SAP Business Network for Asset Collaboration - Automatically Share Work Orders

[Adam-Sivell]

Why Share Work Orders Anyway?

The SAP Business Network for Asset Collaboration (BNAC) removes the need for emailing or extracting work orders to excel and instead lets your partners work from a single version of the truth. What are the key reasons that organisations share work orders?

Sharing Work Orders with Service / Maintenance Providers enables:

• Review of the planned work and associated assets, work history, and documentation
• Collaboration on the scope & duration of the work
• Acceptance of the work
• Confirmation that the work is complete
• Confirmation of the operation job times
• The ability to create follow-on notifications

Sharing work orders with OEMs & regulators enables:

• Provide feedback on Asset Performance
• Add details & depth to warranty claims
• Reporting work performed by third parties

In addition multiple parties might be involved in work order planning or scheduling, often with different partners responsible for different operations. Using the SAP Business Network means all partners gain secure access to the details they need.

How to setup automatic sharing?

The SAP Business Network for Asset Collaboration can automatically share work orders with a business partner that is specified on the Work Order operation in the S/4HANA or ECC system. The following points will help ensure that you are setup and ready to share.

Enable Automatic Sharing in BNAC

Automatic Sharing must be enabled in your companies application settings:

Automatic Sharing with Partners in BNAC

It's straightforward to enable automatic sharing between your company. At a high level the prerequisites and steps are:

• Your company must be connected with the business partner in BNAC
• Your company must have the business partner from your ERP mapped to the BNAC business partner
• You must set-up an automatic sharing pattern for the business partner

To help clarify lets recap the BNAC business partner fundamentals. The SAP Business Network needs to understand the relationship between Business Partners on your ERP (e.g. S/4HANA), Business Partners on the SAP Business Network, and Business Partners of other connected parties. The following diagram gives a high level overview..

Connecting your company to the Business Partner in BNAC

To be able to Map a business partner Your Company must have connected to the BNAC Business Partner (e.g. BNAC- ABC Services). Check this (or connect) via the Business Partners tile of the Administration Tab….

 

Mapping Business Partners from your ERP to BNAC business partners

Your company has an ERP e.g. SAP S/4HANA with business partners (for example you have a service provider known as ABC Services).

Your company joins the SAP Business Network for Asset Collaboration and BNAC represents the business partners from your ERP as External Organizations

You can see these in BNAC by navigating to the Administration tab and selecting the Company Profile tile…

Once on the Company Profile application select External Organizations…

The SAP Business Network for Asset Collaboration (BNAC) has business partners that have joined the network. This may for example include the service provider ABC Services.

However BNAC does not yet understand that the service provider ABC Services belonging to Your Company is the same as the ABC Services on BNAC.

To map the business partner from Your Company to BNAC select the External Organization to display its profile….

Then Select “Map Business Partner”

In the pop-up select the BNAC Business Partner that maps to the Your Company external organization (e.g. BNAC – ABC Services will be mapped to Your Company ABC Services).

Now BNAC understands that Your Company partner ABC Services is the same as the BNAC partner BNAC – ABC Services 😊

 

Create Automatic Sharing Criteria

Once the relationships are understood then it is possible to define the automatic sharing criteria. Use the Network Authorizations tile in the Administration tab and select Patterns….

Create a new pattern…

 

Add the Business Partner

 

Now you have a rule in place that will automatically share Work Orders whenever they are assigned to the Business Partner (vendor) on the Work Order operation. 

Example S/4HANA Work Order with a PM03 Operation