If you’re a service manager responsible for in-house repairs, you’ve probably experienced at least one of the following situations:
Such mishaps can be annoying for you and your customers. They can hurt your business and produce extra work.
To prevent them, you can use so-called situations to make the system proactively notify you. A situation can be any business event that requires your attention. For example, an approaching deadline, a pending task, an exceeded threshold, or any kind of a delay.
Apart from simply alerting you, a situation lets you take action right away. For example, in case of an unconfirmed in-house repair, you can navigate straight to the affected in-house repair from the situation notification and confirm it.
You can see situation notifications on the SAP Fiori launchpad in the notification area. Besides, you can activate e-mail notifications.
Situations also appear next to the critical objects in object lists and as in-app situation messages on individual object pages.
You can use predefined situation templates to create your own situation types and adjust them to your business needs. You can use filters to define conditions when a situation is to be delivered. For example, you might want to be notified when the repair of a certain object has been completed but not released for billing within five days. This helps you get paid faster for completed repairs.
Apart from configuring conditions, you can also define your own notification texts with links to additional resources. What’s more, you can schedule when the system should check for new situations and send notifications.
Especially for managing in-house repairs, SAP lets you monitor situations for four common use cases:
In addition to in-house repairs, you can use situations to manage other business processes, including service order management or service contract management. For example, in service contract management, you can set up a situation to alert you to service contracts that are about to expire within a period that you define. Or, in service order management, you can be informed automatically if the quantity of procured and delivered service parts or third-party services for a service order exceeds the quantity reported as consumed.
Situation Handling helps you react quicker to critical issues disrupting your service delivery schedule, automate repetitive activities in your service process, and resolve hold-ups during in-house repairs, and thereby better serve your customers.
- You agreed with your customer to complete a repair within a certain period, planned the repair carefully, and triggered the repair process. But for some reason, the repair exceeded the deadline. Thus, the SLA commitment wasn't met, and you incurred a contractual penalty.
- It could also happen that a precheck of a device sent in by the customer for repair was delayed, so the repair couldn’t start as planned. To make things worse, you didn't even realize there was a problem until the customer inquired about their order.
- A new in-house repair record was created in the system, but the colleague who entered the data simply forgot to confirm it and trigger the repair process. As a result, the repair had to be rescheduled and the customer wasn’t amused.
Situations Might Be Exactly What You Are Looking For
Such mishaps can be annoying for you and your customers. They can hurt your business and produce extra work.
To prevent them, you can use so-called situations to make the system proactively notify you. A situation can be any business event that requires your attention. For example, an approaching deadline, a pending task, an exceeded threshold, or any kind of a delay.
Apart from simply alerting you, a situation lets you take action right away. For example, in case of an unconfirmed in-house repair, you can navigate straight to the affected in-house repair from the situation notification and confirm it.
Where Can You See the Situation Notifications
You can see situation notifications on the SAP Fiori launchpad in the notification area. Besides, you can activate e-mail notifications.
Situations also appear next to the critical objects in object lists and as in-app situation messages on individual object pages.
Situation Templates to Set Up Your Own Situations
You can use predefined situation templates to create your own situation types and adjust them to your business needs. You can use filters to define conditions when a situation is to be delivered. For example, you might want to be notified when the repair of a certain object has been completed but not released for billing within five days. This helps you get paid faster for completed repairs.
Apart from configuring conditions, you can also define your own notification texts with links to additional resources. What’s more, you can schedule when the system should check for new situations and send notifications.
Some Common Use Cases
Especially for managing in-house repairs, SAP lets you monitor situations for four common use cases:
- In-House Repair Not Confirmed: An in-house repair hasn't been confirmed within a defined number of days.
- Processing of In-House Repair Overdue: The processing of an in-house repair took longer than expected.
- Precheck of Repair Object Delayed: The precheck of recently created repair objects is delayed.
- Billing for Repair Object Delayed: Billing for billing-relevant repair objects hasn't been triggered within a defined number of days.
In addition to in-house repairs, you can use situations to manage other business processes, including service order management or service contract management. For example, in service contract management, you can set up a situation to alert you to service contracts that are about to expire within a period that you define. Or, in service order management, you can be informed automatically if the quantity of procured and delivered service parts or third-party services for a service order exceeds the quantity reported as consumed.
Situation Handling helps you react quicker to critical issues disrupting your service delivery schedule, automate repetitive activities in your service process, and resolve hold-ups during in-house repairs, and thereby better serve your customers.
More Information
- General Information on Situation Handling
- Situation Template: In-House Repair Not Confirmed
- Situation Template: Processing of In-House Repair Overdue
- Situation Template: Precheck of Repair Object Delayed
- Situation Template: Billing for Repair Object Delayed
- Situation Template: Service Contract Due to Expire Soon
- Situation Template: Service Confirmations Required
- SAP Managed Tags:
