One of the things I struggle with in the service process is how challenging it can be to close a service notification. If you deal with in-house repairs, you know what I’m talking about. In order to close a notification you must first make sure that all the tasks/activities have been close or cancelled, then you can complete the notification. Intuitively, this makes sense. You need to make sure all the steps have been completed before you mark it as closed.
The problem comes in when trying to figure out when to close something. This is easy if you control all the steps of the notification. Like if it is a simple customer call or followup there are no other groups involved. You know when you finished you job, so mark it as complete. But happens when you can’t complete it until customer service and the service shop have done their steps. How do you know??? Inevitably, this is why so many companies do NOT use IW58 (notification list) to see the open notifications. There is often so much junk in there, that it’s more trouble than it is worth to clean it up.
What about the nice little check mark that SAP that lets you close a notification when you Technically complete the service order? Well, this works great if you are dealing with an order created directly from a notification. However, if you use standard SM with a repair sales order, then this check mark does nothing for you.
This combination drove me mad. I guess that’s why I added this feature to Proximity, so when you technically complete a service order, it will go through and close the notification. it would finally allow you to start using the Notification List to see what is truly open, and could use the Completed Status of the notification for reporting as well.
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