I’ve been running into more and more businesses that sell products through a distributor. The problem from a service perspective is that when a distributor holds products for you, you have no idea how long they could sit on the shelf. This makes a life a challenge when trying to accurately set the warranty start date. Now you can use a master warranty to control the end date, but this doesn’t help you to determine when to set the start date.
Now, the most common approach I’ve seen to this is either having a customer mail in a registration form or creating their website to let a customer register it themselves. Now the mail in cards is the worst of all worlds (in my opinion) because it requires your customer to manually fill out a card, mail it back to you, and then you have to manually input the information into the system. Many possible points of failure.
Option 2 is the better approach. You can create a website, portal, whatever and then make interfaces back into SAP. It’s the best possible option. To the best of my knowledge, Hybris does not include any tools for product registration or customer.
This is the reason I built Rapier a long time ago. I always wanted to provide an out of the box solution that would give customers a service portal. I built it to allow them to register themselves as a new user, register their serial number, and create a service ticket (notification) all directly from this Web Dynpro Application. If this sounds like it might be useful for your organization, I’d love to hear from you and provide you a demo.
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