Service Management – One Repair with Multiple Serial Numbers

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This one is near and dear to my heart, because I’ve been trying to come up with a better to handle this (likely to be a new JaveLLin product soon, once I finalize my plan).  But I’m starting to see more and more business that get one call, but will have 10 units coming back for repair.  In general, SAP doesn’t handle this out of the box.  If you follow the standard return and repair model, you would need to create 10 different notifications (at least if you wanted to quick check warranty status and maintain some history).  Well, no business I’ve ever worked for wanted to do that.  Especially since you may be on a call and need to provide a notification number immediately upon call completion.

What I’ve seen in the past, is that normally, the call center just types the first serial number into the notification, and then puts the rest into the notes.  Depending on the realism of the business, they may be expected to make 9 more notifications after the call ends…  but we all know the chance of that happening.  This compounded by the fact that there are usually calls waiting, and it gets really hard to remember to get back to a notification that appears complete.

So what’s the alternative?  it really is custom development as far as I know.  Now, this gets even tougher when you factor in the different options for creating your repair sales order.  Should each serial number be given it’s own line item to keep the repairs separate?  should it be batched, forcing you to ship and receive all units at the same time?  or more commonly, “It depends”.  So this makes it very difficult to utilize the nice little action button on the notification, because you need to go in and tweak everything anyway, add more lines, etc.

So today, I’m reaching out to anyone reading this…  I’d really love to know how you handle this, or if you even encounter this.  Maybe it’s not as big of an issue as I believe it is….  or maybe there is some great functionality I just don’t know about, in which case, PLEASE teach me 🙂

I look forward to your feedback, and as always, 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

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