Now when you set up your service business business, one of the questions you always begin with is how many DIEN materials do you need to run your business? Now there are the obvious ones if you are using the lead service material model (RAS) within SAP:
Return and Repair
Field Service
Exchange
Now, you can even break this down further by warranty or some other breakdown your organization needs. My personal take is to avoid going any deeper than the level I have above. The further down you break things at this level will likely lead to confusion/mistakes when entering in the orders/notifications. I typically encourage any further breakdown to be handled at a level that can change (like the accounting indicator). If you use warranty as an example, once this is on the sales order, it’s very difficult to reverse. So I encourage you to keep things like that out of the “rough cut”.
Once you have the main processes defined, you need to take a look at the next level. Now, this is the parts where things become more convoluted is if you begin to use resource related billing. Now the trick with resource related billing (RRB) is knowing what you need to report on. One of these days I’ll go into more details on RRB, but before you can do that, you need to understand what your goals are. Now you can go simple, and just say labor and materials. But what about subcontract costs? do you need to break out travel costs? or maybe even certain materials (ROH’s vs. HALB’s). Keep in mind that much of your design will be based on your customer needs, but some of it should be based on what you plan to track as a business as well.
Of course, there is the alternative, and that is to use the leading servicable material (RA) model, which makes anything you repair it’s own service material. Typically, this is my least favorite approach because it requires a constant update to the OISD transaction to allow a new material to be a service material. The flip side is that it makes it very easy to assign a specific task list by material.
The short story is to have a plan. You can add more in the future, but in order to handle Resource Related billing, you really need to figure out this part first. When I talk more about RRB you’ll understand why.
Thanks for reading.
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike