Today I want to continue with the Master Warranty configuration I started yesterday. This time around we will get into more details… more of the nitty gritty. If you missed part one of this post, check it out here.
The important piece is to make sure the customer and vendor warranty are assigned to a number range.
Next we move onto the Initial Transactions: Default Values. This is rarely anything you need to change, but I like to be thorough 
It simply sets the defaults for the transactions. By default, it’s set for the customer warranty, which is the most common master warranty, so unless you do more with Vendor warranties, you can leave this alone.
Now we get to the fun part. In order to complete the configuration for the master warranty you need to create some master data. Now, I’ll be honest, I hate the way this works, because you must create master data in your configuration client… but it is what it is… Now, is where you need to do a little planning. You must create some characteristics (I’ll get that shortly). Now the characteristics need to be the same in all clients (at least the name). How many characteristics you need to create is based on what you need to track in the warranty. In my coming example, I needed to track 2 things. Straight time (in months) and the number of hours the widget was used… so I created 2 characteristics. I’m going to cover the creation of those now…
TXN: CT04 – this to create the time based characteristics. Be careful with your naming convention, because you may go down the road and need one for years, one for weeks, who knows… so be specific in your naming.
Nothing fancy in the setup… but it is a good idea to include a Unit of Measure.
Once your characteristics exist, you head to the last step of configuration. Define Warranty Counters.
You’ll notice that I added 2 characteristics. Keep building this list for all the things you want to track. Now for things that are purely time dependent, make sure you set that flag. That tells the warranty that it is based on time not on measurement documents (we’ll cover those in the upcoming posts).
Ok… the configuration is done. Next up, we’ll talk about the master data to use that configuration.
As always, thanks for reading.
Mike