SAP

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,

I like to jump back to this topic, because I feel it’s very valuable to recognize just how you can get additional return on investment using service orders within SAP.  Now often the points I’m making may not be new information, and even better, it could be things your organization is already doing.  In that case, be sure to remind your executives of the things your group is doing right 🙂  However, if you are like many organizations, take these as possible ideas to make your service organization even better.  Today I want to talk about proper scheduling of your service orders.

Now if you want a great way to realize a return on service management, it is scheduling your service orders in the most effective and efficient way.  Again, this concept sounds so obvious, but in general, I see many organizations overlook this concept and just “wing it” when it comes to deciding what to work on next.  There are a few key things that you can easily do to help increase your ROI on the service order.  But before we cover those simple ideas, let’s focus on exactly what you will gain by implementing these.

The first and most important is a more satisfied customer.  How can it get any better than that.  If your customer sends you back their broken widget, you look at your schedule and give them an accurate date of when they can expect their widget back.  Now, customers will always want things back faster, but in general, if you can live up to your promise date, they will respect and trust you.

Next, you get an efficient service shop.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that you don’t have technicians jumping from one order to the next every 30 minutes, because your missing components, the machine you need is in use, or the technician doesn’t have the required skills.  By letting your supervisor schedule things appropriately, you’ll minimize the jumping around, which leads to getting things done faster.  If you’ve ever tried to do 5 tasks at the same time you know that the more jumping you do, the longer it takes to finish.

The first is using the priority field on the service orders.  Now, I’m not going to pretend that this will solve all your issues, but this is the fastest and easiest way to perform what I consider “rough-cut” planning.  The default priority profile for service orders comes with the standard 4 options, Very High, high, medium, low.  Now for most organization, this is fine.  However, you can easily configure these priorities to be whatever you need.  In addition, the priority fields even give you the option to set start and end dates that the priority needs to use.  The dates are great, but in my opinion, just setting a priority on every service order will quickly give your service technicians what needs to be worked on first.  Just drilling in the concept that all #1 priorities must be completed (or at least taken as far as possible) before looking at any priority #2.  In my opinion, the easier you make the rules, more likely your entire team is to follow them 🙂

The next thing I believe is assigning every order (or operation) to a person on your team.  Now this could be overkill if you have a very small team, but even then, unless you assign everything to the same person, you will get benefit out of this concept.  When you assign a responsible person to each order, you take that next machete slash in scheduling.  This way, if you have someone with a specialty skill, say welding, you can assign all the welding operations to that person so it’s very obvious what that person’s workload really is.  It also gives your supervisor viability on the upcoming bottlenecks for a particular resource.

Next up is the basic start and end dates.  If you set these, and if you have your supervisor monitoring these, now you know instantly what needs to happen first.  Now, if you pair these dates with the priority and responsible person, you have essential built a simple capacity plan for your service shop.  When you have each person looking at what they need to do, combined with the date it needs to start/end, and in the event of a conflict, the highest priority wins, and more importantly your customer wins.

Now, if you are really looking to take your scheduling to the next level, you can start moving toward actual capacity management.  Now, I can’t speak as an expert on this topic, but I certainly know that your service work centers can use capacity planning just like any production order work center.  Now, in the service world, things will always be more “fluid” than in the production world simply because you never know when something will break.  That doesn’t mean you can’t still plan to the best of your ability.

I hope this gives you some ideas to increase your service order ROI.  Thanks for reading,

Now, I’m pretty excited about this.  This is the execution of my latest brainchild.  Now, this idea really should’ve been obvious to me quite a while ago, but it’s amazing how difficult it can be to see the forest through the trees.  As you may know, we’ve had a product called Proximity, and one of the pieces was production execution.  What I finally realized is that I could take the same concept and apply the idea to the service management realm.  Now the elegance of this solution is the simplicity I can provide to the service/repair shop.

By creating a single transaction that allows any service technician to quickly see the service orders that apply to them.  They can see every operation they need to work on, quickly see the priority, and even any notes that have been entered onto the order.  Then, they can even drill into a specific service operation, they can run availability, they can do a confirmation, if the shop uses PRT’s you can even view those all right in the same screen.

If this sounds like something your service department could use,  please check out our web page that includes a demo on the functionality for Service Execution.

I’d love to hear your feedback and thanks for reading,

It’s interesting, because as long as I’ve been doing service, I’ve always tended to be hands off on this portion of the process.  I left it to the MM or WM person to set this up.  I won’t pretend to be an expert or go deep into the configuration, but the overall process is something i wanted share.  Let’s start at the beginning.  What am I talking about when I say service parts staging?  I’m talking about the process of getting components that will be used in a repair to the service storage location so they can be easily issued to the order upon completion.  It also serves to “secure” the inventor for service.

Now, several of the things I just said, require a little more explanation, and I’ll get to them to shortly.  First, I need to digress a little and explain the 3 most common scenarios for service inventory.

1.  Service uses it’s own IM managed storage location.  Any additional inventory is acquired from an IM managed warehouse.  This scenario is the most common and the most straight forward.  Inventory can be completely managed using material movements.

2.  Service uses it’ own IM managed storage location.  Any additional inventory is acquired from a WM managed warehouse.  This is somewhat common, but still happens in the minority of facilities.  In general, WM tends to be used only for large warehouse with a large number of components.  This scenario becomes much for complicated because any time you deal with a “mixed” environment, you have to deal with material movements, transfer requirements and transfer orders.

3.  Service exists in the same WM warehouse as the inventory it may need.  While this sounds like an easy environment, it’s still a bit of a challenge because service management has no integration with warehouse management.  Now production orders can integrate with WM cleanly (at least in this scenario).

Now, the heart of the issue come from getting the parts to the service order when it’s needed.  This inevitably means that service will need stock from somewhere else.  It really doesn’t matter which of the 3 scenarios you are talking about, each presents it’s own set of challenges.  At the end of the day, we just need components in a location that the service department can access them.

Now, let’s take scenario 1 & 2 together.  let’s say we have a storage location called SERV. This will be the SLOC that service uses.  Now, the inventory that service and production both use will be in a SLOC called INVN. Now for your service parts, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if INVN is IM or WM.  To get the parts, you need to execute a material movement, like 311, and then send the pick list over to the warehouse to pick the parts and deliver them.  If INVN is Warehouse managed, just doing the 311 movement will generate a negative that can be converted to a TR/TO to actually move the parts from the bins of your choosing using LB12 or some other variation to create the .  Now, the major challenge is creating the material list to transfer, and then of course performing the actual move.  Now, the good news is that the components are “reserved” because in SAP they have moved to SERV, however the physical move still needs to happen, so it’s important to make sure the pick list gets sent to the warehouse to complete the loop when using the 311 method in advance.

Scenario 3 is actually quite a bit easier.  Since it is completely within WM, SAP provides a transaction called LP10, that allows you enter in the order and then select what bins to pull the material from, and then deliver it to appropriate service order.

As you can see, getting components to the service order isn’t as easy as it looks.  There is significant work, and this should play an important part in your blueprinting for service.  Determining if you want to deal with WM or IM in your service area is an important consideration.

Thanks for reading,