Today I’m heading back into the Service Management realm. I wanted to talk about something that is relatively simple, yet immensely cumbersome in practice. That’s right, the equipment hierarchy. When I say the equipment hierarchy, it may also be known as the equipment structure. It is the process of linking serial numbers/equipment records into a structure or hierarchy. The principal is very simple, and I’m going to walk through the process. After the process, I’ll explain what makes it all so cumbersome (if you haven’t already experienced the pain).
If you go into any equipment record and go to the structure tab.
in the bottom portion, you’ll find the button: 
to structure the hierarchy.
On this screen, you simply enter in each equipment record that belongs at this “level”.
Now you can see that a structure exists. If any of the equipment records in this list had their own equipment hierarchy, you’d see the Sb-Eq box checked.
Now at the top of the page, you’ll see the button: 
and it will bring up the entire structure report.
My example was pretty simple, but it would also show functional locations, and would show the entire explosion. So, pretty easy, right?
now, the problem comes into maintaining this. Up to this point, I’m not aware of any automated way to capture the hierarchy. Say for example, have a production order with the top level material being serialized, and you use several other serialized components to assemble it. You must now manually create that structure (now make it worse, and say it’s a production order for 50, you have to repeat the process 50 times). The issue becomes complicated because you may issue 50 serialized components to make 10 finished goods. Which 5 items went into which finished product??? Without a high amount of diligence, it becomes highly manual and extremely difficult to maintain automatically. I’ll be talking more in the future about some methods to begin capturing this information.
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