Service Management Lesson 1: Service Management introduction
Thanks for checking out the e-course on optimizing your SAP service management for decreased cost and increased revenue. Throughout this course, we will be talking about the major components of service management, the transactions associated with service management and high level processes. If you are at all familiar with Service Management in SAP, you are probably aware of the of areas that are not integrated as well as other more standard SAP modules. This course will help you navigate those integration areas and give you advise on how to streamline your processes. If at any point in the course you have questions, please reply to this email and we will do our best to address your specific questions. Now, onto the first lesson.
Service management is often a little known area in the realm of SAP. It is often called Customer Service. It is a cross between Sales and Distribution and Plant Maintenance. The basic premise of service management is everything that occurs to a product after the initial sale. There are several unique processes in the world of service management:

1. In-house Repair: This is the process that is used whenever the customer returns the product (or a portion of the product) to a service center or plant in the same SAP system. The product is either repaired or replaced and shipped to the customer.
2. On-Site or Field Service: This is any repair/rework that is date at the customer’s site. The work is done by an internal employee and any parts are shipped to the customer site or brought by the technician.
3. Exchange and Loaners: This is a variation of the in-house repair. This process sends a replacement product before the customer ships their return. Typically this process is adopted as a special service that customers pay a premium to receive.
4. Claims Processing: This process is used when a third party service center performs a repair and then bills the back to the company for the services/materials that were used in the repair.
5. Returns: This process is purely the return for credit. The part is received back into inventory against a sales order or invoice. This process is primarily SD, but can fall under SM depending on the organization and depending on the pieces used to generate the return.
6. Service Contracts: This is less of a process, and more of a connection piece to all of the processes listed above. The service contract, also known as a maintenance contract, an extended warranty, or countless other names depending on the organization. The contract is a prepayment for “possible” services to be rendered. The customer is often given an incentive to purchase in advance, perhaps at a lower price or premium service (like the exchange listed above).

The master data required for service is again a combination of SM & PM. The big pieces you need include:

1. Materials (Servicable Materials) – In most instances, there is always something that needs to be repaired or replaced.
2. Service Materials – These materials (typically material type DIEN) are used to identify the service process that the SD document should execute
3. Customers – because of the integration with SD, there can’t be any documents without a customer.
4. Serial Number/Equipment (Recommended) – the serial number isn’t required for the service process, however, to get the full benefits of the service process serialization should be included in the process.
5. Work Center(s) – because of the integration with PM, that means you must have work centers to perform the repair at, even if the repair is done on the customer’s site.
6. Service Product Mapping – This is the link between service materials and work centers for each plant.
7. Functional Location/Installed Base – these pieces are more advanced methods of maintaining which customers have which products, what serial numbers, and even the specific customer location they are installed at. This area is not required for Service Management, but may be required by your business.

Now that you have the basic 10,000 foot view of service management, I encourage you to check out the following information on how to perform the blueprinting aspects of service management.

SAP SM: Blueprinting Questions – Master Data
SAP SM: Blueprinting Questions – Call Center
SAP SM: Blueprinting Questions – Sales / Customer Service
SAP SM: Blueprinting Questions – Shipping & Receiving
SAP SM: Blueprinting Questions – Service Processing
SAP SM: Blueprinting Questions – Technical

Checking out these documents will give you a good idea of all the concepts to be aware of. In the next lesson, we’re going to talk about service planning. The next lesson will give you the first method to improve your service process.

Thanks for reading,