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Service Contracts – the latest e-book

I’m pretty excited.  I recently finished my 4th e-book.  I feel like I’m starting to get into the swing of things.  This E-Book is personally one of my favorites that I have done.  Maybe because I keep learning more about the process, or maybe because I think this topic is poorly covered out there, that I think it will be very useful to a lot of people out there.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/652520

This latest book is all about the service contracts.  I went back to my original book and focused heavily on the configuration side of how to set up.  Of course, you can’t configure something if you don’t know what you need.  So the book covers blueprinting, it walks you through the different service contract processes and throw in some complicated topics like billing plans and revenue recognition.  If you like this book and find anything missing, or anything you think could be covered in more detail, please let me know.  I would be happy to make additions or clarifications.  My goal is to make this a useful reference guide to veterans and novices alike.  Please check it out and let me know what you think,

thanks for reading,

Product Registration

Product Registration

Early on in my adventures to create products in service management, I created a web application designed for end users to input their own information.  I learned a lot from that initial product, and it gave me a lot of good ideas.  At the time, the product never really took off, so I set it on the shelf for a while.  As I explore the whole new UI5, responsive technology suddenly makes me wonder if this is something to revive.  My brain has been focusing a lot on warranty lately, and the concept of product registration was something I designed into my old application.  It worked very simply.  Once someone logged into the application, they could register a product.  All they needed was a serial number, material number or equipment record.  Every business is slightly different, so I kept this generic.  They could search SAP to see if the serial number existed.  If it did, they could register it to themselves.

Upon registering it would assign an end user partner to the equipment, and it had the option to assign warranty start and end dates as well.  As an added feature, within the scope of the application, you could see all products registered to you (or your company) and select them from a list if you needed to submit a notification.

If you don’t currently use SAP capture your registrations, what sort of data are you losing?  I’ve worked at companies before that still receive the little postcard registrations.  This is great, but someone needs to manually key these into the system.  If you don’t do any sort of registration, do you know all your end users?  if so, no big loss.  If not, you could be losing out on the ability to market directly to the people using your product.  If you use registration within SAP, you have that reporting capability available to you.

What I’m curious about is if this is something your organization would see value in.  If so, I’d love to hear from you, and I’d be open to moving the original “Rapier” up on the priority list to be converted to UI5 (it is currently in ABAP Web Dynpro).  I look forward to hearing your thoughts,

thanks for reading,

Setting Warranty Dates – A new option

Setting Warranty Dates – A new option

One of the things I have always wanted to see from SAP is an easy way to set warranty dates.  They have gone out and built up a lot of automotive functionality, namely ACS-Warranty, the Warranty Claims “module” etc.  But I have yet to find an easy way to enter in the dates.  So, my mind naturally wonders how it could be done better.  So a few months ago, I blueprinted what I thought could be a great solution.  I wanted to find out if you agree, and if so, do you think it is worth developing.

What if warranty dates worked just like pricing in SD?  Now, if you aren’t familiar with how SD pricing works, let me give you the high level.  pricing contains a series of tables, each of the tables has different and/or more fields.  let me paint you a picture.

Table 1 – material number

Table 2 – material number, product hierarchy

Table 3 – material number, pricing group, product hierarchy

and so on…  within SD pricing, I can group and sequence these tables in such a way that if you find the value in a table, you stop and return that value.  if not, you keep dropping down to the next table until you find a match.  so if I group these tables 1 = table 3, 2 = table 2, 3 = table 1.  Then table 1 will be my most generic, and last resort.  Typically there are fewer entries in the most specific tables despite the fact that it is more specific.  This is because there are usually only a handful of “special” cases that drive different prices.

Now, what if we could do that with warranty dates?  have it use this same concept to be as generic or specific as your business needs.  If your company (or any customer you have worked with in the past) could benefit from something like this?

Looking forward to your responses.  Thanks for reading,

Setting Warranty Dates for new products

Setting Warranty Dates for new products

A challenge I always seem to encounter in SAP is setting warranty dates.  Now, in my world, I’m very familiar with what to do with the warranty dates and how to process things, but one of the biggest challenges is getting the warranty dates set properly in the first place.  In my travels, I’ve done this 4 different ways, often depending on the business or development resources available.  Here are the options I’ve done in the past and I’d love to hear your experience.

  1.  Write a user exit at the time of post goods issue.  This will work, especially if you follow simple warranty rules.  The gotcha for this always ends up being how to set different dates by product line, hierarchy, material type, etc.  You typically end up with one or more custom tables to hold this information.  But this falls apart if you need to get more complicated than material number (prod hier, or whatever).  Perhaps you offer 12 months on everything in a product family, except for you most mature product, which you offer 18 months.  Short of adding in new product hierarchy, or listing each material individually, you end up writing a lot of code that may or may not change.
  2. Product Registration: Method 1 is great if you start the warranty clock as soon as you ship it.  What happens if you deal with distributors that may hold your product for 1 – 6 months before the end user purchases it.  You can’t very well your end user it’s out of warranty if they just bought it and it’s been sitting on a shelf for a while.  In this case, you need to resort to product registration.  If you users are willing to do this, I love this approach.  However, this requires a lot of up front work.  You typically need a user website capable of allowing your customers to register a product.  This means you need to be capable of creating new customers on the fly, adding partner types to an existing equipment record, and then setting the warranty dates.  You also typically need to add a front end to login, or even create new users in the system to even allow an end customer to do this.  It’s a big up front effort unless your business has already done it.
  3. Create a background program that looks at all the of the serial numbers shipped, PGI’d, etc, and then using similar logic to the user exit, load in the correct values.  This approach is very similar to #1, but offloads the heavy lifting until later rather than doing it as the delivery is going out the door.  This approach is typically better, since warranty information is not critical as a product leaves the door.  You typically have at least a week before you should need to worry about it 🙂
  4. Manually entering the data/skipping it.  All too often, this ends up being the approach that businesses take.  Why?  it’s too much development to get the data in when it might never be used.  So they may run a report monthly to show all the equipment with blank warranty dates, and in someone’s “spare time”, they might enter in the data.  Let’s be honest, this means you might as well skip it, since the warranty data will be so hit or miss that data is not trustworthy.

Now, something to consider regardless of how you set the warranty dates (or master warranty) is:  What happens if you don’t have a simple time based warranty?  as soon as you need to track hours of usage, miles, tons moved, or whatever, you now need to track a whole new level of warranty data.  Measurement documents are great for this…  but they carry their own overhead.  For example, how do you get the numbers?  do you have technicians that can see each piece of equipment and regularly report back the latest values?  Are your customers willing to give you numbers on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?  If you can’t get something to give you these numbers, you end up with a product that appears to infinitely under warranty.  Great for your customers, not so great for you.

Now, all of these methods can work…  but is there a better way?  I’ve been thinking of developing something into Renovation/Proximity to help with this.  Before I invest my time, I want to make sure there isn’t an easier way to do this that I may have missed.  Would love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading,

Service Quotations… Why are these so challenging?

Service Quotations… Why are these so challenging?

I’ve recently been helping out a fellow service expert to navigate the ins and outs of quoting service.  It really has lead me to the question “why is it so difficult?”  Let me tell you where I’m coming from, in the ECC world, if you want to quote your customer for In-House Repairs, you have to jump through a lot of hoops.  First, you have to decide if you want to go with a more manual approach, or do a bunch of “SAP sponsored” development.  Each of these methods as merit, but at the end of the day, if you want send a quote to your customer, it’s not easy.

A while back, I did a post that explained the SAP approved method for handling this.  It entailed new item categories, users exits, DIP profiles, and of course, a lot of form and pricing work.  Overall, it’s a pretty slick method, but it requires a lot of ramp up to get there, and for non-SAP experts, it can look very cluttered and cumbersome.  The long and short of it is that your sales order because both the sales order and the quote.  Does it work?  absolutely.  Is it an elegant solution… in my opinion, absolutely NOT.

The flip side is to simply create a quotation with reference to the original sales order.  This means that you basically have to enter in the quote from scratch.  You will need your service guys to send you an excel, or you need to be fluent enough in reading a service order to enter in all the data.  Minimal development effort… maximum effort from the users.

This lack of good options lead me to create a simple button in Renovation: Repair Order Execution.  The button is simply Create Quotation.  What isn’t simple is the cool functionality behind this button.  First off, it checks for a specific user status on the service order to make sure the service department has finished updating the order with planned cost.  Next off, it check how you want you quote created.  Do you want the servicable material as an item on the quote?  do you want all the items that would have come from you DIP profile?  do you want to pull from a sales bom?  Then it pulls in the items on the order, and then adds the unit costing for each thing, so that EK02 condition will show you the cost.  Then, to let the service department know what’s going on, it changes the user status to show that they are waiting for the customer to accept or reject the quote.

If you are interested in a better way to quote for service, check out Renovation.  Just email me, and I”ll be happy to set up a demo.

Thanks for reading,

Understand the technical side of DIP

Understand the technical side of DIP

Today I wanted to find out if there was a simple function to call the Dynamic Item Processor without executing it.  Basically, I wanted a simulator to see what materials would be placed on the sales order.  I found a great post that really helped me:

https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=394105949

In a nutshell, this post walked through all the major function modules called in the DIP processing.  It’s quite extensive, and happily saved me a lot of debugging to learn all of this.  Turns out, I can do everything I was hoping for with a single function:

VPKDPP_GET_DI_WITH_VALUES

Jackpot!!!  it’s a good day.

thanks for reading,

Are you interested in learning how to improve you service organization?

Are you interested in learning how to improve you service organization?

While I know that service is often the red headed step-child of an organization, it doesn’t mean that things can’t get better.  I’ve worked in enough places to recognize that the service group is often the last place any budget gets allocated to.  As a result, I’ve worked very hard to help service organization improve themselves on a shoestring budget.  One of those methods is my e-course that shows you some easy and affordable ways to cut cost or generate revenue within your service organization, all using standard SAP.

Service Management E-Course

If your service organization could use some new ideas, please check out this e-course.  I would love any feedback, or even new ideas to add to the class.

Thanks for reading,

Could you benefit from Decreasing Repair Time and Increasing Productivity in Service

Could you benefit from Decreasing Repair Time and Increasing Productivity in Service

  • Are you customers waiting too long for their equipment to be repaired?
  • Do your technicians know the orders to work on first? Do they have everything they need when they need it?
  • Are your technicians wasting time entering operations and components for each customer repair?
  • Are you wasting your warehouse space on customer repairs waiting on parts?
  • Are you comparing planned cost to actual cost?
  • Is Quoting an In-House repair a manual headache?

I know these questions are silly because if you use Service Management in SAP, the answer is yes to at least one of these questions!!!  Let’s face it, who doesn’t want to easily shave cost off the bottom line, or better yet get some new revenue channels coming into your organization.  Well, I wrote a white paper to give you some ways to do just this.  Now some well run organization may already be using all of these, but in general, most organization are not doing at least one or two of the items in this white paper.

Free Guide on Decreasing Repair Time and Increasing Productivity in Service

Thanks for reading,

Service Management – Setting up the Work Center

On my most recent assignment, I learned a lot about setting up the service work center properly.  One of the biggest take aways from this that I learned is that the formulas for service orders are very particular.  In particular, there is one field that is essential if you wish to see the planned cost show up in the service order.

blog04

The highlighted field above needs to be SAP008, or something using the following data.

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This becomes very important, because production orders have a far greater range of formula variables that work than service (or network) orders.

So, if you find that planned costs just aren’t showing up in your service order, take a look at the formula assigned to the routing.

Thanks for reading,

Notification Execution – Creating a Notification w/Multiple Serial Numbers

Now, I’m pretty excited, because this is an idea I’ve been toying with for quite some time.  And recently, I’ve finally devoted some resources to making it real.  The concept is simple, allowing a user to enter multiple technical objects onto a single notification.  While SAP doesn’t give you an option this simple, I’ve come up with a way to utilize standard SAP functionality (along with my new Renovation tool) to accomplish this.  While the overall concept isn’t overly complex, dealing with it isn’t easy.

First, let me explain the concept.  The idea is using a parent notification, and then a create w/reference for each serial number.  The concept is that you can provide a parent notification to your customer, all the child notification will house the individual serial numbers.  The problem with this approach is keeping everything in sync, and then of course moving all that data to the next round…  like a return or repair sales order.

This is where Renovation comes in.  Step 1 is to first create a notification.

blog03

What you are looking at is one possible configuration for Renovation to create a notification, along with all of the children.  With our configuration, we allow you to pick and choose the fields you want shown and the sequence to show them.  You can add objects and even see the warranty status of each individual object.  You can enter Items, Tasks, Activities or Causes.  You can even select what values to pass to the child notifications.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in or would like to know more about, feel free to ping me and I can setup a demo.  If you have suggestions on how to make it even better, please let me know.

thanks for reading,