Noboru Ota Introducing SAP S/4HANA® Service This E-Bite is protected by copyright. It contains a digital watermark, a signature that indicates which person may use this copy. Full Legal Notes and Notes on Usage can be found at the end of this publication. SAP PRESS E-Bites SAP PRESS E-Bites provide you with a high-quality response to your specific project need. If you’re looking for detailed instructions on a specific task; or if you need to become familiar with a small, but crucial sub-component of an SAP product; or if you want to understand all the hype around product xyz: SAP PRESS E-Bites have you covered. Authored by the top professionals in the SAP universe, E-Bites provide the excellence you know from SAP PRESS, in a digestible electronic format, delivered (and consumed) in a fraction of the time! Divyendra Purohit Introducing Rebate and Settlement Management with SAP S/4HANA www.sap-press.com/5057 | $24.99 | 94 pages Jawad Akhtar Business Partners and Customer-Vendor Integration (CVI) in SAP S/4HANA www.sap-press.com/4971 | $24.99 | 130 pages Mrinal K. Roy Introducing Advanced ATP (aATP) in SAP S/4HANA www.sap-press.com/4914 | $24.99 | 115 pages The Author of this E-Bite Noboru Ota is chief expert in SAP S/4HANA solution management, based out of the Walldorf office. He has been working with SAP since 2002, when he joined its Tokyo office in Japan as an SAP consultant. In 2006, he moved to the Melbourne office in Australia and dedicated more than a decade as a frontline implementation consultant and team lead. He engaged in various multi-year SAP implementation projects, designing business processes, configuring and coding features and functions, supporting go-live through the night, and producing a ton of documents. He relocated a second time across ocean and land to Germany in 2017, where he currently focuses on communicating different aspects of SAP S/4HANA to a wide range of audiences. What You’ll Learn In 2018, SAP introduced a new service management component as part of SAP S/4HANA, its flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Called SAP S/4HANA Service, it is planned to be the future nucleus of service management applications offered by SAP, harmonizing the classic Customer Service module in SAP ERP and the service capabilities of SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM). This E‐Bite will introduce you to SAP S/4HANA Service and the new service management capabilities within SAP S/4HANA. The E‐Bite is written with nonexperts in mind, but a basic familiarity with SAP solutions is preferred, given the historical depth of the topic and SAP solutions. Both classic service management solutions (Customer Service module and SAP CRM) have been used by thousands of organizations globally in a wide variety of industries and purposes, ranging from industry assets such as power plants to consumer goods such as luxury accessories. Therefore, we don’t assume the audience to be in any specific industry. 1 Service Basics 1.1 Service Management Business 1.2 Service Management Solutions from SAP 1.3 Setting Up Your Own SAP S/4HANA Demo System Quickly and Cheaply 2 Master Data in SAP S/4HANA Service 2.1 Customer Master Data (Business Partner) 2.2 Material, Serial Number, and Asset 2.3 Maintenance Plan, Task List, and Service Order Template 2.4 Pricing 3 Service Order Management 3.1 Service Order 3.2 Service Confirmation 3.3 Billing 3.4 Internal Order 3.5 Reservation and Purchase Requisition 3.6 Sales Order 3.7 In-House Repair (Depot Repair) 3.8 Field Service Management (On-Site Maintenance Service) 3.9 Other Related Features (Service Order Templates and Bills of Materials) 4 Service Maintenance Plan and Service Contract Management 4.1 Service Contract 4.2 Recurring Service: Maintenance Plan and Scheduling 5 Service Request Management, Service Quotations, and Packaged Service Offerings 5.1 Service Request 5.2 Service Order Quotation/Solution Quotation and Product Bundle 5.3 Interaction Center in SAP S/4HANA 6 Service Monitoring and Analytics 6.1 Embedded Analytics 6.2 SAP Analytics Cloud 7 Future Innovations 8 What’s Next? 1 Service Basics The new service management capabilities are available with all deployment modes of SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, including SAP S/4HANA, private cloud edition (as a RISE with SAP offering). This E‐Bite primarily focuses on the on-premise SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA, private cloud edition, attempting to be a bridge for SAP practitioners with a background in SAP ERP or SAP CRM; nevertheless, it’s also hoped to be useful for anyone, with no prior SAP background, who is interested in learning the new service management capabilities. This E‐Bite is structured in the following way. This section serves as context for the rest of the E‐Bite. It first runs you through typical service management processes, at a high level, for organizations— business or public sector—that SAP S/4HANA Service is design to support. It then provides short summaries of the classic solutions SAP has historically offered for service management—the Customer Service module of SAP ERP and the service capabilities of SAP CRM—followed by a summary of the new SAP S/4HANA Service. The first section ends with introducing the SAP S/4HANA trial, which lets you try out a preconfigured SAP S/4HANA system, including the service capabilities we will go through in this E‐Bite, on a cloud infrastructure of your choice. The second section dives right into the main master data objects of SAP S/4HANA Service and clarifies how SAP S/4HANA harmonizes the two classic solutions SAP released previously from a perspective of data objects. The master data objects we will discuss are the customer (business partner); material, serial number, and asset (technical object); maintenance plan, task list, and service template; and pricing. Section 3 and Section 6 build on the description of the data objects and walk you through the processes that SAP S/4HANA supports. These processes are modeled as a sequence of transactional data underpinned by common master data. We’ll look at service order management (Section 3), recurring services with service contracts and maintenance plan (Section 4), service requests and solution quotations together with product bundles (Section 5), and monitoring and analytics for service management (Section 6). In the final section, we’ll look out into SAP’s future roadmap, and briefly cover one of the main roadmap items: maintenance-centric service. It’s designed to greatly ease the transition to SAP S/4HANA for existing SAP ERP customers who use the Customer Service module today. 1.1 Service Management Business Let’s look at three typical business processes as models. At the onset, note that, first, the business scenarios presented here are deliberately simplified and abstract, disregarding intricate details of industries and organizations, especially in the eyes of veteran practitioners in these domains. Second, these processes aren’t mutually exclusive. Some organizations have all the processes as part of their core service management processes, and others have their own combination of them. Nevertheless, the simplified models presented here will highlight some key commonalities and differences in business processes, which we hope to connect with capabilities provided by SAP S/4HANA Service in later sections. Providing Maintenance Service for Installed Equipment One distinct characteristic of this type of maintenance service is that you need to send technicians for the job to the location of the installed equipment. This means that the service provider typically has a group of field service technicians and a team to manage their schedules, considering the field crew’s capacities and servicing demands. Installed equipment can refer to physical industrial equipment such as wind turbines used for wind power generation, CT scanners installed at a hospital, and even a consumer white goods item (e.g., dishwasher and washing machine) at home. The actual logistical tasks, supply chains, and networks of stakeholders involved in providing maintenance services for an offshore wind farm are very different from those for dishwashers at home, of course. For a wind farm, different service providers, in addition to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), might be involved for different components that constitute a wind turbine. Maintaining a series of dishwashers and other related home appliances could be done by a single service provider, who might be skilled (and perhaps certified) to service a range of equipment. In this instance, you represent a system of equipment and parts installed as a hierarchy of equipment master records. The service history and other equipment-specific operational data, such as oil gauge reading, might also be recorded periodically against the equipment master records. You’ll usually have a long-term service contract to conduct regular maintenance services for given systems of installed equipment at the customer site. The service contract also typically includes provisions for some ad hoc (reactive/break-fix) services and consumable parts. Servicing In-House, or Depot Repair For this type of maintenance service, the physical equipment or device in question comes to you. It can be a small consumer goods item, such as a mobile phone, wristwatch, or pearl necklace, or it can be a large piece of equipment, such as a jet engine or a construction automobile returned to a repair facility. Again, the complexity involved in the actual repair or maintenance job varies significantly among different physical goods and equipment in question—the nature of work is so different that it’s not worth comparing. The process typically involves inspection of the returned asset to decide on a follow-up course of action. For a consumer device, for example, a follow-up action typically includes making a judgement about whether it can be repaired, performing the actual repair, and returning the repaired device or a substitute device. In addition to technical repair activities, the business process typically involves commercial matters that influence their fees, such as quoting the repair and spare parts, including judgement for the warranty situations for the quoted items. For more complex assets, you might also need to record a replaceable serialized component part removed and added, keep track of component inventory, service parts consumed, and labor hours, as well as other sundry costs for different work done to the overall service work. Customer-Facing Services The last example may be familiar to a layperson as a consumer. This type of service is typically thought of as a call center operation. For example, you may have a mobile phone and internet connection provided by a telecom company and call its customer center to inquire about the bill you’ve just received. In another case, your mobile phone may have some technical issue, and you might like to visit the shop down the street to get it looked at. Your first point of contact as a consumer may also be a web chat in the customer service website or a social network service such as Twitter or Facebook. Behind the scenes in the call center, the service agent must identify who the caller is with the customer ID, some form of product ID, or serial number. Service agents then log the interaction with you. The call can be an inquiry about the bill as mentioned, a complaint about a product, or a request for repair services. An inquiry may be resolved within a single call, or a request for repair might need a follow-up action on your part as a customer (e.g., to return the device by mail or directly visit a shop), followed by a chain of actions by a service center. 1.2 Service Management Solutions from SAP Following are the on-premise solutions offered from SAP for service management. SAP ERP SAP ERP offers robust service management capabilities through its Customer Service module. It leverages enterprise asset management capabilities within SAP ERP, known as the Plant Maintenance module. Plant Maintenance is widely used globally by many organizations to manage a variety of physical assets. Typical usage includes management of industrial physical assets such as power plants, mining facilities and equipment, airplanes, manufacturing, material handling equipment, and many others. In addition, many public sector organizations, such as city councils, use the Plant Maintenance module to manage buildings, parks, trees, and other public assets. While Plant Maintenance is meant for managing the assets that you own, which typically appear in your balance sheet as assets, Customer Service adds the “customer aspects” to Plant Maintenance, connecting it with the sales capabilities from the Sales and Distribution module. Customer Service, thus, offers such fundamental processes as billing for maintenance services. It’s so well integrated with Plant Maintenance that it’s often abbreviated as PM/CS. SAP Customer Relationship Management SAP CRM is a comprehensive on-premise solution focused on customer relationship management (CRM). Its capabilities include marketing, sales, service, and interaction center. It can be used as a standalone CRM solution. Alternatively, it can be used as an extension to SAP ERP by combining the processes and data through a native data integration between the two. SAP CRM has a set of capabilities dedicated to service management. With its strong call center support with Interaction Center, you can establish an end-to-end service business process that starts from a call center agent handing over a follow-on repair service order in the repair depot and continues with tracking and managing the status of calls all the way from the point of contact to the resolution of issues for customers. SAP S/4HANA SAP S/4HANA combines the good parts of service capabilities from its predecessors, both SAP ERP and SAP CRM. This is in line with the simplification principle of SAP S/4HANA. This can lead to a reduced total cost of ownership as you could choose to use just SAP S/4HANA for service management, eliminating the need for servers and other computing resources to host two different applications, and for replication of data between SAP ERP and SAP CRM. The Service component was initially added as a technical add-on component called Customer Management in early 2018, as part of feature pack stack 1 (FPS01) for the SAP S/4HANA 1709 release. As an add-on component, it required an additional installation process on top of the SAP S/4HANA instance to enable its service capabilities. As of the 1909 release (released in September 2019), the Service component is delivered as part of the SAP S/4HANA instance and, thus, is no longer an add-on component. You’ll have all the features and functions of the Service component after you’ve installed SAP S/4HANA. Figure 1.1 illustrates the brief history of SAP S/4HANA Service. Figure 1.1 Brief History of SAP S/4HANA Service Figure 1.2 illustrates the current end-to-end vision of SAP in the domain of service management at the time of this writing in the beginning of 2021. You could consider this service management view as a subset of SAP’s overall vision of the intelligent enterprise. Technical capabilities underpinning the intelligent enterprise are composed of various applications deployed on a single platform, allowing frontline and back-office employees and management to leverage such advanced technologies as machine learning, robotic process automation, and analytics, while fusing them with their dayto-day operations and decision-making at all levels of the organization. Figure 1.2 SAP’s End-to-End Vision of Service Management as of 2021 In this diagram, you see SAP S/4HANA in the middle to manage your service operations in the back office, serving as the core of the end-to-end service management. The back-office capabilities include not only the service order quotations, service orders, and repair orders, but also logistics, such as activities for service and spare parts in the warehouse, service contract management, and financial and commercial aspects (e.g., controlling and billing). On the left side of service operations, you see customer service, and on the right side, field service. This can be viewed as a value chain starting from the left and flowing to the right. On the left, there are a variety of channels and points of contact for customers, going through the back-office operation in the middle, and then execution of services in the field by scheduling and dispatching service technicians on the right. Depending on your service management processes, some elements will be optional; for example, some service organizations may not need a field service operation because their repair service occurs in-house by bringing in the piece of equipment in question. At the bottom of the illustration, two related sets of capabilities are shown: asset management and analytics. SAP S/4HANA includes robust capabilities for asset management widely used for assets that require a stringent maintenance regime (e.g., power plants) and serialized and repairable luxury goods (e.g., jewelries and accessories). SAP S/4HANA also has real-time reporting and analytics capabilities with user-friendly visualization for all levels of the organization. Nevertheless, these two additional layers of applications further extend these capabilities or can be used as standalone applications in the environment where SAP S/4HANA may not be the main system of record. So far, we’ve provided a whirlwind overview of SAP’s service management solutions. We’ve introduced SAP S/4HANA Service in the context of SAP’s overall vision of the intelligent enterprise, embedding SAP S/4HANA Service as the core of the end-to-end service management processes. From the next section onward, we’ll zoom in on different aspects of SAP S/4HANA Service. 1.3 Setting Up Your Own SAP S/4HANA Demo System Quickly and Cheaply Before starting this journey, let’s take a quick detour for those who want to see an actual SAP S/4HANA system in action to completion. If you’re not interested in an actual system demo right now, you can skip this section. SAP offers inexpensive ways to try out SAP S/4HANA. One such way is to use SAP Cloud Appliance Library, which provides a preconfigured SAP S/4HANA instance, called SAP S/4HANA FullyActivated Appliance. You can read more in a community blog post at http://s-prs.co/533200. By using an appliance, you can quickly deploy an SAP S/4HANA instance onto a cloud infrastructure of your choice, such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Detailed demo guides are available (search for “demo guides” in the community blog), including on the capabilities of SAP S/4HANA Service. SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance provides a fully configured system, set of users with administrator authorization (SAP_ALL), and operating system–level access via remote desktop access. You can start using the service management capabilities as soon as you’ve deployed an instance; typically, it takes one to two hours of work to launch the SAP Fiori launchpad. You can also do this from a home PC with a hobbyist budget (e.g., without requiring your organization’s budget approval). Go to http://s‐prs.co/533201 for a step-by-step guide that takes you through the process from signing up for GCP with a credit card payment, all the way to launching SAP S/4HANA. Although it was written for the 1709 and 1809 releases, the procedure should be applicable for later releases. Note Most of the screenshots of the system in this E‐Bite are taken from a 2020 release instance of SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance, which is also available to you as a reader (we’ve made slight adjustments to the master data to show different examples, but the configuration is mostly unchanged). 2 Master Data in SAP S/4HANA Service At the end of the previous section, we saw SAP’s holistic approach for service management with its intelligent enterprise strategy. An intelligent enterprise lets organizations run business processes in which the capabilities underpinning such processes are composed of various applications deployed on a single platform. SAP S/4HANA is the core component of the intelligent enterprise. SAP S/4HANA Service is the kernel of SAP service management solutions. In this context, you briefly saw that SAP S/4HANA Service combines the “good parts” of the Customer Service component of SAP ERP and SAP CRM. In this section, you’ll see how this occurs from a technical perspective. We’ll zoom in on the different data objects that are related to service processes in SAP S/4HANA and see how it brings them together in a single solution. SAP S/4HANA Service carries over master data objects related to service management from the classic SAP ERP and has adapted the processes and transactional data objects from the service capabilities of SAP CRM (e.g., refer to SAP Note 2962632 S4TWL Customer Service). Figure 2.1 illustrates the shift. On the left are the main master data objects relevant for service management; on the right, the transactional data objects are listed. This is a crude generalization; for example, you could dispute the fact that service contract as an object is categorized under transactional data. Despite these reservations, it’s still useful as generalized guidance to let you quickly grasp the shift that has taken place in SAP S/4HANA Service from the classic solutions. We’ll zoom in on each object in a minute, but let’s run through a high-level overview first. For master data, they are carried over from SAP ERP mostly as is, except for business partners. The business partner here refers to the customer master, which has been unified with the vendor (supplier) master under the business partner. This unification isn’t service specific; it’s part of the overall simplification and data harmonization efforts of SAP S/4HANA in general. Figure 2.1 SAP S/4HANA Service’s Simplified Data Model The transactional data objects are new for SAP S/4HANA, coming from the SAP CRM heritage. They are based on the SAP CRM data model, different from those in SAP ERP. These data objects have been adjusted to natively work within SAP S/4HANA, which is based on the SAP HANA database. As you can expect from a wellintegrated ERP solution, the applications that deal with the transactional data leverage the capabilities of other LOBs such as inventory management, purchasing, sales, and financials. This creates a cohesive whole, providing a rich set of capabilities supporting various service management business processes, which is more than a sum of its individual parts can provide. We’ll look at transactional data and business processes in later sections. Let’s focus on the data objects first. 2.1 Customer Master Data (Business Partner) As part of general simplification efforts, SAPS/4HANA has harmonized the data model of customer and vendor (supplier) master data with the unified business partner master data. You now can represent a legal entity (or an individual person) with a single master data record. This wasn’t possible with the customer and supplier master data in SAP ERP; when you dealt with the same legal entity as a customer and a supplier, you had to create separate master data record for the customer and the supplier, and then map them. SAP S/4HANA Service takes advantage of this unification; it uses the standard business partners of the customer role. As it’s a constituent part of SAP S/4HANA, the business partner master data is shared across other LOB capabilities (e.g., sales and financials) within the same system. Unlike SAP CRM, which is a separate system, business partners need not be replicated between systems. As you’ll see in later sections, having unified semantics is useful when you can have real-time analytics within the same system. Transactional business objects such as service orders, sales orders, and financial accounting documents share the semantics, eliminating the need for data mapping among different LOBs. 2.2 Material, Serial Number, and Asset SAP S/4HANA manages materials (products) as material master data records in the same way that classic SAP ERP does. There are SAP Fiori apps that help end users more easily manage product master data records. Figure 2.2 shows a screen image of a SAP Fiori app for product master data, Manage Product Master Data. Figure 2.2 Manage Product Master Data App Serial number records for materials work in the same way as in classic SAP ERP, as do technical objects (equipment and functional location master records—Figure 2.3). This means that you can apply your familiar knowledge from the Plant Maintenance module when it comes to maintaining assets. For example, you can record serial numbers for individual pieces of equipment in the same way in SAP ERP or have a master warranty assigned to them to keep records of warranty information. You can have a hierarchical representation of a piece of equipment with multiple components. You can also use the bill of materials (BOM) master data record to represent a service BOM for sets of equipment. When it comes to data for materials and assets, there is a smooth continuation from the classic world into the new SAP S/4HANA world. Figure 2.3 List of Technical Objects App One notable exception to these inherited master data objects is the bundle product. A bundle product lets you group multiple products into a single bundle product and offer it as a single product in a “solution” quotation. The products included in a bundle can be physical products, intangible services, and service contract items that will lead to a long-term service contract. If you have SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (SAP BRIM) license, you can also include a subscription order in a bundle offer. This way, you can package up existing products and services into a solution offer. For example, for a consumer, this might be an internet bundle service from an internet provider, where you can get an internet connection (long-term service contract), mobile phone usage (usage-based subscription), mobile phone (physical product), internet Wi-Fi router (physical product), and a one-off setup service (service). Technically, bundle products are material master records, with a specific material type (the default is BUND—bundle—but you can configure this with parameter changes). This is a feature inherited from SAP CRM. Figure 2.4 shows Product Bundles app where you see the definition of a printer bundle is displayed; it should look familiar to those who have a background in SAP CRM. We’ll look at bundles in action in a separate section later. Figure 2.4 Example: Bundle Product in SAP S/4HANA Service SAP Customer Relationship Management Middleware No Longer Required If you come from an SAP CRM background, you’ll notice that this is a significantly streamlined setup. Transactional data such as solution quotations and service orders directly work with the underlying master data in SAP S/4HANA such as materials and equipment. You no longer need to replicate material master data and equipment through SAP CRM middleware for the initial setup, nor do you need to manage the ongoing delta data synchronization afterwards. 2.3 Maintenance Plan, Task List, and Service Order Template Maintenance plans and tasks are two different master data objects, but they are often discussed in the same context of service management. At the time this writing in early 2021, SAP is in the process of enabling these master data for the business processes supported by SAP S/4HANA Service. The task list isn’t yet supported; instead, the service order template is used to model a set of standard tasks. We’ll look at these master data objects in turn. Maintenance Plan Maintenance plans are master data that define maintenance schedules to automate the generation of service orders. They are typically used in the context of preventive maintenance. SAP S/4HANA carried them over from SAP ERP, where they are commonly used in the Plant Maintenance and Customer Service modules. With the 2020 release, the maintenance plan object has been extended so that you can use it in the service management process in SAP S/4HANA Service. SAP Fiori apps are available to show a list of maintenance plans (Figure 2.5), consistent with the way other applications work. For example, As an end user, you can use the Find Maintenance Items app (Figure 2.6) to see a list of maintenance plans and then narrow them down to find the one you’re looking for using search, sort, and filter. You can save your own variants, so you can easily go back to your frequently used list. Figure 2.5 SAP Fiori Apps for Maintenance Plans Figure 2.6 Find Maintenance Items App A maintenance plan automates recurring regular maintenance services. A plan can be based on a time interval, on a certain performance, or on a counter. For example, you can have a regular monthly or semiannual maintenance plan (time interval). A maintenance plan based on vehicle mileage or hours of operation are examples of performance-based plans. In the latter case, the counter is represented by measurement documents at a measuring point associated with a piece of equipment. These are standard objects shared with the Plant Maintenance module, so we won’t delve into them in this E‐Bite. Task List and Service Template A task list defines a set of tasks to be carried out by maintenance technicians. This can be a generic list to group together related tasks so that you can easily reuse the group for different maintenance jobs. Task lists can be also used to represent a standard “work package” for certain class of assets. Task lists are commonly used in conjunction with maintenance plans. They help generate service orders with tasks relevant for the service job at hand. You can have a variety of such work packages so that you can represent different sets of work procedures; for example, a set of tasks for bimonthly inspections would have different tasks than that for a major overhaul job conducted annually. One thing to note is that as of the 2020 release, SAP S/4HANA Service doesn’t use the maintenance task list. Instead, it uses the service order template to define the standardized list of services. Service templates look almost identical to service orders (as in Figure 2.7). In fact, you can create a service order from within a service template as a follow-on document if that procedure is relevant for your business process. Figure 2.7 Example: Service Template By combining a maintenance plan and a task list, you can get the system to automatically generate recurring service orders based on a predefined schedule. You’ll see more about how the different types of master data are used for recurring services in a later section of this E‐Bite. 2.4 Pricing As with the customer master data (business partner), pricing capabilities in service transactions also have been harmonized. SAP S/4HANA uses the standard condition technique and condition records. SAP Internet Pricing Configurator is no longer used for the purpose of pricing within SAP S/4HANA Service. This means that the service and sales capabilities share the same pricing data. You can use the same set of SAP Fiori apps and transactions to maintain pricing-related master data. There are some pricing conditions and parameters specific to services. For example, service contracts have specific conditions to define pricing with discounts for billing customers. You can benefit from the unified data model and approaches to setting up pricing, while you can still fine-tune your price conditions for business domains (whether service or sales). If your business organizes sales and service together as one unit (e.g., controlled under one overarching profit center), then you can take advantage of the unified pricing data model as well. So far, we’ve seen an overview of different master data used by SAP S/4HANA Service. An underlining theme is simplification by harmonizing different master data within a single integrated solution. Customers (business partners) are shared across sales, service, and financials among other LOBs. Materials and technical objects (equipment and functional locations) are the main master data items for asset management, as are maintenance plans, task lists, and service templates. As you can see, some overlapping master data items have been consolidated between SAP ERP and SAP CRM. They are shared across different LOB capabilities within SAP S/4HANA. In the following sections, we’ll look at transactional data in more depth. You’ll also see how these types of master data are used in the context of business processes represented by sequences of transactional data. 3 Service Order Management In this section, we’ll introduce service order management in SAP S/4HANA Service, which encompasses the main business processes of service management. The process requires a service order that contains all the required information for the service technician to carry out the work. Execution of the service process starts with a service order. The service management process is typically cross-functional, spanning multiple business units to fulfill the service requirements. The process is modeled as a combination of multiple documents triggered in sequence and in parallel with the service order as the centerpiece. More concretely, the following documents can be created as follow-on activities (we’ve discussed the first two already): Service confirmation Billing request and customer invoice Internal order Reservation for materials Purchase requisition Sales order These are the main documents, which can be achieved via parameter settings and delivered as the standard set of configuration options. With a very flexible Customizing framework with custom actions, you could implement different follow-on activities specific to your organizations. We’ll also discuss two main variations of service order management processes: In-house repair Field service management This section ends with a quick review of a couple additional features that are relevant for service order management: Service templates BOMs 3.1 Service Order Let’s begin with an example. A service order in SAP S/4HANA looks like the Figure 3.1. At the top of the screen, you see the service order number, description, and a series of buttons to take generic actions with the opened service order or to create a new one. The tabs across the screen enable you to quickly navigate to different sections in the currently open service order. In this example screen, you’re presented with the Service Order Details section, also known as the header information, and the Items section. From the header information, you can see the customer and contact person, the equipment ID of the printer installed, the service contract number and warranty ID, the list of service tasks to be carried out and materials needed, and the relevant dates (e.g., when the service is requested to being and end). If you look at the bottom of the screen for the items of the service order, you see there are two items. Item 10 is listed as a Maintenance service product with the Quantity in hours, which means the service is to be carried out by a technician for the printer installation at the customer site. Item 20 represents a service part with the Quantity in the number of pieces planned to be used for the maintenance service. Notice that there is price information on each item, and at the top of the header information, you see the total value combining the two items (Net Value and Gross Value). Figure 3.1 Example Service Order: Header and Items (Maintenance Service and Service Part) If your background is the Customer Service module of SAP ERP, it might come as a surprise that the service order contains the price information; it’s not the costs of the service, but the price to be billed to the customer. The pricing uses the standard condition records and condition technique used in the sales capabilities within SAP S/4HANA. A service order is the main transactional object for service management that holds the key information required for technicians and represents a plan for a service job. In its simplest, the service execution process follows these steps: 1. Create and release the service order. 2. Carry out the services. 3. Create and complete the service confirmation. 4. Bill the customer. Let’s review this basic business process first, and then we’ll look at other key follow-up activities that can be linked to model more complex scenarios. 3.2 Service Confirmation After the service technicians have finished doing the services, they confirm the time and materials consumed by the service order by creating a service confirmation as a follow-on document from the service order. When you create a service confirmation, you can carry over the items from the service order. While the service order represents the plan for the service, the actual labor time duration and the quantity of the material consumed can be different from the plan. Additional services or materials could also be required for the job. These can be recorded in the service confirmation as costs for the service rendered to the customer. You inspect the detail of the costs recorded by looking at the transaction history of a service confirmation (see Figure 3.2). You can see that the service confirmation is related to a service order named Maintenance Service, followed by an internal order that collects the costs incurred for the service confirmation. The time sheet represents the labor costs for the maintenance work, and the goods movement links to a material document that records the goods issue for the service part consumed for the maintenance work. The service job in the service order can take a long time to complete. You can create multiple service confirmations, perhaps done by different technicians for different service items. You can control the status of service confirmations, and, after all the confirmations are completed, you can start the billing process. In this description of a basic process, we assume that the bill is based on the actual resources (labor and material) consumed. The system also can be configured to support fixed price services, where you bill the customer for an agreed amount for a service regardless of the resources required to conduct it. Figure 3.2 Transaction History of a Service Confirmation 3.3 Billing After the service order and confirmation are complete, you can release the items for billing. Billing is done with the standard billing capabilities within SAP S/4HANA, common across service and sales processes. A billing creates a financial posting (e.g., revenue and accounts receivable) and a customer invoice. The fact that a customer invoice has been created can also be seen from the Transaction History section of the service confirmation. By looking at the Transaction History, you can keep track of the execution status of the service job. So far, you’ve seen a basic business process of service execution. It starts with a service order, which represents a plan, and is followed by service confirmation and billing. 3.4 Internal Order The capability to account for costs of any activities as they occur is integral to an ERP solution in general. SAP S/4HANA Service also does this. Unlike the work order and classic service order within SAP ERP, the new service order within SAP S/4HANA Service doesn’t collect costs incurred for the services carried out—for example, labor hours of the service technicians and the materials used and consumed for the work. Instead, an internal order is automatically generated after a service order is released. The costs for the service order are posted against its corresponding internal order. If any of the items in a service order have an associated service contract, then the internal order associated with the service contract is used as the cost collecting object for the item. The internal order associated with a service can be seen in the Transaction History section of a service order (as in Figure 3.3). Figure 3.3 Internal Order Generated for a Service Order Note There is a technical detail to be noted in the context of the cost controlling mechanism for service management. The service capability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud simplifies this cost collection mechanism and breaks away from the use of the internal order. It uses the service order itself as a cost collector. As of the 2020 release, this simplification is yet to be implemented in SAP S/4HANA, and the internal order remains in use. The time confirmed for service items that represent labor time of service technicians generates a time recording entry in SAP CrossApplication Time Sheet for the employee. Costs for the materials consumed are also recorded. You can see these as related documents in the Transaction History section of the service confirmation and service order (see Figure 3.4). Figure 3.4 Service Confirmation with Transaction History 3.5 Reservation and Purchase Requisition A service order can have items for service or spare parts for the job to be done. These are the materials that service technicians will consume to conduct the required services. They can be retrieved from warehouse inventory or can be directly purchased for a service order. You can add a line item for a consumable material and specify the follow-on process. Technically speaking, this is achieved via the Item Category parameter, which is common to SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, and SAP CRM, and thus should be familiar to those who have experience in these SAP solutions. Based on the Item Category, the system generates an appropriate follow-on document, a reservation or purchase requisition, when you release the service order. Note Optionally, you can set up the system to generate a purchase order. As the process is almost identical to the one with a purchase requisition in the context of this discussion, we’ll treat both scenarios in the same way. After the service on the service order is carried out, and materials are consumed, you create a service confirmation that includes the items for the consumed materials. 3.6 Sales Order A sales order can be a follow-on document from a service order with SAP S/4HANA. One of the ways to use this feature might be to represent an upsell transaction. Alternatively, you could use it to send a product in advance to the customer site for the technician to use later. This is similar to the Advanced Shipment function in the Customer Service module of SAP ERP. As the resultant sales order is a normal sales order, you can use the standard delivery process with the outbound delivery and shipping capabilities of SAP S/4HANA. You can choose to bill these sales orders together with the services or to bill them separately, as your business process requires. 3.7 In-House Repair (Depot Repair) In-house repair is a process where you receive devices or a set of equipment back from customers and then carry out services on them. As the name suggests, it’s mainly assumed to be some kind of repair work for the items returned due to malfunction, for example. SAP S/4HANA has added a new set of SAP Fiori apps to manage inhouse repair processes. The app is designed to show the overall process and status of each of the items in the in-house repair process (Figure 3.5). The process starts with creating an in-house repair object, which is a new object to group multiple repair (service) orders and track their status as a group and also individually for a customer. When you create a new in-house repair object, you can add one or multiple products by using the equipment ID or serial number. If you decide to go ahead with the repair process for these products, the system will generate a repair order for each product. The repair object graphically shows you the status of where each item is in the repair process. The decision to go ahead with repair or not can be made and recorded for each product. To do so, the first step in the in-house repair process is the precheck. During precheck, you inspect the returned item and decide whether or not it’s feasible to repair it. If it’s deemed infeasible, the item is returned to the customer. Figure 3.5 In-House Repair (as of SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS01) The next step is to create a service order for repair (repair order) and carry out the actual repair work. The repair order goes through the same process as with normal service order management with the confirmation and billing of repair work. The in-house repair object can work as a tool to guide you through the process and monitor the status for the group of products in the repair process. You can also create a repair service quotation to ask the customer whether or not to proceed with the repair for the fee quoted. At the time of writing in February 2021, this feature is available with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS01. 3.8 Field Service Management (On-Site Maintenance Service) Another variation of the normal service order process is field service management. Unlike in-house repair, in this process, you send your service technicians to the customer site to carry out the work. For this process, SAP S/4HANA Service is natively integrated with SAP Field Service Management. Following are its main capabilities relevant to the context of the current discussion: Scheduling of field service technicians with a graphical schedule dashboard (Figure 3.6) Smartphone apps to connect field service technicians with the various elements of SAP S/4HANA Figure 3.6 Field Service Management: Planning and Dispatching With the mobile capabilities, you can get the details of service jobs and record time, materials, and expenses for each job. These details get synchronized with SAP S/4HANA Service, enabling you to connect the field and back office seamlessly. With the mobile capability, you can present a service report to your customer and obtain their approval on the mobile device, for example, helping you move to the billing phase of the process in a timely manner. 3.9 Other Related Features (Service Order Templates and Bills of Materials) In this section, we’ll touch on two features relevant for service order management: service order templates and bills of materials (BoMs). Service Order Templates A service order can be created in different ways. Service order templates are available to help you create many service orders of a similar setup. As the name suggests, you can create predefined templates that have the same structure as a service order with a single header and multiple items. You can create a variety of templates for different purposes and then use a built-in search app to easily find the one you need for a given occasion. A new service order can be created by copying the template of your choice. You can then adjust the service order if necessary. Alternatively, if you’re already creating a service order, you can look for a template from within the Items section of the service order. After you’ve found an appropriate service template, you can selectively bring items into the service order you’re creating. As you’ll see in a later section, service order templates are also used in automatic generation of service orders from a maintenance plan— we call this scenario recurring services. If you’re versed in the Customer Service module of SAP ERP, you might think that service templates are similar to task lists. As an analogy, this is true—both serve a largely overlapping purpose: standardize the creation of service orders across the organization and make it easy or automatic to minimize human errors. Task lists aren’t available in SAP S/4HANA Service, although there is a new capability—maintenance-centric service—planned in the roadmap that will use the classic task list master data (discussed in Section 6). Bills of Materials In some industries and organizations, you may maintain service BOMs for specific materials or serialized units of equipment. You can use them to define standard sets of services applicable to those materials and equipment. When you specify a material or equipment in the header of the service order, you can open a popup window where you can navigate the hierarchical structure of a BOM and copy items into the service order you’re in. So far, we’ve discussed the main capabilities of service order management along with the business process starting from creating a service order to service confirmation and billing, as well as a variety of follow-on processes for different scenarios according to your business needs. We’ve also briefly touched on service order templates and BOMs that are meant to help standardize the definition of service orders across the organization. 4 Service Maintenance Plan and Service Contract Management In this section, we’ll introduce service contract management along with recurring services and highlight their key features. Recurring services use maintenance plans to automate service order generation. Service contracts and recurring services can work together to automate typical preventive maintenance processes in service management. We’ll begin with the service contract and then turn to recurring services. 4.1 Service Contract A service contract is a long-term agreement with a customer concerning provision of services. It can be generic or specific to a set of devices or equipment. For example, a manufacturer of medical diagnostics equipment might have a contract with hospitals for units of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment, their installation service, and regular maintenance services for the next 5 years (60 months). The screen in Figure 4.1 shows an example service contract created in an actual SAP S/4HANA system to illustrate this example of MRI units. The manufacturer might bill the customer for the units at a certain price and then agree to have a recurring payment for the maintenance at 20% of the total sale price per year for the next 5 years, billed monthly (60 months). For the maintenance services, regular inspection services and standard parts replacement might be covered under the warranty and incur no additional costs to the customer. For other and special parts replacement, you might have a pricing agreement with some discount for the relevant parts. You might also have a clause in the service contract on terms of renewal after the initial 5 years. For another example, the scenario can be consumer oriented: an internet provider might simply have a regular payment agreement with an individual customer for the use of the internet, such as monthly payments for the next 24 months. This could be also represented with a service contract with a simple recurring billing plan. Figure 4.1 Service Contract in SAP S/4HANA Service These are just contrived fictional examples that may or may not correspond to the real detail of the industries they refer to; nevertheless, they should conceptually highlight some key elements of the features that support business processes centered around service contracts. Let’s look at them one by one. Specify a Product and Equipment Referring to the MRI equipment example in the previous subsection, a service contract with the hospital will need to be specific to the installed MRI units. You could create equipment master records with serial numbers to represent the MRI units and then reference them in a service contract as illustrated in Figure 4.2. As you can see, the Object List section lists two equipment IDs; each one refers to a serialized MRI unit. They are both the same model, represented by a material number (not visible in the screenshot). Figure 4.2 List of Equipment, and List of Service and Service Parts under Service Contract The Product List area contains the service and service parts covered by this service contract. This example includes a standard inspection service and two sets of service parts. As you can see, these two lists within a service contract provide a wide range of possibilities for representing actual service contracts. In addition, if you have service BoMs for the reference material or equipment, you can leverage them when you maintain the product list. Service contracts with object and product lists can be used when you’re creating service orders. There are different ways to configure the system behavior in relation to service orders and service contracts, so this is just an example of how you might use the feature. For example, you can get the system to automatically propose a service contract relevant to the equipment when you’re creating a service order for it. If you accept the proposal and link the service order with the service contract, then you can selectively copy the products from the product list of the service contract. This way, the system can help the end user create a service order that is consistent with the service agreement with the customer. Price Agreements Continuing with the MRI example, we can assume that the standard inspection service and regular service parts are free of charge— covered by the regular payment based on the service contract. We can also assume that the special service part is provided with a discounted rate. This kind of price agreement can be represented in the system through the use of condition records. This a standard feature of SAP S/4HANA, shared across the sales, service, and other sale-related capabilities. Figure 4.3 shows price agreements with the hospital under the service contract. The standard inspection service and assortment of standard service parts will receive a 100% discount, representing the warranty coverage for the duration of the service contract. The special part is offered at a 15% discounted rate. Figure 4.3 Price Conditions for a Service Contract These pricing agreements can be automatically applied when you create a service order with reference to the service contract if you include relevant products (materials) in the service order. Of course, the service order can contain other products. The products that aren’t under the service contract won’t be influenced by the discounts defined in the price agreement. Recurring Billing The hospital is billed monthly for the 20% of the sale price of the MRI units. This is a regular, recurring payment that can be automated through the billing plan of the service contract (Figure 4.4). Figure 4.4 Billing Plan in the Service Contract The plan generates a billing request that is common to the sales capabilities within SAP S/4HANA, so the billing teams are already familiar with this. The top part of the figure shows different attributes that define the plan; for example, it’s settled monthly, and the billing date is the first of the month. Different attributes can be selected according to the need of your organization, for instance, semiannual settlement instead of monthly. Renewal, Changes, Completion, and Cancellation Service contracts are long-term agreements with a customer, and thus changes are to be expected. Standard features are available to help with those changes. You can manually renew an existing service contract or set a service contract to let the renewal process automatically represent such a contract clause, for example. For automatic renewal, you can further specify when such an extension kicks in and the duration of the extension. In addition to renewal, SAP S/4HANA has a feature specific to changes to the customer (sold-to party, to be more precise). The name of the customer might change, for example, due to acquisition or divestment on the customer side. For some industries and businesses, service contracts may define a target quantity or target value; when a target quantity or value has been consumed under the service contract, it’s considered completed. The status of the service contract can be automatically set accordingly, which helps end users comply with the agreement and proceed to the next action, such as trigger a renewal process. You can also fine-tune what exactly should happen when such a target is being crossed via completion rules. For example, you can specify whether an end user will see an error message so that you can’t go beyond the target, or see only a warning message instead. For midterm cancellation, you can define some additional information to be entered into service contracts, for example, cancellation party (who triggered the cancellation) and reason for cancellation. Revenue Recognition Business organizations globally follow certain financial reporting standards (e.g., International Reporting Standards [IFRS]) to operate, and thus they are required to comply with a certain revenue recognition process to account for revenues from service contracts. One of the greatest strengths of SAP S/4HANA, being a unified ERP software application, is its tight integration between business operations such as service management and financial management. It has a built-in capability for revenue recognition and works with the service contract process of SAP S/4HANA Service (refer to the online documentation available at https://help.sap.com/s4hana). Details of the revenue recognition capabilities are beyond the scope of this E‐Bite, but consider reviewing the following as a starting point: SAP Note 2582784 - Revenue Accounting and Reporting with SAP RAR 1.3 and SAP S/4HANA 1809 & 1909 OP - FAQs and Guidance. Obviously, it’s not the only relevant note, and please refer to other information sources to do your own research on revenue recognitions within SAP S/4HANA. 4.2 Recurring Service: Maintenance Plan and Scheduling Continuing with the MRI example introduced in the previous section, the hospital has a five-year service maintenance contract with a provision of regular inspection service. As noted earlier, the inspection service and the assortment of regular service parts are covered by the service contract and thus is free of charge (included with the regular payment). These commercial aspects are contained in the service contract. Recurring service with a maintenance plan deals with execution aspects by automatically creating service orders according to the predefined plan. Recurring service is a new feature introduced with the 2020 release of SAP S/4HANA. The maintenance plan master data object that you might be familiar with in the Plant Maintenance module is extended to work with the service order object (Figure 4.5). Note Maintenance plan type Strategy isn’t supported as of the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release. Figure 4.5 shows a time-based maintenance plan. As you can see, there is one maintenance plan item associated with an equipment ID. It’s linked to a service contract item, thus representing the relationship between the maintenance plan and service contract. When service orders are generated for the plan, commercial terms in the service contract can be automatically applied. Service order items will be based on the service order template specified in the maintenance plan item. If you’re familiar with the Plant Maintenance or Customer Service modules, this is a major difference. As of the 2020 release, SAP S/4HANA Service uses service order templates instead of the task list master data. Figure 4.5 Creating a Maintenance Plan for a Piece of Equipment After you set up a maintenance plan for a set of equipment based on a service contract and service order template, you can schedule the plan to automatically generate service orders. Many parameters are available that you can use to fine-tune this process. These are useful to accommodate the messy reality of execution—some service orders may not be completed in time for the next cycle, or estimated counter usage may not be accurate and need adjustment to reflect the actual counter reading, for example. We won’t delve deeper into these details in this E‐Bite. Refer to the relevant section of online documentation; there is a good amount of detail described in “Scheduling Parameters” section available at http://s-prs.co/533202 (the online documentation is release and FPS dependent, so refer to the one relevant for you). 5 Service Request Management, Service Quotations, and Packaged Service Offerings In the previous two sections, we’ve discussed service management processes with a focus on maintenance service operations. The service order is the core transactional data object that defines a service job by maintaining information about the relevant customer, assets, services and parts, and cost objects that collect costs for controlling purposes, among others. We’ve also covered the service contract and maintenance plan that are often used together for preventive maintenance services to automate generation of service orders. In this section, we’ll turn our focus to customer interaction and commercial aspects of SAP S/4HANA Service. It should be noted that “customers” here can be internal customers in the context of a shared service origination. First, we’ll look at service requests as an entry point for recording a customer request and other interactions with customers. Second, we’ll discuss service and solution quotations as a means to provide a quotation for a service or combination of physical and service products. We’ll revisit the product bundle master data mentioned earlier and discuss it in the context of business and processes. You can use bundle products as master data to group goods and services together and offer them as a bundle deal. You can dynamically define your bundles based on date intervals and business rules (e.g., for a holiday seasonal campaign). Third, we’ll briefly discuss Interaction Center. 5.1 Service Request Service requests are business objects that can be used to record interactions with a customer: your end customer outside your organization or an internal one in the context of shared services. The interactions can be customer calls, problems, complaints, requests, and so on. Depending on the industry and the nature of the business, you may call them tickets or incidents. Service requests are equivalent to service notifications in the Customer Service module of SAP ERP. You typically initiate the service process by recording customer requests in a service request. You then judge the situation, determine an appropriate course of action, and assign appropriate parties to follow up the request. You can branch out into a variety of different processes by creating follow-on documents. Service requests offer flexible customizing options. You can automate the generation of follow-on documents and define some as manual creation to model a process step where deliberate judgement is required. You can also flexibly customize what elements of service requests are to be copied over to the follow-on documents; for instance, you might like to pass on internal notes from a service request to a follow-on service order to relay what has been discussed with the customer. This way, it’s possible to model a diverse range of service management business processes specific to your organization. Let’s discuss some key features more concretely. A service request shows the generic Details information of a service request (see Figure 5.1). You may notice that the basic structure of the data object visible in the system is similar to that of a service order you saw in a previous section. The service request number and description appear at the top of the screen, followed by a series of buttons for generic actions. You can click on the available tabs to navigate to different sections. The Details tab shows the header information of the service request. Figure 5.1 Example Service Request Note As of this writing in December 2020, the service request isn’t available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. SAP offers the SAP Service Cloud solution (www.sap.com/products/service-cloud.html). Many of the elements are common between service orders and service requests, such as customer information, and the product, equipment, and serial number the request or order is about. Among the different elements, we’ll discuss the following, which are more basic, more frequently used for service requests, and are relevant for service management processes in general: Category: Subject and reason Checklist Service level agreement Category Sorting a multitude of service requests into the appropriate categories is an important part of service request management. Use of the categorizing feature is optional, so it’s possible to achieve from a very simple mechanism (no categorization) to a highly complex one, and every different degree of complexity in between. Nevertheless, setting one up opens up different possibilities. For example, you can automatically derive a predefined checklist that is appropriate for the type of service request or service item to offer (and potentially pass on to a follow-on service order). Categorization can also be used for statistical purposes. You can retrospectively analyze the aggregate data to discern patterns in service requests, for example, trends in customer complaints and reasons. SAP S/4HANA Service uses a combination of the two categorizing schemes to sort service requests in a structured manner: subject (what it’s about) and reason (why the customer is contacting the company). The preceding example is categorized into a request regarding an online shop by using the subject scheme, and the reason scheme isn’t used. Categories 1–4 in Figure 5.1, shown previously, represent a hierarchy of categories. In this example, Request is chosen in the Category 1 field. This then narrows down the options available in Category 2, in which Online Shop has been chosen). Thus, it’s clear that the subject of this service request is a request for an online shop. Checklist A checklist can serve as a predefined procedure, a chain of tasks, and a decision tree relevant for a given service request. The example in Figure 5.2 shows a set of questions that a support technician should ask the customer when he receives a technical ticket about a computer. Checklists can be derived from the category assigned to a service request. Figure 5.2 Checklist in a Service Request Service Level Agreement A service level agreement (SLA) with SAP S/4HANA Service is represented by a combination of a service profile and a response profile (Figure 5.3). If relevant and set up properly for the system, the warranty ID can also be displayed to let you visually confirm what the SLA and warranty situations are for the product and customer. Use of service requests is optional, but it offers features that can help an organization sort, organize, and act on customer requests— external or internal—with a structure. You could additionally consider using a machine learning tool to help categorize service requests in an effort to boost the productivity of service teams. Note For use of machine learning technologies to help automatically categorize service requests, an additional product is required called SAP Service Ticket Intelligence (requires an additional license). Refer to SAP Notes 2506240, 2673363, and 2646975 for more technical detail to enable it for SAP S/4HANA. Figure 5.3 Time Recording and Service Level Agreement 5.2 Service Order Quotation/Solution Quotation and Product Bundle One of the major differences between Customer Service in SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA Service is the way commercial aspects of service processes are handled. You can create a service order quote directly or as a follow-on document from a service request. You can design different sequences of steps according to your business processes. One thing distinct for SAP S/4HANA is the solution quotation object, which has its origin in SAP CRM. It’s specifically designed to combine physical goods or assets and intangible services together in a single solution quotation. It can also have an item that represents a long-term service contract. This means that the solution quotation can flexibly model a business process where, as an example, you offer a physical product together with a one-off installation service and a long-term service maintenance contract for a customer. As you’ve seen in a previous section, you can automate regular billing based on the intervals you define—monthly, quarterly, annually, and so on. The example in Figure 5.4 shows a solution quotation being created. A bundle product (discussed in Section 1 on master data object) is used in the bundle solution that groups together a printer (physical product), installation service, and a long-term maintenance contract as a single product. In this particular example, there are two types of printer to choose from. As you can see in Figure 5.5, you can set a special price for a bundle component—in this case, the normal price is $600, and the bundle price is $500. The latter is used to calculate the bundle product as a whole. Figure 5.4 Selecting an Option Product in a Bundle for a Solution Quotation Figure 5.5 Special Bundle Price for a Component in a Bundle After a solution quotation is released as an offer to the customer, then the customer can decide whether to accept it or not. After the solution quotation is accepted, the system automatically generates appropriate follow-on documents for each item. In this example of a printer bundle solution (Figure 5.6), the item for the printer generates a sales order. You can follow the normal sales process for shipping and billing. The one-off installation service item generates a service order. The last item for the long-term contract generates a service contract with which you can set the regular billing process in accordance with the service agreement. Figure 5.6 History Solution Quotation Showing Follow-On Documents in Transaction In addition to these follow-on transactions, you can also consider creating a subscription order. Unlike the periodic regular billing capability of service contracts, subscriptions can be used to model usage-based billing. A mobile phone is a typical example of such usage-based billing. Your mobile phone provider logs the duration of the outgoing phone calls made from the mobile phone. Based on the actual usage (e.g. duration of talks and data usage) and other price factors (e.g., national or international calls may have different rates), the provider bill you. A similar usage-based billing can be incorporated into a solution quotation as a separate line item together with the other types of items discussed previously: physical goods, one-off service, and service contract. For a subscription, you’ll need an additional product, SAP BRIM, which requires an additional license. Finally, regarding solution quotations, SAP sees the convergence of sales and services in many industries. In some industries such as information and telecommunication technologies, this has been the norm for a long time; for others, this may be only visible on the horizon. Traditionally, many business organizations, especially manufacturers, have tended to treat sales and service distinctly— different profit centers, different business units, different key performance indicators (KPIs), and so on. As sales and services increasingly converge, there is greater need for visibility into both combined. The solution quotation capability can be essential in this sales-service convergence. In this context, SAP S/4HANA Service has added a small and yet potentially powerful visibility tool called business solution portfolios that lets you view sales- and servicerelated data per customer, thus creating a portfolio-style view of the business relationships you have with certain customers (Figure 5.7). Figure 5.7 SAP Fiori App: Manage Business Solution Portfolios 5.3 Interaction Center in SAP S/4HANA As service requests can be used as interaction logs and tickets, they are often used for call center operations together with Interaction Center. Interaction Center is, essentially, a set of tools and capabilities for call center operations. It has its own user interface (UI), called agent desktop, specialized for use by service agents who need to deal with a set of specific requirements in the call center context, such as managing parallel customer calls. Interaction Center also has an interface to work with additional communication management software with telephony and other multichannel capabilities (e.g., web chat). Interaction Center in SAP CRM has been widely adopted many SAP customers globally. Interaction Center in SAP S/4HANA has adopted most of features from its SAP CRM equivalent and optimized them for the new data model and applications beyond Interaction Center. Interaction Center is optional when you use service requests and SAP S/4HANA Service in general. Note Most of the Customer Service module of SAP ERP is in the compatibility scope, which means you can use most of the Customer Service capabilities when you move to SAP S/4HANA for a limited time. As of March 9, 2021, the duration of the combability scope for Customer Service, along with two other components, has been extended through to 2030. This extension is an exception and doesn’t apply to most other components. Please refer to the latest version of SAP Note 2269324, rather than relying solely on the information provided in this E‐Bite. 6 Service Monitoring and Analytics So far in this E‐Bite, you’ve seen business processes for service management. We’ve looked at service order management, recurring services with using service contracts for preventive maintenance services, service request management, and solution quotations with product bundles. As you can see, thanks to the SAP Fiori design, end users have consistent interactions with applications—in general, they can start an app with a search to display a list of documents, and can narrow the search with filters and sort to get to the document they want to work on. In this section, we’ll turn to tools for monitoring these day-to-day operations, as well as working with management reporting and analytics. First, we’ll discuss embedded analytics, introduced with SAP S/4HANA, that is a general reporting facility which looks at reports related to service management. Second, we’ll provide a brief overview of SAP Analytics Cloud, a strategic visualization and analytics tool in the cloud designed to extend embedded analytics. We’ll conclude this section with an example visualization for sales and service combined that SAP Analytics Cloud makes available. Note SAP Fiori “is the design language that brings great user experiences to enterprise applications” (https://experience.sap.com/fiori/). In many cases, SAP Fiori is also used to refer to the actual technical implementation of the design language, based on the JavaScript libraries to construct UIs to be displayed in web browsers. Many web UIs used by SAP S/4HANA Service are in fact based on SAP WebClient UI, which has a longer history than the standard SAP Fiori apps written with SAPUI5 (SAP UI for HTML5), which is a collection of libraries mainly written in JavaScript (https://developers.sap.com/topics/ui5.html). 6.1 Embedded Analytics Embedded analytics takes advantages of the SAP HANA database and brings operational reports, analytics, and visualization close to end users for their day-to-day work within SAP Fiori launchpad—the user menu (as in Figure 6.1). You can have analytics capabilities for the data available within SAP S/4HANA when calling an analytics app, thus providing users with your real-time insights. As of the 2020 release, the scope of SAP S/4HANA Service includes the following analytics apps: Service Management Overview Expiring Service Contracts Analysis Overdue Service Orders Analysis Service Contracts Analysis Service Orders Analysis Figure 6.1 Example Analytics for Sales Figure 6.2 shows the Service Management Overview app. In the same way as other overview analytics apps, it provides visualization of a collection of other analytics apps in a dashboard format. Roles and authorizations influence the data and tiles that users can see, and overview apps can be dashboards that are relevant for individual users for their roles. The top part of the app is a global filter; when you set a filter to see only a specific customer or product, for example, all the visualizations will be filtered by the customer or the product. In addition, each tile is also an app its own right, and you can navigate into each one to open the underlying analytics app. Thus the overview app can double as an index page for different reports. Figure 6.2 Service Management Overview These apps listed previously in this subsection are only a fraction of the embedded analytics apps available out of the box in SAP S/4HANA. They are designed to make it easy to work with data for service capabilities; however, in reality, the work of service management practitioners is rarely confined within the definition of the services that these features and functions necessarily impose. If you deal with customer-facing service business processes with shared service center or call center operations, the KPIs you need will be very different from those for managing maintenance services in more industrial situations, such as offshore wind farms, components for factory automation systems, and so on. As SAP S/4HANA is used globally by organizations of different sizes in a variety of industries, users can take advantage of embedded analytics apps across different LOBs—for example, sales and enterprise asset management. Embedded analytics are also extensible. The fact that there are outof-the-box apps means that SAP has created the foundational services in the form of database views and other technical objects. You can reuse them, if necessary, by reassembling different objects to create your own custom analytics apps. Entire sets of SAP Fiori apps and programing tools are available for extending the standard out-of-the-box analytics in SAP S/4HANA. 6.2 SAP Analytics Cloud The topic of analytics, in general and specific to service management, goes beyond SAP S/4HANA and the embedded analytics within it. Before concluding this section, let’s take a brief look at SAP Analytics Cloud. SAP Analytics Cloud is SAP’s strategic business intelligence solution. As a standalone cloud solution, it’s designed to work seamlessly with SAP S/4HANA. It goes well beyond the scope of this E‐Bite to describe all it offers. In the context of SAP S/4HANA Service, SAP Analytics Cloud is a powerful tool to extend interactive dashboard capabilities that embedded analytics within SAP S/4HANA alone can provide. SAP delivers a number of dashboards and reports that you can deploy and start using right out of the box. The UI is well integrated in the SAP Fiori launchpad, so, for end users, it feels like it’s just a part of SAP S/4HANA. For example, SAP has delivered an order-to-cash dashboard, which offers a number of interactive visualizations for sales and service KPIs combined to offer a comprehensive overview for managers responsible for revenues and profitability in sales and services. The Order to Cash Dashboard screen is shown in Figure 6.3. Figure 6.3 Order to Cash Dashboard Screen In this section, you’ve seen an overview of embedded analytics in general, as well as apps specific to SAP S/4HANA Service. We also discussed SAP Analytics Cloud, which can be used as a powerful tool to extend interactive dashboards. Finally, you saw an example dashboard for sales and service combined. 7 Future Innovations So far, we’ve focused on what is currently available as of the 2020 release of SAP S/4HANA. We’ve discussed master data and the different standard processes available out of the box. The preceding section introduced you to embedded analytics within SAP S/4HANA, as well as SAP Analytics Cloud as an extension to them, for service management. In this final section, we’ll look into the future and discuss one of the key planned innovations called maintenance-centric service. In a nutshell, it combines the capabilities of SAP S/4HANA asset management (formerly, the Plant Maintenance module of SAP ERP) with the service capabilities of SAP S/4HANA. Figure 7.1 illustrates this concept. You can think of it as further harmonization of disparate capabilities offered by various SAP solutions—just like SAP S/4HANA Service itself harmonized the Customer Service module of SAP ERP and the service capabilities of SAP CRM, maintenancecentric service will combine another set of adjacent capabilities with SAP S/4HANA Service. It is an enhancement that leverages the existing capabilities available in SAP S/4HANA, but it’s not a replacement nor does it impact the capabilities of the asset management line of business (LoB) within SAP S/4HANA. Figure 7.1 High-Level Concept of Maintenance-Centric Service At the time of this writing, there are two roadmap items pertaining to maintenance-centric service visible in the SAP’ Road Map Explorer tool for SAP S/4HANA. If you haven’t done so, you can register to view the roadmap items. You can search for “maintenance-centric service”, or you can apply filters; Service Order Management and SAP S/4HANA should display the entries related to maintenancecentric service. Because it’s a future roadmap item, SAP may change its name, release timing, and capabilities currently described in SAP Road Map Explorer (as in Figure 7.2). Nevertheless, this item is important, especially for those who are familiar with the Customer Service module of SAP ERP. Figure 7.2 SAP Road Map Explorer Remember that the Customer Service module in SAP S/4HANA is still available as part of the compatibility scope. We won’t delve into the detail of exactly what it is, but the use rights of Customer Service in SAP S/4HANA, along with other features and functions categorized in the compatibility scope, are time-limited. Note Detail of the compatibility scope is described in the SAP Note 2269324 – Compatibility Scope Matrix for SAP S/4HANA OnPremise (Version 62 from 08.10.2020 in English). At the time of this writing, installed base management is listed in the matrix attached to this note (file name: S4HANACompatibilityScopeMatrix-DETAILS.pdf). As of March 9, 2021, the duration of the combability scope for Customer Service, along with two other components, has been extended through 2030. This extension is an exception and doesn’t apply to most other components. Refer to the latest version of the note, rather than relying solely on the information provided in this E‐Bite. The shift from Customer Service to the new service capabilities has been public since the early days of SAP S/4HANA. The compatibility packages in general (including items in the Customer Service module) are intended to ease the transformation from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA by extending the time for use rights of Customer Service capabilities, and thus enabling stepwise system conversion. One of the main reasons SAP was prompted to conceive of maintenance-centric service is the feedback from customers who use the Plant Maintenance and Customer Service modules of SAP ERP. These customers face a particular challenge in their transformation efforts from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA. Many of these customers currently deploy Plant Maintenance and Customer Service to be used by overlapping groups of users, for example, maintenance engineering teams tasked to maintain equipment and assets. These teams provide maintenance services for the equipment owned by their own companies, as well as by their customer or partner companies. In many cases, there is no difference in the types of equipment, and thus for the purposes of maintenance, these assets are treated interchangeably. A major difference is that the work done for their own equipment is considered internal costs (a primary domain of Plant Maintenance), whereas the work done for equipment owned by customer or partner organizations must be billed to the respective organizations (a primary domain of Customer Service), so that they can bill these external parties. In some industries and regions, these business processes are referred to as billable maintenance. Because Plant Maintenance and Customer Service share much of the master data and transactional data, these modules provide a unified user experience for the maintenance engineering teams. In its current form, SAP S/4HANA Service entails a break away from this Plant Maintenance/Customer Service paradigm, presenting challenges in transformational efforts. By combining the capabilities from Plant Maintenance modules into SAP S/4HANA Service, maintenancecentric service is intended to mitigate these challenges. According to SAP Roadmap Explorer, maintenance-centric service is intended for SAP ERP customers who use Customer Service and Plant Maintenance “almost interchangeably today”. As you can see in Figure 7.1, shown earlier, the Asset View on the right is labeled Plant Maintenance. The idea is that engineer and technician users of Plant Maintenance/Customer Service today will continue to be able to use the familiar Plant Maintenance object, while the work order in the maintenance-centric service is set up to deal with the technical operational aspects, such as equipment and operations, leveraging the task list master data. The commercial aspects, such as service agreements and billing, are managed through the capabilities provided in the new SAP S/4HANA Service, as you’ve seen. In other words, there will be a maintenance-centric service order shadowing and linked to a work order. Technicians look at the work order and create confirmations and so forth in (mostly) the same way as today. For the billing process, it’s also planned that the classic resource-related billing will work with maintenance-centric service. 8 What’s Next? You’ve seen what SAP S/4HANA Service is all about, whether it’s service master data, service order management, service maintenance plans, service contract management, request management, quotations, and packaged service offerings. What’s next in your SAP S/4HANA journey? Recommendation from Our Editors Check out Configuring Sales in SAP S/4HANA, by Christian van Helfteren. Set up your sales processes: sales order management, shipping and delivery, billing and invoicing, and more! Visit www.sap-press.com/4907 and find Configuring Sales in SAP S/4HANA! In addition to this book, our editors picked a few other SAP PRESS publications that you might also be interested in. Check out the next page to learn more! More from SAP PRESS Sales and Distribution with SAP S/4HANA: Business User Guide Master the ins and outs of running sales and distribution in your SAP S/4HANA system. Follow step-by-step instructions, workflow diagrams, and system screenshots to complete your critical tasks and keep the sales pipeline moving. 450 pages, pub. 05/2021 E-book: $69.99 | Print: $79.95 | Bundle: $89.99 www.sap-press.com/5263 SAP CRM: Business Processes and Configuration This guide offers the details you need about essential SAP CRM functionality and customization. Understand the key SAP CRM business processes and then configure the system for marketing, sales, and service. 737 pages, pub. 09/2015 E-book: $69.99 | Print: $79.95 | Bundle: $89.99 www.sap-press.com/3648 SAP CRM: Technical Principles and Programming Find the information you need in this essential, one-stop guide to SAP CRM backend architecture and programming! You’ll learn how to perform daily programming tasks in SAP CRM, and get up to speed with the most common enhancements! 440 pages, pub. 05/2013 E-book: $59.99 | Print: $69.95 | Bundle: $79.99 www.sap-press.com/3194 Usage, Service, and Legal Notes Notes on Usage This E-Bite is protected by copyright. By purchasing this E-Bite, you have agreed to accept and adhere to the copyrights. You are entitled to use this E-Bite for personal purposes. You may print and copy it, too, but also only for personal use. Sharing an electronic or printed copy with others, however, is not permitted, neither as a whole nor in parts. 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Figure 1.1 Brief History of SAP S/4HANA Service Figure 1.2 SAP’s End-to-End Vision of Service Management as of 2021 Figure 2.1 Model SAP S/4HANA Service’s Simplified Data Figure 2.2 Manage Product Master Data App Figure 2.3 List of Technical Objects App Figure 2.4 Example: Bundle Product in SAP S/4HANA Service Figure 2.5 SAP Fiori Apps for Maintenance Plans Figure 2.6 Find Maintenance Items App Figure 2.7 Example: Service Template Figure 3.1 Example Service Order: Header and Items (Maintenance Service and Service Part) Figure 3.2 Transaction History of a Service Confirmation Figure 3.3 Order Internal Order Generated for a Service Figure 3.4 History Service Confirmation with Transaction Figure 3.5 In-House Repair (as of SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS01) Figure 3.6 Field Service Management: Planning and Dispatching Figure 4.1 Service Service Contract in SAP S/4HANA Figure 4.2 List of Equipment, and List of Service and Service Parts under Service Contract Figure 4.3 Price Conditions for a Service Contract Figure 4.4 Billing Plan in the Service Contract Figure 4.5 Creating a Maintenance Plan for a Piece of Equipment Figure 5.1 Example Service Request Figure 5.2 Checklist in a Service Request Figure 5.3 Time Recording and Service Level Agreement Figure 5.4 Selecting an Option Product in a Bundle for a Solution Quotation Figure 5.5 a Bundle Special Bundle Price for a Component in Figure 5.6 Solution Quotation Showing Follow-On Documents in Transaction History Figure 5.7 SAP Fiori App: Manage Business Solution Portfolios Figure 6.1 Example Analytics for Sales Figure 6.2 Service Management Overview Figure 6.3 Order to Cash Dashboard Screen Figure 7.1 High-Level Concept of MaintenanceCentric Service Figure 7.2 SAP Road Map Explorer
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