SAP

I’ve recently had multiple different people ask me a similar question.  The general idea is that a company has a product that they want to sell on a contract.  This product will then be shipped on a regular interval.  This can often apply to some sort of consumable for a product, like cleaning supplies, testing kits, whatever.  The customer buys a bunch up front, typically at a discounted rate, or they simply want to include a bunch of extras on a big contract purchase order.  Either way, the idea is to buy a bunch in advance and have them delivered sometime in the future…  or on a regular interval.

I’ve spent some time digging, but unfortunately, I haven’t found a good solution.  I have found 3 different ways talked about, so I wanted to cover them and explain what I have found.  Maybe you can tell me a better way to do it.

1. Subscription order.  This is the most promising.  It is a specific sales order type that is designed to deliver something on a regular interval.  The drawback, unless you have IS-Media, you don’t have this functionality.  I believe it also requires some master data setup, which could be an issue if you sell this product normally and on a subscription.  I wasn’t able to dig further into this to know for sure.
2. Schedule Agreements.  Again, this sounded like a winner, but as I dug into it, it really appears to have little difference from a standard order.  I could not find any functionality to help me automatically drive schedule line dates.
3. Standard Sales order…  for me, I chose to go down this process because if I had to set the schedule lines manually anyway, why mess with a different order type or fancy configuration.  Simply lock in the schedule lines so that they are not rescheduled, and enter in the quantity to be delivered on each date.

Now, this still is far from ideal, so I might end up designing something into my Renovation tool for service contract processing.  Then I can add an option to add an item on a schedule.  Then define if it is monthy, quarterly, yearly or manual.  Sound like anything you might be able to use?

Thanks for reading,

I’ve been running into more and more businesses that sell products through a distributor.  The problem from a service perspective is that when a distributor holds products for you, you have no idea how long they could sit on the shelf.  This makes a life a challenge when trying to accurately set the warranty start date.  Now you can use a master warranty to control the end date, but this doesn’t help you to determine when to set the start date.

Now, the most common approach I’ve seen to this is either having a customer mail in a registration form or creating their website to let a customer register it themselves.  Now the mail in cards is the worst of all worlds (in my opinion)  because it requires your customer to manually fill out a card, mail it back to you, and then you have to manually input the information into the system.  Many possible points of failure.

Option 2 is the better approach.  You can create a website, portal, whatever and then make interfaces back into SAP.  It’s the best possible option.  To the best of my knowledge, Hybris does not include any tools for product registration or customer.

This is the reason I built Rapier a long time ago.  I always wanted to provide an out of the box solution that would give customers a service portal.  I built it to allow them to register themselves as a new user, register their serial number, and create a service ticket (notification) all directly from this Web Dynpro Application.  If this sounds like it might be useful for your organization, I’d love to hear from you and provide you a demo.

Thanks for reading,

I recently talked about building a contract that can handle services and products in a single document.  The idea behind this contract is that it will allow you to sell a product with an extended warranty and bill the customer in a single invoice.  There is another very interesting use for this concept.  If you run business across multiple divisions, don’t you want the ability to see a customer products from any division and invoice them once?  Now, of course there could be inter-company  considerations, but that is just pricing :).   Using this contract, you could enter as many different divisions on a single order.  You will need to execute real orders in the respective division in order to provide the delivery and intercompany invoicing though.

The key to this is being able to perform the create with reference function from the original contract.  The problem is that when you create with reference, it locks in the sales organization, distribution channel and division.  There is a way to overcome this.  if you use the following user exit, and your own version of custom code, you can open up the field for editing.

Program: MV45AFZZ

FORM userexit_field_modification.

IF screen-name = ‘VBAK-VTWEG’
OR screen-name = ‘VBAK-SPART’.

screen-input = 1.
MODIFY SCREEN.

ENDIF.

This is highly simplified logic, and would open the field for everything.  You could enter in a specific document type or other value to denote when the screen field should be opened.  But this should get you going in the right direction.

Thanks for reading,