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SAP S/4HANA Service
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition already offers a comprehensive service management solution since many releases. This is the SAP S/4HANA Service. Service supports end-to-end scenarios like field services, recurring services and in-house repairs and it supports the setup and operation of functions and processes for service contract management, service order management, billing, etc.
With SAP S/4HANA 2023, SAP is offering a new process variant in SAP S/4HANA Service. This is the Service with Advanced Execution. This new process helps businesses to plan, execute and bill services for complex assets or long-running services with multiple billing cycles.
What is Service with Advanced Execution
This is a new service business process which offers advanced planning and execution capabilities. It is built around the integration of Service with Maintenance Management. Service is responsible for understanding the scope of the service requirement, negotiating the price, ensuring customer satisfaction and managing profitability. Maintenance Management is responsible for planning and executing the service, including scheduling and confirming the work.
Service brings the commercial capabilities to the process like
- Service contract management and price agreements
- Service order quotation and service order management
- Pricing and credit check
- Billing
On the other hand, Maintenance Management enables planning and execution capabilities like
- Maintenance task list
- Maintenance order and confirmation management
- Maintenance planning with strategy
- Resource scheduling
- Advance Shipment
Thus, service with advanced execution brings together the best of both worlds. This new process also supports resource-related quotation and resource-related billing based on the Dynamic Item Processor (DIP).
Service with Advanced Execution
The key elements in service with advanced execution
Service with Advanced Execution also works with the Service Order Quotation and Service Order. But this new process is enabled with a new type of item in Service, which is the Execution Order Item. The execution order item in a service transaction holds the commercial data. Each execution order item, in general, has a corresponding maintenance order, which is the planning and execution object. This is a special type of maintenance order called as Billable maintenance order.
Thus, the execution order item in Service, together with the billable maintenance order, forms the core of the service with advanced execution process.
Business roles and responsibilities
Service with advanced execution process could be managed across two distinct personas or business roles. The customer service manager may have the exclusive access to the Service functionality. This business user could play the role of the commercial persona. On the other hand, the maintenance planner might have the requisite authorizations for the features and apps in maintenance management. In this case, this other independent business user would have the responsibility of planning and execution. With customer service manager and maintenance planner complementing each other, the overall responsibility for a service can be split between two different and independent personas.
However, it could also be possible that the same business user is handling both commercial and execution aspects. In this case, this user would be authorized to access both Service and Maintenance Management, thus owning the complete process end-to-end.
Pre-requisites
This new process is supported only with Item-based accounting. See the customizing activity in the SAP Reference IMG under Service -> Transactions -> Settings for Service Transactions -> Integration -> Enable Item-Based Accounting for Service.
It is also required to configure the mapping of transaction types and item categories in Service to the corresponding maintenance order types. This can be done in Customizing for Service under Transactions -> Settings for Service Transactions -> Integration -> Plant Maintenance Integration -> Map Order Types.
Summary
The service with advanced execution offers a dynamic new option, wherein the planning and execution of the service itself is performed not within service, but rather with the detailed planning and flexible execution capabilities of maintenance management. With this new process, the maintenance of a complex asset becomes a reusable and common subprocess between maintenance and service. It even involves the same transactions like maintenance order and maintenance confirmation. The only distinction is whether we need the capability to bill the costs to a customer or not.
Further references
General product assistance documentation: Service with Advanced Execution
Product assistance documentation for in-house repair: In-House Repair with Advanced Execution
Scope items in best practice content:
Next blog: Deep Dive: Execution order item and Billable maintenance order
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