SM

Recently, I start this topic, and I wanted to get back to it again.  Last time we looked at using the volume of notifications to help you determine when service contracts might be useful.  So once you take the first pass and just look at volume, now you can use the same service notifications and get into the details, to help you decide at the next level…

When I talk about the details, now I’m talking about the catalogs or classification that (I hope) your call center employees (or better yet, your customers) are filling in each time.  These catalogs can be your lifeline, if you have the data.  You design these catalogs to fit your business, and cover all the major areas you expect to find.  So, if you sell computers, you have some obvious breakdowns.

* Hardware
* Software

Now, if you want to cover software under your contract, this is typically driven around call center/help desk support.  The sort of things that you can offer is live support through chat, or you can offer an upgrade to talk to a live person on the phone.  You can even upgrade further to offer a package to talk to someone in your chosen region (say, you don’t want to talk to call center 1/2 way across the world, but would rather talk to someone from your half of the country).

Ok, so you think offering a contract based on the software might be worthwhile.  How do you get the number to decide?  Well, start looking at the next level of the catalog.  What software was the biggest culprit?  was it the operating system?  was a particular app?  or was it more of a training?  Now when you know this, you can even begin to tailor the contract to what your customers really want.  As you can see, you can quickly see how many notifications called each of these catalogs, and sub catalogs.  You can even begin to analyze how long each notification was open.  Was it solved same day?  same hour?  or did it have to go up the chain to other levels?  how often did each of these occur?  Get the idea?  Just by looking at some simple data, you can quickly drive down to what happens the most often, and what your customers might be most likely to buy from you at a discount.

Now, again, this will require a little bit of analysis, but with some data analysis, you could start looking at selling unlimited calls for certain software issues, or you could sell up to X calls per month, etc with premium service.  Now, it might need a dedicated agent to handle these contracts, but premium service gets you premium revenue.  It all comes down to what your customers want/need.  You can use your service notifications to predict what they need…  then you just need your marketing guru to package it into something they will buy.  All because you used SAP service notifications to collect data…

Thanks for reading,

You know, it’s interesting.  I’ve done SM for so long, but I never really went through the exercise of why?  or what’s in it for me?  It wasn’t until a recent demo I gave pitching the power of SAP SM, that it really hit home for me just what you can get from using SAP SM.  Well, today’s post is no different.  Today I’m going to talk about using Service Notifications to drive your service contract business.  Now you might be thinking you already know about connecting your service notifications to your service contracts.  And you’d be right, that is a great piece, but the real power comes from analyzing your notifications to determine what products are worthwhile to offer a service contract program.

Now, the initial thought might be to offer a service contract for everything you sell.  While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, you might be incurring a lot of additional cost by using this catch all approach.  In a future post, I’ll talk more about the ROI of using service contracts.  Today, I’m going to focus on what you should offer a contract for.  How can a service notification tell you what products to offer “extended warranty”?

First, you start by looking at the volume of notifications by material number by product age.  This is going to give you a really solid first pass of a product worthwhile of extended warranty.  The idea behind this approach is to look a product, and find out when the majority of issues occur?  Much like the post a did recently when I talked about setting proper warranty dates, the same applies for service contracts.  You NEED to know when the majority of your issues begin to happen.  Is it 3 months of use?  6 months of use?  10 years of use?  Now, based on your “base” warranty, you can look at the volume of issues that occur in each time frame.  If the volume is high enough that things “can” go wrong, but low enough that you won’t be gambling the farm, this tells you the window you can offer the service plan for.

Maybe an example is in order here…  you have a material, and over the past year, you see the following.

3 months – 100
6 months – 120
9 months – 125
1 year – 133
18 months – 220
2 years – 250
30 months – 400
3 years – 650

now this is a blog, so I’m not gonna graph it, but you can quickly see the exponential type curve of these numbers.  the idea is to offer your warranty for 6 months or a year.  Now the volume is reasonable up to the 18 month mark.  once you hit 30 months, the volume starts to spike.  This suggests to me that you should offer an extended warranty for an extra year.  Your customers will see it as a value since things do happen more often after the first year, but you won’t be replacing EVERY unit.  win win in my book…

This actually went longer than expected, so I’ll pick this up again tomorrow…

thanks for reading,

Continuing on in the series of how you can use Service notifications to improve your bottom line.  One of the best ways I can think of is making your products better.  Everyone who uses quality notifications knows the value of this, but for some reason, service notifications are often overlooked for this purposes.

The whole key to this is collecting enough data to categorize each notification.  The best way, in my opinion is using the many different catalogs to classify what is going on.  Just as a recap, depending on what fields you have available, you can have as many as 5 different catalogs available within a single notification.  You can even use the same catalog multiple times for things like causes.  Why do you care?

Because you can do reporting against these values to find trends in your products.  If you notice that 20 notifications come in a week for the same product, all stating that the product was damaged in transit, well, that should be a pretty big flag to review your packaging and your carrier to review what the hell is going on.  Maybe you got a bad batch of packaging materials, maybe you recently made a “cost saving” change to a different vendor…  regardless, you have an obvious set of data that you should be reviewing.

You may also simply find a pattern in your customers “mis-using” your products.  This might give your marketing/legal group something to include your literature stating in certain terms, product not to be used in the rain, or product should not be used for longer than 3 hours without shut down.  Doesn’t matter, but the data is there if you can collect.  This should be reason enough to train your call center to collect this every time.

Now, there is another way to capture information that is very valuable, and often more flexible.  You can use classification, along with multiple value characteristics allowing you to select as many options as apply.  This has the potential to give your organization ALL the data they could use.  SAP provides standard reporting using CL30N.  But if you’d like even more data, check out our out of the box service management dashboard.

Thanks for reading,

Well, continuing in our theme of showing you what you can do with Service Notification data, today is a great metric that most businesses care about, but maybe don’t realize all the different aspects available when it comes to measuring productivity.  Let me tell you what I mean by that.

Now of course, there is a obvious call center metric of calls taken, calls waiting, etc…  But in the service management world, you can also be looking at more of the post call analytic’s.  For example, how many of the calls are closed during the initial call.  You could be tracking this using the standard status.  The initial status of the notification is closed, it means that your call center agent was able to close the call on the phone, no additional follow up was needed.  The only thing better than this is if the customer didn’t have to call in the first place 🙂

One of the other productivity metrics you can track is the number of notifications created by each SAP user.  You can be tracking how long each notification is kept open, simply by tracking the date/time stamp of the system status within the notification.  You can even keep track of who is filling in their notifications properly.  For example, if you use the catalogs, you can keep track of who is filling in this information.  This could lead you to additional training opportunities, especially if you employ temporary employees in your call center.  Losing this information could be costing you money, but I’ll talk about some of those opportunities soon 🙂

Anyway, the point of all of this is allowing you to see who your best call center employees are, and if you use temporary employees, they could be the people you entice to stay on full time, or the other end of the spectrum can be let go to bring in better people.

Thanks for reading,

Well, I’ve realized that all too often, I talk about the nitty gritty, the details.  What i don’t really talk often enough about is “Why?”.  So I thought I’d start a series to talk about the service Notifications ROI, or return on investment.  All too often, I hear business’ complain about the number of transactions within the service management module.  While, I agree, for small businesses, there can be a lot of transactions, but what is often overlooked, or perhaps unused, is the beneficial data in all of those transactions.  This first series will focus on the information you can use to get real return on investment.

This first piece, to me is one of the most valuable, and most overlooked benefits of the service notification.  That is the ability to offer the most cost effective warranty to your customer that you can.  Now, all too often, everyone is concerned with if the product is under warranty.  But in your customer’s mind, the best products have the longest warranties.  Well, what if you could offer your customers an additional 3 months of warranty, without it costing you any more?

Well, if you pay attention to your service notifications, you can determine by product, how many issues do you encounter within 3 months?  6 months? 1 year?  Let’s say you offer a 3 month warranty on a particular product.  If you analyze your data, and find that 90% of your issues occur after 4 months, you could suddenly extend your warranty to 4 months, and you won’t experience any more service notifications.  This now gives your customers an additional month of “piece of mind”.  Perhaps, this gives you the edge against your competition that only offers a 3 month warranty.

Best of all, you’ve just gave your customers a nice little bonus and it costs you nothing but updating your literature =)  I’ll be throwing out more little pieces of ROI in future posts.

thanks for reading,

Now this is one of the few tricks that I’ve picked up when it comes to the finance portion of the world 🙂  And the only reason I care about this is because it simplifies my configuration for service order costing and also resource related billing.  The concept is called Cost Element Groups.  And they are exactly what they sound like, a group of cost elements.  Now, why do I care?  in both service order cost display and resource related billing, I can enter each cost element into the configuration, transport it, and call it good.  Now, when a new cost element is suddenly introduced, I now need to go back to my dev environment, make sure the cost element exists, then add it to my configuration again, and transport everything.  Cost Element Groups let this all be controlled through master data.  I connect the cost element group one time, and I’m covered for life.  so, let me show you how easy they are, and you can be the judge.

Everything starts with transaction KAH1/KAH2/KAH3.  Below, I’m showing you KAH2 for an existing cost element group, but it’s basically the same for any of the create/change/display transactions.

Enter in the name of the group and hit enter, or the hierarchy button.

This will bring you to the above screen.  You can add or change the name of the group, then press the Cost Element button.

Once you press the button, you will see some new blanks show up.  You can either enter in individual cost elements (just enter the number in the left column) or you can do a range, by entering the start in the left and finish in the right.  Then it will show you all the cost elements that were located within the range.

Simply save, and you’re ready to go.  Now, you do need to remember to create this master data in every system you want to use it, but the flexibility is worth the master data effort.

Thanks for reading,

Now my last couple of posts started talking about SAP service management, and the power that it has.  I noticed that I left out some key information.  Namely, is there any return on investment for maintaining all of this data in your system?  Now, ROI is a very subjective term when it comes to something like data within SAP.  One organization might easily be able to monetize that data, while others struggle.  So, let me give you some ideas to consider when you decide from a financial perspective, what is all that data worth?  I’m going to go through several different scenarios that I’ve seen throughout my career.  Keep in mind, not all of these scenario apply to ever business, but I’m willing bet if you read through these, you might be able to make the leap to your own processes.

1.  Product Registration.  Now, this is something that I often see overlooked in organizations.  Collecting product registrations.  Now, if you buy an appliance, or piece of electronics, you will often see a little card you can fill out to register your product.  Often it is used to start your warranty, or maybe just to give you special offers, or updates as new software becomes available.  From the business side, this information has huge potential upside.

• it allows you to connect to your end user.  If you use distributors, without registration, you’ll never be able to find out who is really buying your stuff.
• It allows you to start and end standard warranties on your products.  This is especially valuable, if you offer your user a one year warranty.  Well, most business don’t start that warranty from the time it’s produced, rather when it is purchased.  If you customer buys it 3 days or 3 months after production, you’re still on the hook for 1 year worth of warranty.  If you run into any percentage of returns or product defects, being able to cut off your free service has a definite financial advantage.
• When you know your end user, you can go to the up sell.  By that I mean, you can offer discounts to buy extended warranty, upgrades, etc.  This allows you to extend the life of your products, while keeping your customer happy.  If you keep providing the latest upgrades or enhancements to your customers, they will remember.  Or more the point, if you don’t provide this, they will remember.

2.  Keeping track of what your customer owns.  This is valuable for any industry, especially if you offer systems of products that might work together.  When you maintain this data, you will quickly be able to know what your customer has at a particular site, or even be able to drill down to a particular area within a site.  This is often contingent on doing the installation yourself, however, it still buys you a lot of valuable ROI with your customers.

• If you provide on-site service, the more you know about what a customer has installed and where, the faster your technician can get your customer up and running again.  You can minimize the down time by having the correct parts with them.  You can do initial troubleshooting, just by knowing that product X & Y are both installed, and sometimes can have side effects if used in certain ways.  KNowing that in advance better equips your technicians to  fix the problem the first time.  That saves you money, and gives you a lot of goodwill from your customers.
• If you install serialized components installed into other serialized components, you don’t to ask your customer to disassemble half the unit, just to tell you the serial number.  Instead, you can quickly look into your installed base, and see what is installed within each unit, often drilling down several levels.  While this might not generate a lot of money, it will generate goodwill with your customers by making it easy to do business with you.
• If you ever need to do a recall (like say GM), knowing where every serial number is located will quickly let you be proactive with your customers, to let them know what needs to be fixed/upgraded/replaced.  You can generate campaigns to notify your customers before they start having problems.  This will save you definite dollars by avoiding last minute, emergency service trips, and instead garnering more goodwill with your customers by letting them schedule when things can be serviced.

3.  Maintaining as accurate warranty dates.  This one seems pretty obvious, but I’ve been surprised how many organizations  are willing to “wing it” for this information.

• Not only can you cut costs buy knowing when a product is no longer under warranty.  You have the ability to generate revenue when it does break down and your customer wants it fixed.
• You encourage registration (see above) by allowing that date to be the starting registration date, rather than the original ship date.
• You can quickly run reports on items coming off of warranty in the next month to send an offer to extend their warranty for a reduced cost.  This keeps customers coming back to you, and not your competitors.

There’s more I can say, but I’ll save it for another time.  The thing to take away from all of this is that if any of this stuff applies your business, and you aren’t collecting this data, you are losing out on all of the benefits that come with it.  I can even show you simple ways to start collecting that data…  but that’s for another post.

thanks for reading,

One of the recent discoveries I found was that you can download the table structures and populate them in Access on a local machine.  This is kind of a cool concept, as I never realized this functionality was available.  So I decide to dig in a little further.  The baseline configuration is pretty easy (check out my post in SDN if you want more details – Service Management – Basic Settings – Print Control – Download – Download Structures to PC).  Now, what isn’t really explained is that you need some stuff in place in order to be able to use this.  The main piece being a couple of RFC’s.  Now, I’ve been able to piece together a few things, so I thought I’d share them with you.

First and foremost, before you can do anything, you need to get or find several files:

wdpsastr.exe
wdpsatab.exe

Without these 2 files, you won’t be able to create the RFC.  Now, after some digging I’ve found a few things. First, there are some OSS notes that explain a lot of this, so I”m going to include them here.

443027 – MS Access Interface – Access 97, 2000, 2002, 2003
583698 – FAQ note – MS Access Interface
118827 – Interface MS Access, setting the TCP/IP connection

These notes explain what I’ll be going over here, but consider my post a short cut for service 🙂

Also, if you have trouble finding these files, check out the SDN post.

http://scn.sap.com/thread/292398

I had trouble getting the files from Service.sap.com, but I was able to find them in an old version of my gui installation.  However, it doesn’t appear to have the installation files to put the correct dll files in place.

Once you have this installed, you can go to SM59 to create the 2 new RFC destinations.

Press create to make a new connection.  You will need to do this twice.

Now, you should be able to proceed with the actual configuration to download the service management tables into access.

Thanks for reading,