Case Management 

Use

Case Management enables you to consolidate, manage, and process information about a complex problem or issue in a central collection point: a case. Within a case, you can group diverse information, such as business partners, transactions, products, and documents. This information can reside in different physical systems.

You can also use Case Management to process problems and issues that involve multiple processing steps or multiple processors. Case Management therefore supports the processing and communication flow between organizational units and helps you to increase processing efficiency.

Case Management is available in the Interaction Center WebClient, and in CRM Enterprise in the People-Centric User Interface (UI).

Integration

·        In the People-Centric UI, Case Management is a separate transaction, however, cases are also integrated into the Service Order transaction. In this transaction, you can create a link between cases and service orders by referencing an existing case or creating a new one.

You can also integrate cases into other CRM business transactions by making the appropriate settings in Customizing under Customer Relationship Management ® Case Management ® Integration in the User Interface (People-Centric UI) ® Integration of Cases in Business Transaction User Interfaces.

·        You can link business objects from an integrated SAP R/3 System to a case (for more information, see the “Features” section below).

Prerequisites

You have made all the necessary settings in Customizing under Customer Relationship Management ® Case Management.

SAP provides standard customizing settings that enable you to run Case Management with few or no modifications. Depending on your business processes and system landscape, however, you may need to make further settings.

The section Extended Customizing of Case Management Customizing, contains more specific settings that you only need to make if you have special requirements, or if you want to link objects residing in systems other than your SAP CRM system to cases.

You only need to make settings in the subsection Special Settings in exceptional cases and should only make settings in this section with the help of a consultant.

Features

·        Linking of existing business objects to a case

You can link the following existing CRM business object types: :

¡        Business partners

¡        Products, individual objects, installed base components

¡        CRM sales and service business transactions

¡        Problems and solutions from the solution database

In addition, you can link business objects from SAP R/3 to a case (you define in Customizing which business object types you want to link).

·        Linking of electronic documents, such as forms and policies to a case

Content Management functionality enables you to structure documents, link archived documents, and track changes to documents by creating different versions.

·        Linking of activities to a case

You can create activities to plan and track the required processing steps for a case. You can assign an activity to a person responsible who is not necessarily the case processor. Processors can generate a list of activities for which they are assigned as person responsible. For more information on the functions available in SAP CRM for activities, see Activity Management.

You can also link existing activities to a case.

·        Notes

You can enter notes to capture case-relevant information during the entire processing life of a case and to facilitate communication between processors. Case notes are stamped with the name of the user who created the note and the date and time of creation. You can categorize notes by assigning them a note type, as defined in Customizing.

·        Change log

Changes to a case are automatically recorded in a log, with a user, date and time stamp. This  helps you to track changes to case attributes, linking of business objects to a case, and unlinking of business objects in a case.

·        Authorizations

Authorization checks enable sensitive information to be handled confidentially and only be made visible to authorized persons. You can restrict authorizations to view or change cases and case notes, based on case types and note types. You can also restrict access to specific information within an authorized case type. For more information, see Case Authorizations.

·        Status management

You can assign customer-defined statuses to cases. You define statuses in Customizing and specify status changes that are permitted in the Case Management transaction.

The Reopen and Confirm buttons in the transaction also change the system status for a case to In process and Confirmed respectively. Once a case is confirmed, it can no longer be processed.

Specifics of the People-Centric UI

·        You can manage related cases together in a hierarchy by defining subcases.

·        You can classify cases and analyze this information in the SAP Business Information Warehouse. You define classifications for cases in classification catalogs. For more information, see Case Classification.

·        You can create a new case by copying an existing one as a template.

When you copy a case, a case of the same case type is created. Depending on your customizing settings, various elements of the case are also copied.

Copied case notes are concatenated and the current user, date, and time are set as the processor and timestamp. When you copy a case that is assigned to another case as a subcase, the new case has the same assignment.

·        You can make a note of the reason for linking objects to a case next to the objects themselves.

Specifics of the Interaction Center WebClient

·        You assign objects to a case by copying them from the activity clipboard. You can also assign business partners and products directly to a case.

If some objects copied from the activity clipboard are not relevant, you can delete these from the case.

·        Content Management for documents is available in the Documents transaction.

·        You can use the powerful text search capabilities of the Knowledge Search to search for cases across case notes and the contents of linked documents and business objects. You can also search for cases based on the long text description of linked business objects.

·        You can e-mail cases found using the Knowledge Search to internal and external parties. Case header information and attachments are sent.

Example

With Case Management, SAP provides the framework for processing issues in a wide variety of industries and scenarios. For example, it can be used for:

·        Incidents relating to complex or expensive products for which you provide technical services

·        Incidents in the Utilities industry, for example power outages

·        Insurance claims cases

SAP provides predefined case types to support the following scenarios:

·        General incident tracking

·        Disputes regarding customer invoices and payments in the Telecommunications industry