External Maintenance - External work centers

[Former Member]

Hi Super Gurus,

I have a punch of hard questions chasing me all this period. I would be thankful if you helped me :

- We are going for external processing using external work centers (Each company with it's own work center). In fact, i'm facing a huge problem.

The situation : We do exactly what is defined here.

Processing with an External Company as Work Center - Customer Service (CS) - SAP Library 

=> We have one PO "for the yearly preventive maintenance orders" that will be closed by the end of the year. We don't discuss the time with our contractors, they do their interventions (One intervention is one service, and we haven't define any hourly basis)=> There job is to ensure preventive maintenance.

so this is the problem :

- If we define the CO activity type and price, we will not be able to track time because for exemple 1H = 1 service =3000$

- We want to specify the time of the operations done by the contractors (Because we have a shared planning with PP) => Specifiying the time will change the amount of the service => we lose the costs

- If there any way to say, i called this maintenance work center, whatever the time, the cost will be a constant value ?

Kind regards,

Karim Es.

[sebastian_lenartowicz · Accepted solution]

Greetings Karim,

Please can you clarify: you want to keep the Work Duration (DAUNO) of the Operation to the real amount of time taken for the intervention, but you want to specify an amount of Work Amount (ARBEI) to be the same each time you use this particular Work Centre?

If this is the case, I would propose that you

1) Use the calculation key '0' - "maintain manually" to decouple both the values. This will allow you to maintain real duration (variable) and 1 hour or work amount (constant) as "hours" at the same cost each time.

If "hours" are misleading as the unit for work amount, you can do the following:

2) Define a new time-based unit in CUNI (as you may only use time-based units for Work) as a copy of "H". Ensure it's 1:1 with hours in terms of numerator, denominator etc. to prevent wrong calculation of cost.

3) Maintain this unit in IR02 the Work Centre (Capacities and Scheduling), in KL02 for the Activity Unit.

Note that you will be required to input this new unit in the Order and Task List operations for this Work Centre.

The unit for Duration, however, should still be "hours". Consider if you require a Task List Profile with the relevant units.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Sebastian,

First, what a great way of re-explaining my need very happy with answer.

Could you please clarify this for me :

In the official document for processing external maintenance as work centers : Processing with an External Company as Work Center - Customer Service (CS) - SAP Library

Could you please read this part, are they talking about a simple PO or a Framework order ?

Process Flow

• You configure an individual purchase order, which has a validity period (for example, one quarter, a year), in which the purchase order conditions are defined. You assign this purchase order to the cost center for the work center that has been created for the external company.

• You create the order with operations to be processed externally in exactly the same way as an order with operations to be processed internally. See

Creation of an Order.

• Print out the order papers.

• You hire the external company by sending the printed order papers to the external company or handing them to their employees.

• The tasks are performed by the external company.

• You confirm the order operations to be processed externally in exactly the same way as internally processed operations.

• Steps two to six apply for all orders that are processed within the validity period of the purchase order.

• The cost center of the external company is credited following the time confirmation of the operations.

• The cost center of the external company can be debited by issuing an invoice periodically (for example, monthly). The invoice therefore includes all the orders performed during this period. After the expiration date, the balance of the cost center is 0.

The costs are first collected on the order and then settled to the receiver specified in the settlement rule.

Kind Regards,
Karim E.

[former_member193219]

Hello Espartie,

what comes to my mind, try to define 2 control keys in your service order:

one for the constant costs and relevant for costing and the second defined as not relevant for costing, where you can enter time. The disadvantage of course is that you will have to double the operations...

You can test it,

BR,

Sergey