest into the notes.  Depending on the realism of the business, they may be expected to make 9 more notifications after the call ends…  but we all know the chance of that happening.  This compounded by the fact that there are usually calls waiting, and it gets really hard to remember to get back to a notification that appears complete.

So what’s the alternative?  it really is custom development as far as I know.  Now, this gets even tougher when you factor in the different options for creating your repair sales order.  Should each serial number be given it’s own line item to keep the repairs separate?  should it be batched, forcing you to ship and receive all units at the same time?  or more commonly, “It depends”.  So this makes it very difficult to utilize the nice little action button on the notification, because you need to go in and tweak everything anyway, add more lines, etc.

So today, I’m reaching out to anyone reading this…  I’d really love to know how you handle this, or if you even encounter this.  Maybe it’s not as big of an issue as I believe it is….  or maybe there is some great functionality I just don’t know about, in which case, PLEASE teach me 🙂

I look forward to your feedback, and as always, thanks for reading,

Sports vs. Business

If you’re a sports fan like I am, Go Pack Go, you might recognize some of the familiar phrases I’ll put out here in terms of dealing with a tough loss, or even an upcoming tough game…

“sometimes a good ass kicking is what it takes to turn things around”
“it was close, they played a great game, but just couldn’t finish”
“if it wasn’t for that bad call, we would’ve won”

Isn’t it funny how we make these excuses for our favorite teams.  Would we make the same excuses for ourselves???  Do you often tell yourself, “I really needed to lose big”?  well, I can tell you, I never tell that to myself. Maybe not, but I’m sure you make similar excuses in your business world.  If you’re a sales person, how often do you justify things.  “They’ll say yes in two weeks”, “they fell on hard times, but they’ll buy when things get better”, “if only someone smarter was making the buying decisions”.  I know that I try to stay positive, but even the best of us justify failure.

Now I know, I make some of these same justifications.  We always hope they are true.  But where do you draw the line between uplifting and fairy tale?  In my world, I don’t often think about this, because I believe so fully in what I’m doing that I don’t allow myself to think otherwise.  But there are moments that I look at my blind allegiance to the Packers, and wonder if I make the same comparisons, true or false, in my own business.

Don’t worry, not giving up anytime soon 🙂  but it is important to keep a healthy perspective on everything.  Be honest with yourself, know when your criticism is valid, know what you want.  None of these are easy…  but it’s good to question.  Be faithful to your team, but be honest to your business….

Thanks for reading,

Variant Configuration – Using CCUNDO

Well, I recently ran into a case that I needed to pull this old trick out of the archives.  It had been so long, that I needed to go to the CWG and look around to remember what it was.  It’s transaction CCUNDO. A rather handy transaction when you use VC and engineering change management together.  CCUNDO allows you to remove VC items like object dependencies, classes, characteristics, etc. from a change number.  For those of you familiar with ECM, you probably remember that you can just break the link by going into CC02.  CCUNDO allows you to select the items you need to remove from the change number, and magically, the change number link is gone.

Now, there are 2 major scenarios I use this transaction for.  The first and most common is a mistake.  I typed in the wrong change number when I went to change “X”.

The 2nd is also a mistake, but sometimes it’s a mistake from long ago.  In VC world, inevitably an object will be created without ECM, then later, an ECM gets attached to it.  Normally, this isn’t a huge deal, until you need to do something like add a new characteristic to a variant table, or change the value assignment alternatives to a table. These things can only happen when you lock everywhere the table is used.  And if you use ECM, it has to be locked throughout history.  If you created a dependency or constraint without a change number, but then added ECM later.  There will always be a date period from 00/00/0000 until the first change number was applied that you can never again touch.  Making it impossible to update that table.  Before CCUNDO, the only option was to create a brand new table and change everything over.  While this isn’t the end of the world, it sure is easier to just continue using the original table.  In this case, you use CCUNDO to remove ALL change numbers from the object, thus getting it back to a state of never being under ECM.  Then you can either delete the object and create it with ECM, or just reset it back with the latest change number.

Now one of the biggest things to keep in mind is that I do NOT encourage this to be used in production for anything other than scenario 1.  In scenario 2, you are likely to lose ALL your history on these objects.  Again, not the end of hte world, but having this history is the whole reason you use ECM.

Thanks for reading,

Adding Value…

In my never ending quest to become a better entrepreneur, I started reading a new book.  I got it from one of my neighbors who is in the selling business, and she said it’s her favorite book, so I thought why not.  Well, I’m only 50 pages into it, and it’s already got my head swimming with new ideas.  I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this in future posts, but the first major lesson is in adding or providing value.  Now, this sounds obvious.  Of course you provide value, why else would someone pay you?

The twist on this is just to provide value, for the sake of helping others.  I’m still struggling a bit with this myself, since it’s a lot of work to do blog posts, email newsletters, fancy SAP products and consulting, just to help others.  Despite that, just reading through the chapters started to give me a perspective on ways to build new customers.  Again, this is material I’ve heard before in other ways, but sometimes just hearing it enough helps it to sink (at least for me).

So, the concept is simple.  Provide value for others, and in the end, it will come back to you.  Now, it’s a fine line as to what value truly is.  In my world, it might mean giving away some of my products to small to midsized customers.  It might mean doing some free consulting in my “spare time”.  It might mean recommending competitors products or services because they are more mature.  It will definitely mean continuing to blog and sharing my learning experiences to anyone willing to read my stuff.

so my question today is, how are you providing value to your customers? prospects? anyone in your life for that matter?  And hardest of all, how can you do it without ulterior motives involved 🙂  I’m still battling this, but even so, the idea of providing as much value as possible is clearly important.

Thanks for reading,

Sales Order – Unit Costing

Well, today I’m going to cheat on my blog post, and instead send you over to read a great post a friend of mine recently did on Unit Costing within a Sales Order.  Rama posts some great things on SD and Variant Configuration, so I do encourage you to check out his blog on a regular basis.  so, without further babbling, go check out his link 🙂

Unit Costing

Thanks for reading,

 

Service Management – RA vs. RAS Order Type

It’s funny, I’ve been doing this for a while, and i’ve always avoided using the RA order types.  I recently got to wondering why I had the bias toward the RAS order type.  So I thought I’d go into the details of the differences.  So, here goes. RA vs. RAS Order type.

It’s actually curious just how similar they are.  The whole concept comes from the “leading material”.  I only recently heard this term and had it stick in my brain.  I was talking to someone from SAP working on an OSS message I had open, and they asked if I was using the leading service material or leading serviceable material.  When I first read this, I sat there with the blank look on my face, wondering exactly what they were asking me.  It finally hit me, depending on what scenario you run, you might “lead” with a DIEN or service material, or you might lead with a “serviceable” material (the think you are fixing.  So, step one is understanding the distinction.

Ok…  so, now we get to the real deal.  Exactly why would I choose leading “service” vs. “Servicable”.  In my opinion, the answer is actually pretty simple.  It all comes down to the processes you have available for any particular material.  Let’s just say you have a material 100.  It’s produced by you and come back for repair.  Now, if the only option is that the customer returns the materials to you, you fix it and send it back, then you either method works great.  BUT, as soon as you introduce some variability, like the service Exchange process, that throws  monkey wrench into the whole deal.  Why?  because of item category determination.  In the back end of SAP, when you use the RA order type, the item category determination works off of the “Serviceable” material.  So it’s all dependent on what you are fixing.  If a particular material is ALWAY fixed the same way, then using the RA is better approach.

Now, as soon as you enter multiple repair procedures into the mix that can be applied to a material, this is when you must go to the leading “Service” material. (RAS order type).  The RAS order type gives you additional flexibility, and also decreased maintenance (in txn OISD) compared to the RA order type.  Now, the RA gives you a more straightforward approach, but in my opinion, it tends to limit your options.  If everything you do is field service, then this becomes less of an issue, but if you ever have the need for multiple repair procedures (or even field service vs. in-house repair), the RAS is truly the way to go.

Thanks for reading,

Packaging is King

Well, you have probably noticed how excited I’ve been lately about my products.  And what this has really reinforced, is that packaging is king.  I’m not talking about bubble wrap or boxes, I’m talking about how you put your ideas together.  I’ve had individual transactions I built, they are very useful, and absolutely would never be purchased.  Why?  well, it’s a single transaction.  If it’s important enough, most companies can find enough resources to build it themselves.  Now this approach isn’t always the best, you could probably buy it cheaper than build it, but depending on your budget, sometimes it’s easier to waste resources then justify an expense.  Let’s not go down the budget rabbit hole…  let’s just focus on when do you start to thinking about buying something.

Now, let’s see what happens when you bundle several things together and put it into a fancy package.  It provides the functionality of that one transaction, plus it puts it in a fancy wrapper, and includes some other nice to have features.  Well, suddenly this becomes easier to justify because it’s bigger, it has the “cool” factor, and would take a LOT of effort to spec out and build in-house.  Suddenly, it’s easier to justify that expense.  You can suddenly get some things you didn’t even know you needed, but wow, it WOULD make life easier.  I don’t pretend to understand the psychological explanation behind this, but now that I recognize it, I can totally see it every where.

So, the real key comes down to how to package your product.  I don’t care if it’s software, an e-book, or a cool “as seen on TV” gadget.  The key is how you package it, how you bundle it, and just how functional you can make it.  Buying a hammer, isn’t exciting.  But buying this cool new hammer, nail gun, and drill together that come in a handy easy to store case…  now that’s marketable.  So if you start to get into this mindset, remember to figure out how you can package your idea.  It took me a lot of years to come to this conclusion.  Learn from my revelations 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Service Supervisor – The latest offering

Now, it’s been a while since something got me really excited.  But a few weeks ago, I sat down with my WM guru friend, Jeff, we walked through what would need to happen in order to be able to do “staging” on service orders.  I did a post a couple weeks ago going into all the details of exactly what service staging is, so I won’t bore you again.  I’ve had an idea on my “to-do” list for a couple years now to integrate SM with WM.  Little did I know at the time that this would springboard me into a new idea, that I’m pretty excited about.  It’s the service supervisor transaction.  Now, if you’ve followed my stuff for any length of time, you might remember me talking about a Production transaction I built called Proximity.  The idea is to provide a single location to handle all the SAP work for a shop floor manager or technician.  We built one for the supervisor & and for execution.  Well, frankly, I never gave it much more thought.  This was my partner’s thing, he knows production, so I built it.  Then fast forward a couple years.  I’m talking with Jeff, and it FINALLY hits me.  Why don’t I make a set of transactions for the service shop.  After all, that’s my expertise, why shouldn’t they have a transaction to help in their day to day life.  And before you know it, Service Execution was born.  But something like staging, or releasing service orders is not typically something the service technician does, there’s usually a supervisor.  And next you know, Service Supervisor was born.

I literally just finished this last week, and I’m so excited, that I just had toot my own horn a little bit.  Now I’ve developed lots of things, had lots of ideas…  but this one became special on multiple levels.  First, it provided me with a vested interest in one of our products.  Proximity, up until now was just Mike’s thing, not mine.  Now that there is a rather large service component, I suddenly have a much bigger stake in the game.  Next, I had always had these “tool sets” for service orders.  They were kind of a side project because who wants to buy some little gadgets, even if they are helpful.  Now, I have a vehicle to package them and make them useful within a transaction.  So my service order availability tool that’s been sitting out there forever, is now a button on Service Supervisor.  I’ll still provide the transaction so you could run it nightly, or in background, but now, the supervisor can just run it whenever they want, and for as many orders as they want.

Now, coming full circle, is the advent of Service Component Staging.  After years of wondering what user exits I’d have to program, wondering how could I deliver this as a product, I finally solved all of that.  It’s now my favorite button within service supervisor.  Mostly because I think it’s so cool :).  I’ve included many of the same configuration options you see in WM for production orders, and give you additional options geared toward service.  Including the option to print a picklist to a designated printer every time you stage components.  You can decide what material movement should be used.  I even provide the functionality to do WM to WM transfers, an option you can’t get out of the box for service orders.  There’s more to it, and if you’re curious, let me know because I’d love to explain it to you 🙂

The best thing is that as I come up with more ideas to help the service shop, I can just add them to these transactions and give them to anyone using Proximity.  Then to sweeten the deal, if you buy Proximity, you get service and production, all in one.  Sorry if I sound like an infomercial.  I kinda feel a little like one right now, because this really is cool.

Thanks for reading, and if you’d like to learn more about Proximity for Service, please comment or email me:

mpiehl@javellinsolutions.
http://www.javellinsolutions.com/proximity-for-service/