On a recent trip to Singapore to visit a client, someone in the airplane asked me what I did for a living. I hesitated briefly. I’ve been consulting for so long, that it’s hard not to say consulting. However, I’ve come to realize that I have evolved far beyond a consultant. I’ve become a solutions architect for SAP Service Management. But that is a big title, and I’m not the kind of guy that goes for big titles. So I kept it simple, I’m the Service Management Expert. I design solutions and software to make life easier for service organizations.
I saw that not every company wants to implement CRM, Cloud for Customer, or whatever is the latest technology that SAP has added the newest features. I wanted customers on standard ECC to be able to improve their service organizations without expensive implementations, new licensing, or adding additional IT staff to support new hardware. (or something like that is my elevator pitch).
Now, if I haven’t put someone to sleep yet, the next question they typically ask is something like, how did you get into that? Well, my journey has taken a strange path. I started out a mechanical engineer with a knack for computer programming. One thing led to another, and I ended up in SAP. Service was often the forgotten module, so along with Sales and Distribution and writing reports and other code, I got put in charge of service. I quickly came to realize that this area was the most interesting to me. One thing led to another, and ended up consulting at many companies, in many industries to implement and improve service within SAP.
In the 15 years I’ve been doing service management (SM), I kept running into the same issues, over and over again.
- Reporting.
- Complexity for the Service Shop
- Lack of communication between customer service and repair shop
Reporting is such a challenge in service because it crosses multiple modules within SAP. This meant that there were no out of the box reports to cover all the connections between sales, call center and the repair depot. Every implementation always wrote custom reports, typically they were all similar to each other because the metric were usually the same. At the end of the day, how long did it take to do certain steps, how much did it cost, and “why did it take so long?”
The next major issue was complexity of the process. There were so many transactions to plan and complete a work order and the typical service shop technician isn’t interested in data entry. They want to be fixing something, turning wrenches, running tests, etc… who wants to spend half of their day just documenting what they did, how long it took them, and when it finished.
Finally, for in-house and field repairs, there needs to be solid communication between customer service and the technicians. In most organizations, the service group isn’t the one that takes the calls, so if customer service doesn’t get all the information, the customer needs to be contacted more than once. Customers hate this, it wastes time for customer service and delays the service processing. Often times, it was as simple as the information that that customer service collected never got passed down to the technicians because it was held on another document within SAP that doesn’t get used by the technicians. The solution, the tech now has to look multiple places to get the full picture. Sound efficient to you???
Now SAP is a great piece of software. It is capable of handling most any process in business. The problem is that SAP, like any good business, is always evolving. They make new products and want customers to buy them. What’s the best way to do that? Put the best functionality in the new stuff, and stop updating the old stuff. This leaves a huge gap for customers that can’t afford to keep upgrading to the newest products, implementing the latest software or even keeping up with the latest and greatest releases.
All of these factors are why I built JaveLLin Solutions. I wanted to help the little guy, and I have found no matter how big the company is, nearly every service shop operates like a little guy. I wanted the service shop to focus on fixing things, not entering data. I wanted the service managers to be able to have accurate data about their shop to make informed decisions.
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike