Managing your service order workload can often be an overwhelming task in and of itself.  Trying to set dates, determine your capacity, estimate parts and just stay on top of what to work on next can be challenging.  It becomes doubly so because in many smaller organization the person planning is often the person managing the entire department, and often the same people doing repairs.  Because of that, I wanted to talk about some ways to help that process and give your service order planner some new ideas of how to streamline the process.

Using IW72 as a Work List

First let’s begin with an easy one.  Using a standard SAP transaction to manage and edit your work list.  For this I recommend IW72/IW73.  As you can see from the screen shot, you get quite a few selection options.  The most important include the order status at the top, which allows you to see open, completed, all of the above.  In addition, you have the standard fields like order type, you can even use the status inclusive/exclusive fields (very handy as well).

In addition, after you execute, you get a nice ALV grid with options for pretty much any service related field you could wish to see.  I encourage you to set a default layout that includes only the fields you really care about.  All of the rest of the steps that I talk about can utilize the fields in IW72, or whatever methods you choose manage your work list for service orders.

System and User Status of the Order

Now, this one should be obvious, but I can’t just gloss over it.  The system and user status are 2 of the most valuable fields out there for monitoring your workload, and keeping track of what you should be working.  Let me start with the system status.  This built in, so you don’t have anything to configure. What is important is to understand what the different statuses represent.  Some of the most important: CRTD, REL, TECO & CLSD.  These 3 are the main statuses, Created means that it exists, but it is not being worked on yet. REL means that it can be worked on, or is being worked on.  TECO means that you are done working with it, but still may collect some residual costs.  CLSD means it is complete, no more costs, and likely the costs have been settled to some other location (sales order, cost center, etc.) There are many other statuses, and rather than go into all of those here, let me just say that looking into those status can be very important, especially when you understand which statuses show up for you business.  Only then can you truly evaluate which statuses mean something for your organization. Next up is the user status.  This one is completely configurable, in my opinion, required.  While the system status is very useful, it can’t possible capture each step your business needs to recognize.  A perfect example of this is in-house quoting.  There is nothing built into the system status to show that a quote has been sent to the customer if you are using in-house repairs.  For me information on this, please check out my blog post:  Quoting In-house Repairs.  the point to take away from this is that having a manual set of statuses that denote if something needs to be quoted, has been sent to the customer, has been accepted or rejected are things that are very important to your service organization, but isn’t available for this process in SAP.  Your organization may other processes that need to be captured throughout the repair process.  Again, you need to analyze your business to see what makes sense.

I’m not going into further detail, but if you go into the configuration, you’ll see how you can configure your own statuses, sequences, and even if you are allowed to go backwards in the status chain.  If you are looking for a better way to manage your workload, I encourage you to check out Proximity.  This is a tool that will allow service orders and production orders to be maintained in a simple, streamlined transaction.

Managing the start and end dates

In my opinion, this is one of the most important steps that most organizations aren’t doing. In the following screen shot you will see all of the dates and settings that you can influence inside of each service order.

Now, if you truly want to have something properly scheduled, you will need to closely monitor these dates.  The Basic dates and the scheduled dates are your window into accurate scheduling that can give you a real picture of how long it will take to get a particular service order done.  If you are not actively monitoring and adjusting these dates, how can you possibly have any idea of how long it will take to finish a particular order?  Now it’s a given that certain orders will always take priority over others.  If you actively managing the workload, you can shift more important orders to the front of the line and still see the impact this will cause on the other orders in the queue.

Priority

One of the first fields I’d like to focus on more closely is priority.  This field is an easy method to decide what is more important and what is less important.  You can define your own priorities and as many of them as you need.

In configuration, you can define the Relative Start and Relative End, you can define what each priority will default the dates to.  If you configure this, setting a priority will automatically set your dates.  You will still have the option to override the dates, but often these schedules are promised or guaranteed to a customer, so you must live up to them.  Again, this window will quickly show if you can live up to your customers expectations.  It’s important to understand if you can live up to your service promises.  If you can’t, you MUST be realistic and either change the expectations, or invest in resources that will allow you to live up to expectations.  Priorities, combined with reporting, are what can help drive the change in your service organization.  If you are in need a service dashboard to monitor your service business, check out Broadsword by JaveLLin Solutions.

Auto. scheduling

One of the other pieces is the automated scheduling that you can turn on for service orders.  This will help you to plan based on forward scheduling, backward scheduling etc.  This is a nice feature, and it is pretty self explanatory, so I’m not going to convince you to turn it on.  Instead, I want to warn you of the dangers of trusting the automated scheduling.  Like everything in SAP, automated scheduling is as good as your master data.  This means that if you capacity is properly maintained for each work center.  It also means that properly managing the resources (like employee vacations, or even sick time) will greatly impact the accuracy of your scheduling.  You must also properly plan the service order.  This means that you must enter in accurate times in the operations and accurate estimates of the components you’ll need.  If this information is accurate, then automated scheduling can work well for you.  However, in my experience, the majority of organizations do not have data good enough to rely on this information.  Most production orders have the data to accomplish this, but often service organizations are not as “structured” as production.  There is another important factor to keep in mind, and that is your field service/on-site service orders.  Often, you may simply set a start and end date, regardless of the master data.  You may simple set that your technician will be on-site for 2 days, and you may even factor in travel time.  Many companies may not wish to try to setup operations to take that much time, but rather just set the start and end dates.  This is just something to factor into your configuration.

Proper Planning of the Operations and Components

We mentioned this in a previous lesson, but proper planning of your operations and components can give you a much more accurate picture of your total schedule.  While this sounds simple, it really a very valuable tool to rely on.

I hope I have provided some new ideas to help you streamline your service organization and improve your scheduling.  Please feel free to comment on this class, and if you feel there is something I should cover in more detail, I welcome your suggestions.

mpiehl@goJaveLLin.com