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Year: 2015

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Master Warranty – part 1

With many new readers, I thought I’d go back into the archives and revive some older posts.  This week, I want to talk about the Master Warranty.  There will be 4 parts, talking about the configuration, master data, and even using them.

Today will be part one of my series on Master Warranties, or even Warranties in general.  The Master Warranty is SAP’s solution for an easy, reusable way to attach a rule based warranty to your equipment records.

So to start this off, you first need to make sure the master warranty functionality is setup.  So, moving down the list, we first look at Check Warranty Categories.

You’ll see by default there are 2 standard versions.  Customer & Vendor.  I can’t think of another option for warranty, but SAP does give you the option to add new entries :)  Just make sure the master warranties you want available are checked.  By default, both are checked and normally, you want change this, unless you want to turn off Vendor Warranties for example.

Next up, we’ll look at Define Warranty Types

This is the biggest piece of configuration in the whole master warranty area.  Again, you have the 2 options Customer & Vendor.  Now there are a bunch of fields you can setup (but you don’t need to)…

D.Box.Not – If the indicator is set, a dialog box is displayed when you create a service notification that gives you the warranty status.
D.Box.Ord – If the indicator is set, a dialog box is displayed when you create a service order that gives you the warranty status.
D.Box.Inv – If the indicator is set, a dialog box is displayed when you create a service invoice that gives you the warranty status.
Status Profile – allows you set status profile (a group of status’ that apply) to a particular warranty type.
Partner Determination Procedure – just like everywhere else in SAP.  Figures out your partners.
Usage of the Condition Table & Application & Procedure – You can set this to work according to the condition tables like Pricing, listing/exclusion, etc…  This is actually new to me.  I didn’t realize this could be done, and after a little more digging, it does nothing…  these are fields for future use…  so they do nothing.  So much for my excitement.

Well, this seems like a good place to stop for today.  I’ll pick this up again in the next post and talk further about configuring the master warranty.

As always, thanks for reading,

Using RPR_ABAP_SOURCE_SCAN

I know I’ve talked about this report before, but it’s become especially valuable to me lately.  I’ve worked in a few environments that are highly customized.  I’ve done the old school diggings of starting in a spot and either looking for Z programs, or spending hours in debug.  Well, this program has quite literally saved me hours in the past weeks.  This standard program allows you to type in a variable, a phrase, whatever that you are looking for, and it will search everything you request and show you where it has been used.

My most recent example was trying to find an EXPORT to MEMORY phrase.  I found the import, but I needed to see what was being sent in the export.  Well, I dug for an hour or so, with no luck.  So I decided to give this a try.  I set the program off, and a few hours later, I found exactly what I was looking for.  This allowed me to focus on some other issues, while the program did the tedious digging for me.  It was awesome.

If you have never tried: RPR_ABAP_SOURCE_SCAN and you are either a programmer or functional person that can debug, then like me you probably wasted a lot of hours in digging.  Give it a try.  It’s awesome, and I can’t believe that SAP doesn’t make it more widely known.

Thanks for reading,

Variant Configuration – Fear of Material Variants

It’s interesting to me how much fear and concern exist around material variants.  Perhaps I’ve spent too much time with them, and that’s why I have no fear (much like how a snake charmer isn’t afraid of the snake…  they just have a healthy respect for it 😀 ).  I wanted to chat a bit about what you do and don’t need to worry about when it comes to material variants.  I’ve seen the full spectrum in my career, so like that snake charmer, respect MV’s, don’t fear them

First off, don’t make MV’s for everything.  My very first VC job was back in version 3.0F.  In those days, there was no good solution to handle returns, restocking, etc…  So rather than wait for SAP to fix the issues, we developed the a function within the configurator to create a fully usable MV within a minute or two.  This was the process we used for everything that was configurable.  And it worked fine.  The concept was that if modeled everything correctly, there was no reason it could not be instantly costed and assigned all the relevant master data in the background.  This approached solved all the issues on the sales side of things.  Now, the complications came on the engineering side of things.  Within a year or two, we were in the 100,000’s of MV’s.  This meant that each time something changed, all the MV’s needed to be changed as well.  This might be a simple revision to the part, or might be a full fledged configuration change (which required a refresh of the configuration within every material master).  This process quickly become overwhelming.  Especially when massive changes where required that dealt with ECM and complex date shifting.  YUCK. This taught me to respect MV’s…  but also to appreciate them.

See, even today, returning a VC part isn’t easy, and if you want to return it to stock,  you have to use an MV anyway.  The short story is that you can’t do business without them.  The important thing to realize is to NOT overuse them.

Now, on the flip side, I recently uncounted a client that needed configurable materials on a service order.  SAP didn’t design for this, so you simply get the error you can’t use a configurable material as a component on a service order.  Now, this to me is a perfect use for a simple program to create an MV, handle all the BOM, routing, costing and material master, then drop the material on your order a minute later and go on your merry way.  This was not a high volume service shop that would be generating thousands of MV’s a month, and the configurations were very simple, this was a perfect use for an MV.  You may have read some posts about this a few months back.  In general, there is no good way to handle this.  You can do the purchased part (generate a req back to yourself, make a sales order to add the configurable part and so on), you could create a production order for a dummy part, then add the configurable material onto it’s BOM (creating lots of production variance… probably 100%), or you could use an MV.

My advise, respect the MV and don’t go overboard.  However, don’t be afraid if you need to make a few hundred per year.

Thanks for reading,

Service Master Data – What are you doing with it?

Now, SAP is a great system.  It is incredibly powerful, and can provide more possibilities than any business could ever implement.  But no matter what system you use, SAP, AS400, Oracle, or Quick books, it’s all about the data.  I don’t care what system you use to run your business.  If you don’t have your master data in place, your system is an expensive word processor.  Service management is no different.  Depending on your business, there is the potential for a lot of data.  So what do you need to do business?  what do you need to do your service business really well?  Only you can answer that question, because every business is different.  I can say, that it is truly in your best interest to capture as much data as you can…  within reason of course.  Now, there is a lot of data that SAP can help you capture.

The first and most vital, in my opinion, is the serial number.  This is building block for everything service related.  If you want to opportunity to track equipment, this is where it all starts.  SAP provides you with some great functionality, including letting you decide just what gets tracked for a serial number.  Do you want it available or required for material movements, production orders, sales orders, deliveries, etc…  you can do all of that out of the box in SAP.  Now some industries are required to track serial numbers, but many of them do it for trace-ability.  An alternative to the serial number is the batch.  It’s not quite as exact, but it still buys you a quite a bit of functionality.

Now, you can take your serialization to the next level, but it comes with a price.  These next methods I’ll discuss lose the automation benefits.  You’ll need to invest some effort into building and maintaining these next pieces.  Now there are three ways to take things to the next level of grouping serial numbers together.

First is a the serial number hierarchy.  This method is very useful when you need to track serial numbers within serial numbers.  I often see this method when building up something larger, like say an engine.  There are special components that may need to be tracked within a larger unit that is also tracked.

The next method is building a hierarchy using the functional location.  Within SAP, the functional location is often associated with the plant or plant maintenance. The idea behind the functional location is exactly what the name suggests, it’s a location.  Within the location, you can build up the serialized units within that location.  The functional location can often be associated with large machines that don’t move, but may need maintenance, service, etc…  A functional location works like a serial number as far as SAP is concerned.

The last method is the installed base.  Now the installed base is like the functional location, only a lot more functional.  The installed base can hold materials, serial numbers, documents, and even other install bases.  This is is a big step, because it can become an installation within a customer site.  Depending on the size of the customer site, you can break it down as granular as you need to.  This becomes excessively valuable if you provide on-site service.  You can quickly pinpoint and direct your technicians to the exact location of the issue.  Of course, this assumes that you have communication with your equipment…  and that’s a whole other level of data collection…

We’ve talked about enough for today.  What I would like you to take away from this post is that the data building blocks within SAP are just that, building blocks.  We talked about the initial building blocks.  Soon I’ll talk more about why these pieces are so valuable.

Thanks for reading,

 

Are you giving your customers everything they need?

You know, it may sound cliche, but is very true.  I recently had lunch with a friend of mine, and he reminded me how often this simple fact is forgotten.  It may not be obvious to everyone, but service is money.  I’m talking about your aftermarket business, your spare part business, warranties, extended warranties, service contracts, your customer service helpline and of course your repair depots.  While some companies recognize this as a part of the business, many organizations don’t realize the full potential.  In a climate when the economy is up and down, and everyone is uncertain of the future, it means that more people are interested in extending the life of current products.  If you aren’t providing your customers every opportunity to keep doing business with you, you are throwing away revenue.  And I assure you, someone else is happy to take that business.

Now, the first thing that you really need to analyze is what can you being doing for you customers?  Now there are a lot of potential options, so start simple.  Start with what you already do, but do it better.  So, let’s say that you currently perform repairs for your customer.  Great, but how easy do you make it for your customers?

  • Do you provide them 24/7 access to initiate a service call?
    • if so, do you require them to stay on the phone for minutes (that feel like hours)?
  • Do you give them the option to buy an extended warranty?
  • can they print out their own shipping label or return merchandise paperwork?
  • Do you provide them a loaner or exchange option?
  • Could you provide them a complete history of what they’ve bought?

Get the idea?  All of the ideas that mentioned above make your customer experience easier, faster, better…  this encourages them to continue doing business with you.  And to top it off, many customers are willing to pay extra for some of the bonus features.  For example, the loan or exchange option can be sold at a premium to your customers.  Now all of these options are available right now.  All you need to do is setup some pricing and some processes.  The chances are you, already have refurbished units sitting in your inventory.  Why not use them as a loaner bank to keep your customer rolling along in their business while you repair their unit?

If you’re not already using some of these techniques, and are interested in learning how you can use SAP to deliver a better experience to your customers, please email me at mpiehl@gojavellin.com.  I’ll be happy to have a call to understand what you are currently doing, and how you can easily use SAP to enhance your processes.

Thanks for reading,

Dealing with Setbacks

You ever have one of those days when nothing seems to go your way?  When it seems like everything you touch falls apart and your afraid to look at any new email?  Or get a bad feeling when the phone rings?

Well, we all have those days, and when the day is over, what really matters is how we rebound from those though days.  Even for me, it’s a constant learning experience.  The bad days for me often require a couple beers, and a good friend to vent to.  It’s hard to avoid the feeling sorry for myself.  But it helps to remember that everything that goes wrong, can be a learning experience.  It can be something to build on, a change to pivot, or a chance to reflect.  Bad days are limited, and good days happen much more often.

So, but the trouble behind you, and use it to drive you over the next hurdle.  Sometimes our worst experiences, turn into life altering improvements.  Find the good in every situation.  No matter what, it’s there… you might have to dig a little to find it…  but it’s worth the trouble.  If you need a shovel, let me know.  I’ll let you borrow mine.

thanks for reading,

Do your service technicians need better information?

In my travels implementing service, I find a constant gap.  The service technicians want more information without having to dig into multiple transactions to see it.  Take your standard in-house repair or plant maintenance event.  Rarely is all the information contained in the service order.  Sometimes there are attachments or pictures, sometimes long text held in the service notification, or even easier, you need to flip through 4 tabs just see the information you need to do the repair.

This gap led me to create my own app that I call service execution.  The idea behind of this is to see only the service/maintenance orders that are open and that you care about.  Then with a click you can pull up all the information about that order, and even perform common functions for the order, all from a single location.

Proximity: Service Execution

User:  JVS
Password: password

Please press the feedback button to let me know you think,
As always, thanks for reading,

Why use SAP Service Management?

I recently got a question from one of my previous clients.  Why should I do service in SAP?  This can happen sometimes after running the process for a while, realizing that it can be tedious and painful, especially compared to maintaining a spreadsheet.  So this was my answer, and I’d love to hear from any of you on some points I may have missed.

Let me be upfront, and say that the bottom line should always be the driving factor.  I believe in using SAP service management, but at the end of the day, if you can accomplish all of these same things in another way and cost less money and produce the same results, then the decision is obvious.

Everything comes down to integration.  While you may hear this as a buzz word for anything ERP, at the end of the day, it’s why someone paid a lot of money to implement SAP.  By working within the same software, it means that everyone is speaking the same language, seeing the same numbers and looking at the same data.  For service specifically:

  1. Financial integration is one of the biggest pieces you get by using Service.  This means that your costs and revenues can be easily tracked by finance in the same ways they track everything else in the company.  If you stop using SAP service, then finance will be forced to manually journal all of the transactions.  Depending on the financial requirements, this will mean journaling every invoice and every material issue, as well as any costs related to an order.  Or maybe it’s just a couple of lump sums at the end of the month.  All depends on what finance is required to provide in the case of an audit.
  2. Creating demands on other parts of the organization.  Production is the most obvious area that you deal with on a consistent basis.  By using work orders and adding the components you need, it allows demand to be centralized.  Otherwise, you end up having to create manual orders to generate production.  In general, it would work something like this.  You have a service job that you expect to happen in 1 months.  With SM, you enter in all the components you need on the work order, assign the date that you need things, and then begin production on all the long lead time items, and the rest come in later.  If you begin to manage all of this manually, you need to create production/purchase orders for each component on that order and you have to assign each order a date.  Now, let’s say the job gets delayed 2 months.  You either a) leave all the orders, tie up the inventory and have it sit in your shop until the job finally arrives, or b) you have to go into each order and manually change the dates.  If you use SM, changing the service order dates will update anything that isn’t already in the process of being produced.
  3. Reporting – if you keep all the data within SAP, it means you can actually pull everything together to see what happened.  Sure, this can be done using vlookups in multiple spreadsheets, but how many spreadsheets will everyone be maintaining some small piece of puzzle?  Will warranty track all their requests in the same way that service does?  If you tried to look at all the calls that came in to see how many were warranty vs. service, would you be comparing apples to apples?  If everyone uses the same process, you are fine.  If you perform this in SAP, everyone will use the same process.  One of the reasons I built a dashboard is to demonstrate how you can use all the data in SAP to really see where your process performs well and where it needs fine tuning.
  4. Process – while the process may seem over engineered, too complicated, or just plain overkill.  At the end of the day, SAP does reflect all of the things that really happen in the process, and they force you to document it.  This is extremely useful (in my opinion) because if you use spreadsheets to run the business, you are dependent on someone remembering to enter in the data.  SAP takes a lot of that away, because you can’t ship something out the door until you’ve completed it.  You can’t issue the components until they are available in stock, etc…  By forcing you to execute the process, it decreases the chance of skipping steps, or just not documenting things.
    It’s also why I built my applications, to help small shops to be able to use the system easier.  This way you can get all the benefits of accurate data, without as much overhead in the process.
  5. Being able to run your shop your better.  Just because your shop is small, doesn’t mean that it can’t be run more efficiently.  I don’t care if you need to manage 10 jobs or 1000 jobs a month.  Being able to look at the system, quickly decide what is the priority for today, and see everything else that is impacted is much tougher to do a non-integrated system.  Being able to quickly drill into any work order to see the components, what components are still missing, who the customer is because you know this is a big account, and see all the notes, job data and the extact progress in the job, and then quickly do the same to the other 10 jobs screaming for your attention.  And most importantly, pass that information onto everyone that needs to know.
  6. Last but not least… you are probably already using it.  So that would mean designing a new process, since you will have to determine all the SAP touch points that you will still need to be accounted for, plus I’m sure there would need to be some justification that the new process would be stable and reliable and less effort than the new process.

anything else you would include???

thanks for reading,

Keeping Warranty Dates Up to Date

If you do repairs of your customers goods, how do you keep your warranty dates up to date?  This seems like a simple question, but if you use SAP, this simple question often comes back with a head scratch, or a simple statement like “we don’t bother doing it”.  Of course, you many not offer a warranty on your repair work, but many organizations do.

Well, if you are like many organizations I’ve encountered, you know that the process of updating warranty dates in SAP is either a completely manual task, or a development exercise. Now, the later works, but like everything, when you do development, you need to make sure it continues to work every time you do an upgrade.  Now, in general, the equipment api’s and bapi’s don’t often change, so usually, a quick test can reassure you the technical portion is working.  But, if you life in the manual world, how often do your technicians forget to update the warranty start and end dates?  Let’s be honest here, typically a technician is working on multiple jobs at once, and they are trying their best to accurately track time and complete work orders.  When they hit TECO, do you think they always remember to update the warranty dates?

Now you may be saying, so what?  Well, if your accounting department doesn’t care, then you’re in the clear 🙂  But most of the companies I’ve spent time with care very dearly about those warranty dollars.  They want to track how much free work is being given away, and ideally track down why it happened to help prevent it from occurring in the future.  And if your call center needs to rely on SAP to know if it’s under warranty, or worse yet, take your customer’s word on it, then you may be running into a lot of money going into the warranty accounts.

Why isn’t there a simple option upon TECO to enter in the new warranty dates, so no one has to remember???  If you’d like to hear how a way to simply handle this issue and start improving your warranty dates, let me know.  I’ll be happy to show you.

Thanks for reading,

ABAP – Avoid the View

Well, in a never ending quest to improve performance, I’ve stumbled upon yet another novice mistake I was making. I was doing select statements into views. In theory, views are great, everything is already there, I can do 1 extract and grab everything I need. I figured out, selecting data from a view is very EXPENSIVE.
So, my tip of the day, avoid views in your programming. If you only have a view, go to SE11, and see what tables comprise the views, and extract directly from the correct tables. Your users will thank you.
Thanks for reading,