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Hello SAP Community members,
[Part 2 of the series is now scheduled for 1 December, 2022. Detail on this article]
[Added additional information as responses for questions asked during the livestream -- Thank you! The recording, a link to the presented material and others are available here]
My name is Noboru Ota and I am Vice President and Chief Expert, SAP S/4HANA Solution Management, and the author of the book, “Introducing SAP S/4HANA Service”. I have been working for SAP since 2002 and dedicated more than a decade as a front-line implementation consultant. After supporting many projects, go-live through the night, and producing a ton of documents, I currently focus on communicating different aspects of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to a wide range of audiences.
I put together this quick blog post to give you some insight into the SAP Community Call I co-presented with Chief Product Expert, SAP S/4HANA Service, o.frick on the topic of Service in SAP S/4HANA. In his two decades at SAP SE, Oliver has worked with several teams, from Research to Development and Customer Support, from HANA based analytics to SAP CRM, before finally joined the SAP S/4HANA core development team where he is driving the product strategy and roadmap for the After-Sales Service in SAP S/4HANA.
What: 30-minute presentation on Service in SAP S/4HANA followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. You will have the opportunity to submit your questions in the chat during the call.
When: May 18th at 10:00 CET
Where: Recording and links to material here
What you will take-away:
Many SAP customers rely on the Customer Service module of SAP ECC, and service capabilities of SAP Customer Relationship Management, for their after-sales service processes. In the after-sales service space, we observe an emerging trend, the “servitization” of everything, in which distinct sales and service processes merge together. This merge is focused on providing the outcome customers expect from using equipment rather than the sale and servicing of equipment as physical goods. Service management solutions from SAP with S/4HANA extend the existing service processes to support new processes for outcome-driven services. In this SAP Community Call, we provide a system demonstration to concretely illustrate how this is achieved.
We are considering making this call into a two-part series. With the move to SAP S/4HANA, many things are different, and many things remain the same.
This is Part I, focusing on a key differentiating feature of the new service management capability of SAP S/4HANA with SAP Business Technology Platform.
We are planning to do Part II around October – November (to be planned) to talk about aspects of continuity from SAP ECC and SAP CRM.
Be sure to follow the SAP S/4HANA Community page for updates on upcoming SAP Community Calls and related blog posts.
Looking forward to the call and taking your questions!
Best,
Noboru
We have seen an evolutionary trend in aftermarket services. Traditionally, product and equipment manufacturers tended to treat aftermarket services as operations separated from product sales. At that time, production and selling of products was primary focus of business operations. Aftermarket services tended to be limited to provision of spare parts and break-fix service; the interaction with customers was transactional in nature. Today, we see that many manufacturers manage long-term service contracts with their customers, providing regular maintenance services and on-demand repair services. They may have a central call center function to take advantage of the scale of centralized operations. Some manufacturers have moved even further and become a solution provider, focusing on providing business outcomes rather than physical products and equipment to their customers. These manufactures transformed their business model and operations to be able to charge customers based on the outcome and usage. Collectively, we observe a new type of business model is emerging: “everything-as-a-service” (XaaS).
SAP S/4HANA together with SAP Business Technology Platform have capabilities to support all these different types of services. SAP S/4HANA helps business organizations to leverage existing products and services, and flexibly reconfigure their aftermarket offerings and business processes. With S/4HANA, you can define a bundle of physical products and services to offer to customers. You can sell a bundle and set up a service contract to manage a long-term relationship with pricing agreements and automatic regular billing to customers. Delivery of the physical goods can be managed with standard logistic capabilities within S/4HANA, leveraging capabilities for inventory, warehouse and transportation. Execution of services are fully integrated with inventory of parts, with cost breakdowns recorded for the materials and labor hours consumed by individual services. If you have a field service team, you can enable them to connect with S/4HANA on their mobile devices with the SAP Field Service Management solution. These fine-grained details of business operations can be aggregated real-time to show profitability and other business outcomes at different levels for different roles in your organization from front-line employees to executives.
[Part 2 of the series is now scheduled for 1 December, 2022. Detail on this article]
[Added additional information as responses for questions asked during the livestream -- Thank you! The recording, a link to the presented material and others are available here]
My name is Noboru Ota and I am Vice President and Chief Expert, SAP S/4HANA Solution Management, and the author of the book, “Introducing SAP S/4HANA Service”. I have been working for SAP since 2002 and dedicated more than a decade as a front-line implementation consultant. After supporting many projects, go-live through the night, and producing a ton of documents, I currently focus on communicating different aspects of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to a wide range of audiences.
I put together this quick blog post to give you some insight into the SAP Community Call I co-presented with Chief Product Expert, SAP S/4HANA Service, o.frick on the topic of Service in SAP S/4HANA. In his two decades at SAP SE, Oliver has worked with several teams, from Research to Development and Customer Support, from HANA based analytics to SAP CRM, before finally joined the SAP S/4HANA core development team where he is driving the product strategy and roadmap for the After-Sales Service in SAP S/4HANA.
Key Details
What: 30-minute presentation on Service in SAP S/4HANA followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. You will have the opportunity to submit your questions in the chat during the call.
When: May 18th at 10:00 CET
Where: Recording and links to material here
What you will take-away:
Many SAP customers rely on the Customer Service module of SAP ECC, and service capabilities of SAP Customer Relationship Management, for their after-sales service processes. In the after-sales service space, we observe an emerging trend, the “servitization” of everything, in which distinct sales and service processes merge together. This merge is focused on providing the outcome customers expect from using equipment rather than the sale and servicing of equipment as physical goods. Service management solutions from SAP with S/4HANA extend the existing service processes to support new processes for outcome-driven services. In this SAP Community Call, we provide a system demonstration to concretely illustrate how this is achieved.
We are considering making this call into a two-part series. With the move to SAP S/4HANA, many things are different, and many things remain the same.
This is Part I, focusing on a key differentiating feature of the new service management capability of SAP S/4HANA with SAP Business Technology Platform.
We are planning to do Part II around October – November (to be planned) to talk about aspects of continuity from SAP ECC and SAP CRM.
Be sure to follow the SAP S/4HANA Community page for updates on upcoming SAP Community Calls and related blog posts.
Looking forward to the call and taking your questions!
Best,
Noboru
Additional Information as Response to Questions
On data model / One Order model optimized for HANA DB. This blog post series might give you some insights. “Customer Management” is an old name to refer to what we now call S/4HANA Service. The blog is dated 2018 but it should be still good starting point to explore. Also refer to “Further Reading and updates” part at the bottom of the article for other posts from him in the series.
Please also ensure to validate the information by yourself. These blogs are not official documentation; the information provided may be obsolete or inaccurate as SAP can change these technical implementation without prior notice.
How can we explore and show new Service capabilities? You can set up fully configured S/4HANA (on premise) deployed on Cloud e.g. AWS, GCP, etc. I have written a step-by-step guide with some indication of the costs -- no need for your manager's approval; possible with 30-100 euro budget. There is a demo scenarios with which you can explore all the core capabilities of S/4HANA Service.
Our product road map is published and can be viewed via a tool called SAP Road Map Explorer. The link above takes you to the tool with pre-set filter to show core capabilities of S/4HANA Service
- Training courses for SAP S/4HANA
- Learning Journey for SAP S/4HANA Service (including the training courses above)
- If you are interested in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, here is the Learning Journey for Service
Additional Background for our SAP Community Call
We have seen an evolutionary trend in aftermarket services. Traditionally, product and equipment manufacturers tended to treat aftermarket services as operations separated from product sales. At that time, production and selling of products was primary focus of business operations. Aftermarket services tended to be limited to provision of spare parts and break-fix service; the interaction with customers was transactional in nature. Today, we see that many manufacturers manage long-term service contracts with their customers, providing regular maintenance services and on-demand repair services. They may have a central call center function to take advantage of the scale of centralized operations. Some manufacturers have moved even further and become a solution provider, focusing on providing business outcomes rather than physical products and equipment to their customers. These manufactures transformed their business model and operations to be able to charge customers based on the outcome and usage. Collectively, we observe a new type of business model is emerging: “everything-as-a-service” (XaaS).
SAP S/4HANA together with SAP Business Technology Platform have capabilities to support all these different types of services. SAP S/4HANA helps business organizations to leverage existing products and services, and flexibly reconfigure their aftermarket offerings and business processes. With S/4HANA, you can define a bundle of physical products and services to offer to customers. You can sell a bundle and set up a service contract to manage a long-term relationship with pricing agreements and automatic regular billing to customers. Delivery of the physical goods can be managed with standard logistic capabilities within S/4HANA, leveraging capabilities for inventory, warehouse and transportation. Execution of services are fully integrated with inventory of parts, with cost breakdowns recorded for the materials and labor hours consumed by individual services. If you have a field service team, you can enable them to connect with S/4HANA on their mobile devices with the SAP Field Service Management solution. These fine-grained details of business operations can be aggregated real-time to show profitability and other business outcomes at different levels for different roles in your organization from front-line employees to executives.
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