A challenge I always seem to encounter in SAP is setting warranty dates. Now, in my world, I’m very familiar with what to do with the warranty dates and how to process things, but one of the biggest challenges is getting the warranty dates set properly in the first place. In my travels, I’ve done this 4 different ways, often depending on the business or development resources available. Here are the options I’ve done in the past and I’d love to hear your experience.
- Write a user exit at the time of post goods issue. This will work, especially if you follow simple warranty rules. The gotcha for this always ends up being how to set different dates by product line, hierarchy, material type, etc. You typically end up with one or more custom tables to hold this information. But this falls apart if you need to get more complicated than material number (prod hier, or whatever). Perhaps you offer 12 months on everything in a product family, except for you most mature product, which you offer 18 months. Short of adding in new product hierarchy, or listing each material individually, you end up writing a lot of code that may or may not change.
- Product Registration: Method 1 is great if you start the warranty clock as soon as you ship it. What happens if you deal with distributors that may hold your product for 1 – 6 months before the end user purchases it. You can’t very well your end user it’s out of warranty if they just bought it and it’s been sitting on a shelf for a while. In this case, you need to resort to product registration. If you users are willing to do this, I love this approach. However, this requires a lot of up front work. You typically need a user website capable of allowing your customers to register a product. This means you need to be capable of creating new customers on the fly, adding partner types to an existing equipment record, and then setting the warranty dates. You also typically need to add a front end to login, or even create new users in the system to even allow an end customer to do this. It’s a big up front effort unless your business has already done it.
- Create a background program that looks at all the of the serial numbers shipped, PGI’d, etc, and then using similar logic to the user exit, load in the correct values. This approach is very similar to #1, but offloads the heavy lifting until later rather than doing it as the delivery is going out the door. This approach is typically better, since warranty information is not critical as a product leaves the door. You typically have at least a week before you should need to worry about it 🙂
- Manually entering the data/skipping it. All too often, this ends up being the approach that businesses take. Why? it’s too much development to get the data in when it might never be used. So they may run a report monthly to show all the equipment with blank warranty dates, and in someone’s “spare time”, they might enter in the data. Let’s be honest, this means you might as well skip it, since the warranty data will be so hit or miss that data is not trustworthy.
Now, something to consider regardless of how you set the warranty dates (or master warranty) is: What happens if you don’t have a simple time based warranty? as soon as you need to track hours of usage, miles, tons moved, or whatever, you now need to track a whole new level of warranty data. Measurement documents are great for this… but they carry their own overhead. For example, how do you get the numbers? do you have technicians that can see each piece of equipment and regularly report back the latest values? Are your customers willing to give you numbers on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? If you can’t get something to give you these numbers, you end up with a product that appears to infinitely under warranty. Great for your customers, not so great for you.
Now, all of these methods can work… but is there a better way? I’ve been thinking of developing something into Renovation/Proximity to help with this. Before I invest my time, I want to make sure there isn’t an easier way to do this that I may have missed. Would love to hear from you.
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