Service in SAP S/4HANA 2020 extends its business scope significantly by enabling In-House Repair process, Recurring Services, and Embedded Analytics. In this blog post, I will highlight these top three innovations on Service.
- In-House Repair
- Recurring Service & Service Order Template
- Service Analytics
Optimized service delivery through streamlined In-House Repair processes
We introduce In-House Repair process to support companies that offer a repair and maintenance service for products. It is enabled to manage repair services in-house for the products and assets returned from customers.
- Plan and schedule in-house repairs
- Capture received devices for in-house repair and define the next steps based
on repair results
- Review completed repairs
- Trigger the shipment and commercial billing process after completing repairs
The slide above shows the process and relevant features upon business roles.
A service representative can perform the following features, by using apps like Manage In-House Repairs, Perform Pre-check, Prepare for billing. The following features are supported.
- Enter repair objects: Create in-house repairs by adding repair objects, which are sent by the customers. Use the app Manage In-house repairs. See the screen shot below (Figure 1)
- Perform prechecks: Decide for each repair object whether it is marked for repair or whether it is sent back to the customer.
Figure1: Manage In-House Repair - Repair Objects
A service manager can use apps like Manage In-House Repairs and Plan Repairs.
- Plan repairs: Schedule the object for repair. In the repair order, you define the service employee who is to perform the repair.
A service technician can have an app Perform repairs separately.
- Perform repairs: You use this feature to perform the repair based on the repair order.
A service representative can perform Prepare for billing.
- Prepare for billing: Trigger the billing process for the repair object. See the screen shot below (Figure2)
Figure2: Prepare for Billing
For these activities, In-House Repair provides the following business roles required to access Fiori apps:
Purpose |
PFCG Role |
Customer Service Representative |
SAP_BR_CUST_SRVC_REP_REPA |
Customer Service Manager |
SAP_BR_CUST_SRVC_MGR_REPA |
Service Technician |
SAP_BR_CUST_SRVC_TEC_REPA |
Situation handling capability helps users to drive actions proactively when there are situations in the process, which require their attention.
Customer service representatives and managers for In-House Repair get notified automatically when
- the precheck for a repair object has not been completed within a defined number of days
- in-house repair hasn’t been confirmed within a defined number of days
- billing-relevant repair object is still in status 'Bill' after a defined number of days
- processing of an in-house repair takes longer than expected
You can use the predefined situation templates for In-House Repair process. See the table below and click the link for more details.
Long-term Customer Services by planning Recurring Services
We introduce a new business scope,
Recurring Service in 2020. Service management enables the capability to plan recurring services by utilizing Maintenance Plan features. It is possible to schedule periodic services such as regular maintenance on assets. Regular servicing is certainly beneficial to prevent potential escalations due to unforeseen breakdowns, so it increases asset uptime as a result. This will have more focus on long-term service business, which leads to increase upselling potentials and service team utilization.
A new business role,
Service Planner, is delivered to use 9 default apps under Recurring Service. We also offer 7 additional apps related to Maintenance plan, which can be activated if needed. See the slide.
Service Planner can create a
Maintenance Plan, which determines when and which service is to be planned, performed, or offered for which object. Key information for service orders to be generated will be copied from maintenance plan via service contracts and service order templates.
Service intervals will be determined by selecting a Maintenance Plan type
- Single Cycle Plan (Time-based) e.g. every month
- Single Cycle Plan (Performance-based) e.g. every 1000 operating hours
- Multiple Counter Plan
In the multiple counter plan, you create maintenance cycles and allocate counters of equipment or functional locations with different dimensions to them
Read more in help file
WHO
Sold-to-part is derived from a selected Service Contract
Employee responsible is derived from a Service order template
WHAT
The content of Service will be determined by a Service order template
WHERE
Which object or functional location to be serviced can be selected from a Service contract
Running a scheduled job will generate Service orders automatically. Service Planner can monitor the status of jobs and navigate to related documents like Service contracts, Service orders, Service order templates.
Service Order Template for repeatable service tasks
Another new concept we’ve seen in the context of planning a Recurring Service is a Service Order Template. We introduce
Service Order Template to define sets of service-related data for
standardized and repeatable service tasks.
This can be used for
- creating Maintenance Plans for Recurring Services
- creating a Service order
- creating a Service order quotation
Prerequisites
You have configured your service order template transaction(s) in Customizing for Service under Transactions > Basic Settings.
Read more details
here.
Embedded analytics for Service
Embedded analytics empower customer service managers to monitor operations and business outcome of services business in real-time via analytics, looking directly at the transactional data.
- Visualization / dashboard in real-time directly from SAP S/4HANA
- Both operational (e.g. overdue service orders) and business management (e.g. profit margin)
- Personalized for individual user roles
Service Management Overview app offers a single screen for service managers to focus on their role-specific tasks. It enables service mangers to filter and react to information derived from a range of applications.
We deliver the detailed analysis apps for users to slice and dice data using additional dimensions for
- Expiring Service Contracts
- Service Contracts by Net Value
- Service Contracts by Profit Margin
- Incomplete Service Orders
- Overdue Service Orders
- Average Service Duration by Product/Equipment
Figure3: Service Management Overview
As these are only top highlights, you can check all new features in 2020 with
What's new viewer
For more information on SAP S/4HANA 2020, check out the following links: