I recently learned a cool trick when dealing with inter-company in-house repairs. One of the scenarios in service management I’m seeing more often is having one facility bill for a repair while another company performs the repair. There are 2 common ways of transacting this intercompany billing in the system.
1. Create a repair sales order in both the billing and the repairing facility. While this method provides the greatest flexibility, it also requires the greatest amount of transactional data to be entered.
2. Create a single repair order with the main line item in the billing plant, and the receiving/repairing lines in the repair facility.
The biggest challenge with option 2 is billing the “billing plant” for the repair. Sounds simple, but with only a single sales order, how can you invoice the customer and the “billing plant”.
That’s where I discovered this SAP provided report: RVIVAUFT that generates an inter-company invoice from the customer invoice. it’s pretty simple and pretty slick. there is however one drawback to this approach. You can’t invoice the “billing plant” until after you invoice the customer. Typically this shouldn’t be an issue, but depending on your business process it is something to be aware.
Hope you find this as useful as I did.
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike
Hi,
Thank you for the article. we have exactly the same requirement and when trying to enter the plant of second company code in the receiving/repairing lines system is giving an error saying Company code is different to that of main item.
Could you please let me know your thoughts on this error.
Thanks,
Santosh
Hi Santosh, can you give me some more details of exactly what you’ve done up to this point? are you attempting to do the single repair sales order option? If you can give me more details I’ll do my best to help.
thanks,
Mike
Hi Mike
I tried using the option 2, and completed the scenario. I created customer invoice but I do not IC Invoice.
I used repair order with mainline item in one company and and actual repair order in another company. I get customer Invoice. I ran the RVIVAUFT but I do not get IC Invoice. Appreciate your help
Are you getting any error from RVIVAUFT? Are you using leading serviceable material? or leading service material? I’m not sure if makes a difference, but I’ll try to generate an example in my system if I can understand exactly what you’ve done. It’s been a while since I’ve used this program, so I’m not sure off the top of my head. Let me know any additional details you might have. Feel free to email me at: piehlm@paperstreetenterprises.com if you have screenshots you can share.
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Mike,
This information is very useful as I am looking at a similar scenario. Am interested in the 2nd way but because I do not have a working system yet, I do not know how/where I can change the plant. Based on the functionality I have in our demo system, I have a main line under plant A which has a sub item for delivery (from customer back to depot). Before the order is saved, I can see that the plant under that sub item is open for change. I leave it as plant A and proceed to create the delivery and goods receipt. Now, if I move to the repair stage where a second sub line item is created, I found that the plant field for that line is not opened for change. Can I find out which sub line item I should be making the plant change?
Appreciate your advice on the above.
Regards
SF
Well, if I understand your question correctly, this isn’t possible. The repair line (that generates the service order) will always point to the same plant as the main line item. I know that you can change “where the work occurs” in the service order by changing the operations/plant. Depending on the business requirements, you probably want the stock to go to plant B where the service occurs. This will be a manual step to change the plant for the inbound delivery line.
If it’s a hard requirement to have the service order in the plant that will perform the repair, you may need to look closer at option 1.
Hope this help,
Mike
Thanks for your response Mike. Just to clarify (specifically the point on “where the work occurs” in the service order), yes I am looking at the stock going to plant B where the service is carried out by the second company code. Assuming we are happy to change the plant on the inbound delivery line, will the service order be created under company 1 and the plant at the operation level be changed to Plant B for work to be done? In this case, does this mean that I have to set up intercompany so that I can assign plant B on company A’s service order for capturing of labour cost?
Appreciate your advise on that.
Regards
SF
Sorry for the slow response. I really haven’t taken the scenario down to that level. The companies I have worked with have always pursued the lengthy 2 sets of transactional documents. 🙁
If you go down this path, I’d love to hear your experience.
Thanks
Mike
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the article. I’m more interested in the option 1. But I’m struggling to understand how you manage the transfer of the equipment to be repaired from one plant to the other plant. As you know, you can’t create a second repair order on the same equipment if there’s already an open repair order on it. I tried using MRO subcontract solution to move the stock but this only changes the special stock type to F and it doesn’t allow me to create a second repair. Your thoughts?
Thanks
Fede
I believe you are talking about doing the inbound delivery the second time? and yes, that is one of the pieces you will need to “adjust”. In order to make it work, you would need to manually reset the status of the equipment record before you will be able to receive it within the second location.
Subcontracting won’t help you here, like you noticed it expects this to be done outside of your own facility, so no need to alter the equipment status.
If you choose this approach, you would need to update the equipment. As you can see, performing repairs in an intercompany process is NOT an area that SAP really designed for.
I hope this makes sense,
Mike
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your reply. Yes, the second inbound delivery would be restricted due to equipment status. But then, if we adjust the equipment status to allow a second inbound delivery to be created and received into stock, then we will have a mismatch between inventory and equipment, since we will have 1 piece of stock under the billing plant and another piece of stock under the repairing plant. Whilst there will be only one piece of equipment as the serial number is the same.
Also, once the repairing plant finishes the repair work and issues the equipment out to the billing plant, the equipment status would need to be adjusted again as the billing plant would be expecting it to be under the sales order stock of its repair order.
Is this correct what I’m stating above or am I missing something here?
Thanks again.
Kind regards
Federico