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It’s been a while since I got back to some of the ROI posts I did a while ago.  I thought I’d pick up where I left off and talk today about how you can get return on your investment just from proper use of the service order.  Now if you are still reading this, you likely already use service orders, and maybe you even figure that there is nothing more to be done in the service order.  Maybe you feel like it’s already optimized enough and working well.  Perhaps you are right, but at least check out the rest of this post to see if you might be able to find at least one tidbit you can think of implementing.

First and foremost, are you entering the proper data on your service orders.  It wasn’t that long ago, that I came to realize if you generate a field service order directly from a sales order, that the object doesn’t get populated automatically.  While this may not stop anything in the process, you are losing that link in your equipment history.  Losing that link could mean you are losing vital data for a piece of equipment, or at a minimum you have to do extra clicks to see everything.  The object data is just one piece.  Some of the other common pieces of the order I see overlooked include:

• User Status – Can’t say enough about this.
  • Use it to determine your quoting requirements for a customer.  If you do billable repairs, often you customers require a quote before you can start working.  But how do you know that you need a quote?  how do you know when the customer has approved or rejected the quote?  This powerful tool lets you know at a glance.
  • It can be used for so many different things like showing that parts have been pulled for the order already, it can be flags for work flows and much more.  If I had to pick one place that can give you ROI, this is it.
• Basic Start/Finish Dates – this might be covered in MRP or your scheduling, but in my opinion, you should always be populating “realistic” dates into these fields.
  • This provides you with a clear picture of exactly how long you expect someone to be working on a job or step.  Especially if you are planning in the field, you need to know how long a technician will be un-available.  These dates give you a lot more power, especially if your planning of the operations is “light”.
• Accounting Indicator – it’s been my experience that one of the most powerful fields in the notification/sales order/service order is the accounting indicator.  By itself it does nothing, but if you combine it with simple reporting, resource related billing, etc.
  • My favorite usage for this field is determining warranty vs. billable.  We have all been in the position that the customer says it’s under warranty and the techs take a look at it and it’s been run over by a car or something.  Clearly NOT warranty.  By utilizing this field, you have a method to determine if it is really warranty, and if so, you can use this field to drive pricing/RRB etc.  True value add just by using pieces of standard SAP.
• Person/Dept Responsible – this is a highly underused field.  In general, my recommendation is to always use one or both of these partner types in your service order to provide an easy list of who is working on what.
  • As long as that field is set to a person, there is someone accountable.
  • It also provides a great way to narrow down the list of operations/orders that a person is responsible for.  This will help you in scheduling, and them in knowing what their workload looks like.  If you currently use something like IW72, you can get a list by plant or work center, but isn’t an individual list more powerful?  Why make your technicians sort through a bunch of orders.
• Planner Group – I use this less, but in general, this is another good way to narrow down responsibility.
  • One use is if there are multiple supervisors, or a supervisor that spans multiple plants.  This way, you can instantly see who is responsible for planning the order.

So far, we’ve just looked at a few fields.  Now lets talk processing.  Do you plan your service orders?  When I say plan I mean do you enter in the approximate hours and components you expect to complete the job?  If not…  you have a huge opportunity to improve your process and get some quick ROI.  If you aren’t planning components, how can you expect to use MRP to make sure you are getting what you need?  Or are you literally purchasing everything you need by jumping on the phone, driving to your supplier and then giving it to the field?  If this is true, my guess is that you are not utilizing your best skills as a supervisor.  The same goes for hours.  If you don’t know how long something will take, how can you give your customer an accurate completion date?  or even something close.  Now you may be doing this… you may have even gone to the next level of automating some of this.  Good for you!!!  But there is more to it…  are you reviewing planned vs. actual?  what if it used to take 2 hours to do a repair, now it’s taking 2.5 hrs?  do you know why?  and if you do, shouldn’t you be updating your plan to show the correct amount of time?  Like an old friend of mine always said “Garbage in, Garbage out”.  If you enter in data once and forget it, can you trust it?  and if you can’t trust it, you are either flying by the seat of your pants or doing a lot of manual work.  Neither are good in a service shop that is typically over worked to begin with.

Next opportunity is resource related billing (RRB).  Now for many shops this might be overkill…  or is it???  I say that because there are some very standard profiles I have implemented for many companies that work great and give you exactly what you need…  cost vs. revenue at the sales order pricing level.  If your customer needs to see the itemized list of what you did…  are you typing in a bunch of text on a long text field?  are your techs typing up something that can be copied and pasted on some report?  If so… why not use RRB and let SAP do the work for you.  It is typically a one time exercise to set it up…  and then, you just need to make sure you output to the customer prints it correctly.  If you want to see costs by parts so you can do cost + pricing…  if you want a quick itemization breakdown just for internal purposes I suggest using RRB.  You can make it as easy or as complex as you want.  If you want a dead simple profile that covers most of your needs, let me know and I’ll send it to you.

Finally, the biggest place for ROI in service is the overall interface.  Let’s face it, the service order has a lot of tabs and a lot of information.  Most of it your standard technician (and probably any in your organization for that matter) never look at.  The problem is that often there is 1 fields on each tab you do care about.  If that is 4 tabs, that means 4 clicks to see a little bit of info.  Efficient?  of course not.   Then factor in that the technician needs to jump to a separate transaction to enter in their time and materials, they may need to pull up the sales order, notification or attachments to see everything they need to do.  That is a lot of clicks for someone that really just needs to see the data to fix something and then confirm time and materials.  It’s why I built Proximity Execution.  This set of tools gives you one view for the supervisor and one view for the technicians.  Simple, configurable and saves you time.  Want to be able to EASILY schedule your entire service shop…  you need to check out Proximity Supervisor.  With mass change, simple printing, notes, simple views, and all the information at your finger tips, you will be able to maintain your SAP shop data in a 1/4 of the time you spend today.

Thanks for reading,

It’s funny, I’ve been doing this for a while, and i’ve always avoided using the RA order types.  I’ve even talked to some long time veterans in SM/CS that admit they don’t really know the differences either.  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.

Thanks for reading,