Category: Blog

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,

This is the last part of the SAP Service Management Master Warranty.  So far we’ve gone over all of the configuration to use the master warranty, and we even created a master warranty, but so far, it still means nothing.  Today we’ll go over how to use all the pieces we’ve created so far.

In this screen shot, I’ve shown an equipment record (transaction IE02).  Keep in mind, your equipment may look different, but the important piece is the customer or vendor warranty section.  If you currently do not have these fields shown, you’ll need to configure the equipment record to include those sections.  Once there, you must enter a begin guarantee date (this is your warranty start date).  From here, you either enter in the warranty end date, which is the most straightforward way to enter in the warranty.  The other option, is our master warranty we created (this is shown in the screenshot).  Now, you may be asking me…  why use the master warranty if it’s just date related?  The biggest reason to use the master warranty is that you don’t need to worry about the exact end date.  You just pick the master warranty, and it figures out the end date.  It makes life easier for any sort of automation you might wish to use, in order automatically assign the correct start and end date.  Of course, if you do anything other than time related, you must use the master warranty to handle this…  now back to the show 🙂

Now, if your master warranty includes anything not time related, you must use measurement documents.  First, press the measurement/counts button and you will then see the screen shown above.  I’ve shown you the populated version.  Notice that WTY_USAGE_HOURS is the characteristic name.  The rest, I’ll save for another day to go into all the details of the measurement docs.  Be sure to save this and then we can move to the next step.

Now, we move to transaction IK11.  This creates the first counter or measurement.  In the example shown above, you can see that on 5/7/2013, the reading was 5.  As long as it’s less than 1000, it’s still under warranty.  Normally, you collect the measurements on a regular basis, weekly, monthly, etc…

Now, once you enter in the measurement/counter, you can go back to IE02/IE03, and see the status of of warranty.  Notice, the little check mark which means it’s still under warranty.  You can even see the complete details by pressing the puzzle piece next to the status.

The last 2 shots show the the full details of the warranty.  You can see the difference between line 1 which is date dependent, and line 2 which is counter related.  All of this same information can be seen if you enter this piece of equipment on a service notification.  I hope these lessons have enlightened you on using the master warranty.  Watch for another series in the future on some more advanced topics related to warranties, measure documents, etc…  and just as a teaser…  Rapier now includes the ability for your customer to see their customer or vendor warranty and the full status for each piece of equipment they have registered.  Thanks for reading and if you want more great tips like these, check out my Service Management E-Course.

In the last post, I finished the configuration portion of the SAP Service Management – master warranty series.  Now, that leaves us with the “important” part.  Setting up the master data and using it.  That’s what the next 2 lessons will cover. Today I’m going to talk about creating a master warranty.

TXN: BGM1 (like always, 2 is change, 3 is display)

Unless you choose to use the external number range, you can leave this field blank and simply hit enter.  The system will come up with the next available number for you.

Now you’re looking at the initial screen (after I filled in the basics).  Let me just touch on these fields.  If we look at the header section, you’ll notice there are several fields filled in.  Like everything, a description is needed.  Next you choose if this will be a customer or a vendor warranty (if you have any concerns or other options, see my previous posts on the configuration).  I also checked the pass on warranty box.  This simply says that I want to pass this warranty onto any sub-equipment records below this one.  It goes back to the inheritance of the warranty.  The remaining fields are sort and text type fields.  They aren’t required, and may never be needed.

Now we get to the heart of things.  When you look at the Services tab, you must enter at least one service.  Think of an entry in this section as a warranty “grouping”.  Each enter you post here is a service material, so you will need a DIEN or similar material master to exist.  In a master warranty, you can add as many materials as you like here, and can assign characteristics for each material.  This comes in handy for example if all service “time” is covered under warranty, but only certain materials are covered under warranty, you could list those out individually.  Once you enter you material(s), you will need to highlight each one, and select the count tab.

The count tab is truly where the magic happens.  In my example above, the warranty1 material will be true if it is inside of 24 months (characteristic 1) or the Usage Hours is less than or equal to 1000 hours.  The first line is purely time dependent (remember the flag we set in config for time).  The 2nd characteristic will be based on measurement documents since this is the only way we can know this value.

At this point, we can save or repeat the count tab for each remaining material we entered in the first tab.  Next time, we’ll show you how to add the master warranty to an equipment record.  Thanks for reading.