Strategic Service Planning 
Purpose
You can use this business process to define future profitability targets for your area of management responsibility and communicate these to their reporting managers. Using SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) with its Business Planning and Simulation tools, managers can closely align the operational activities of their organizational areas with the strategic goals of the service organization as a whole.
Strategic Service Planning enables managers on different planning levels to access the same planning data but on different aggregation levels. For example, the vice-president could plan for business units, regional managers could plan for customer groups, and service managers could plan for products used in service contracts. Since Strategic Service Planning stores planning data in SAP BW InfoCubes, you can easily compare planning and actual data using analytical tools in SAP BW.
Prerequisites
Controlling data is available in SAP BW.
Process Flow
The following business process runs in SAP SEM, with the exception of the first step:
1. Perform situation analysis (using SAP BW)
Managers on all levels analyze the current situation of their service business using queries in SAP BW in preparation for strategic service planning.
2. Vice president selects business unit
3. Plan quantity, costs and revenues
The vice president or another top-level manager selects the business unit for which the person responsible plans target key figures such as costs and revenues.
Managers can save different planning versions during the planning process.
4. Distribute targets top-down for costs and revenues
The vice president or top-level manager distributes planned targets top-down to the relevant business units.
Managers can use actual values from the last closed year as targets for the planning year, or they can define new targets. They also have the option of distributing overall targets equally to all lower planning levels.
5. Release targets to regional manager
The vice president or top-level manager releases planned targets, for example, to regional managers as the basis for planning on the next organization level.
6. Regional manager selects business unit
7. Plan costs and revenues for customer groups
8. Distribute targets top-down for costs and revenues
9. Release targets to service manager
10. Service manager selects customer group
11. Plan costs and revenues for products and services
The service manager plans target key figures such as costs and revenues, taking into account the targets prescribed by the higher-level manager. When they release their targets, the SAP SEM System automatically rolls planning data up to the regional managers and vice-president.
12. Service manager releases planning data
Regional managers distribute their targets top-down, and release them to service managers. The SAP SEM system automatically rolls the regional managers’ planning data up to the vice president.
13. All level check plan/target achievement
All management levels check whether the planning data released by lower-level managers corresponds with the targets that were originally planned and distributed top-down.
14. Approve plan data
Managers approve planning data with which they are satisfied.
The planning phase is complete. During the period that was the subject of planning, actual data for planned key figures is extracted from operational systems such as SAP CRM to SAP BW.
15. Monitor plan/actual comparison (using SAP BW)
Managers check the accuracy of their past planning using a query in SAP BW.
16. All levels adjust service targets
All management levels adjust their targets as and when appropriate.
See also:
For more information on the planning functions available within SAP SEM and the planning application for Strategic Service Planning, see the SAP Library for SEM Business Planning and Simulation.
For more information on the analytics tool in SAP BW, the Business Explorer, see the SAP Library for SAP BW under Business Explorer.