SM

If you have ever been banging your head against the wall trying to figure out why my Sold-To party would not copy to my service order (like I have). There is a table called TPAER_PM.  This table defines by PM/SM partner determination procedure which partners should be copied.

Strangely, only some of my partners were selected by default for copy.  No idea why.  In addition, there is a report you can use RIPACOPY.  This report will copy all of your procedures and partners into the table.  You will still need to add an X into any column that you want to copy.  So make sure you visit SE16N and set these values if you want them copied from the sales orders.

Thanks for reading,

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.

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

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,

 

In the service order, you have the option that you can create a purchase requisition for any non-stock item.  This could be for an one-time item, or a service.  Well, when you create the purchase requisition, it turns out that the ship-to delivery address in the purchase order takes the sold-to party from the service order.  While this functionality seems fine if you’re going to drop ship something to a job site, if you need to have the material shipped to your own repair facility, then you need to perform an extra step:

Go to the purchase order, delivery address tab, press Reset Address.

This will pull in the plant address, rather than the sold-to party address.

Every day, something new.  Thanks for reading,

I’ve run into an issue with the service exchange or advanced exchange scenario within SAP for years.  The issue, and it’s likely you recognize it, is that in a standard repair procedure, if you receive in the customers equipment, you can run program SDREPA01 and it will automatically generate the service order line for you.  If you try the same thing in advanced exchange, it does nothing.  I even tried submitting an OSS message, and SAP pretty much told me it works as designed.

Well, that answer never sat well with me.  Especially since I consistently run into new clients that have this scenario.  Currently the answer is that you have to manually go into the repair sales order and add a line on the repairs screen.  UGH!  So, I finally carved out some time, and did a whole bunch of research on the process that SAP uses to create that service order.  WOW.  I understand after days of debugging why they said it works as designed.  The code is integrated and all over the place, that making a simple change to it could break a whole lot of stuff in SD or SM.  So I finally built my own version of SDREPA01 that can handle both standard repairs and advanced exchange.

if this sounds like something you’d be interested, let me know.

mpiehl@GoJaveLLin.com

Thanks for reading,

I recently discovered a little trick.  I’ve been familiar with the action log and the display changes section of the equipment master.  If you aren’t familiar, go into IE03 and use the menu:  extras -> action log or extras -> display changes.  Now, the interesting thing that I didn’t realize is that by default the partners are not included in the change log.  There is a way you can add them, but you need to check 2 pieces of configuration.

Assign Partner Determination Procedure to Equipment Category

If you are dealing with the customer equipment type (S), then by default the KUND1, 2 & 3 fields will be checked.  So make sure these fields are included in your equipment type and Usage History is checked.

Assign Partner Determination Procedure to Equipment Category

 

Now, normally, I only pay attention to the partner determination procedure.  What I discovered is that by entering in the partner functions, it allows the history functions to capture the partner types entered in this piece of configuration.

If you need to collect the partner function history, use these simple steps.

Thanks for reading,

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,

I just learned a new trick.  This is rather surprising to me, but you cannot translate an item category into multiple languages from the standard screen.  For some reason, it is grayed out, so you are stuck with blank descriptions if you live in a multiple language SAP system.  Here is how to correct that.

Go to SM30:

V_OIISOCVP

Now, don’t let the description fool you.  We aren’t really changing anything directly about this table, but from here, you can select your item categories, and use goto->translation.

and magically, you can translate your item categories into all the languages you care about.

Thanks for reading,

I’ve recently run into something that I never used.  It’s a new way to use the service contract.  The concept is simple, a single document that can provide a single invoice for both a deliverable product as well as the extended warranty that goes with it.  I became intrigued because it’s often been something that has been fancifully wished for.  Why can’t we do it on a single document?

Now, the concept is still not ideal.  Here is how it works.  The configuration should be relatively standard once you see the concept.  You start with a service contract.  You probably only need an item category for service and another with configuration (if you use VC products).  You don’t explode any BOM on this contract.  It’s purely to drive pricing/invoicing.  Now, the work comes in building all the copy control.  Because you will still need to create an order to do the shipping of the product (be sure it’s Free of Charge).  You create it with reference to your original contract.  The service item can work like normal.

So this works, but again, it does still require multiple contracts/orders, but at least it can be merged into a single billing plan/invoice.  If you’d like more details, let me know.

Thanks for reading,