IT Service Management
This business scenario allows you to organize and manage information pertaining to information technology (IT) service support and delivery within your company. In addition to tracking and resolving issues within the IT infrastructure, you can measure and evaluate the quality of services provided. This business scenario enables quicker and more efficient responses by providing easy access to the following:
Incidents/service requests
Problems
Requests for change (RfCs)
Knowledge articles
Service confirmations
IT service level management
IT items and objects
Integration
You can use SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence to perform IT service reporting and analytics. This provides you with accurate measurements of the performance of your IT services.
In cases where an incident is related to an SAP application issue, you can integrate the SAP Solution Manager Service Desk to allow transfer of incidents from SAP Customer Relationship Management to SAP Solution Manager.
Prerequisites
You have defined the necessary transactions in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management
under 
Transactions
Basic Settings
Define Transaction Types
.
You have defined settings for multilevel categorization in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management
under CRM Cross-Application Components
Multilevel Categorization
.
You have completed the necessary activities in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management
under Transactions
Settings for Service Requests
.
You have defined settings for objects in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management
under Master Data
Products
Objects
Object Settings
for Service Management
.
For more information, see SAP Solution Manager.
Features
Incident management
You can create incidents and monitor incident processing. Incidents can be categorized, prioritized, and linked to relevant transactions. If an incident is locked to a problem, you can unlock it to enter incident-specific information.
Service request management
This feature is used to deliver predefined services that cannot be classified as incidents. Service requests share the same functions as incidents.
Problem management
You can use problems to identify the underlying causes of incidents. You can lock incidents and service requests to problems, so that when the problem is updated, the locked transactions are updated automatically. In addition to this, problems share the same functions as incidents and service requests.
IT change management
This feature provides an easy approval and implementation process for RfCs that minimizes system downtime. You can link RfCs to relevant incidents, service requests, problems, and knowledge articles.
IT service level management
This feature helps you ensure that you meet all of the conditions of service level agreements (SLAs). You can measure quantifiable SLA metrics and produce comprehensive readings of your IT service performance.
IT object management
This feature allows you to account for all IT items within your IT infrastructure, such as components, products, and installed bases. You can view and manage all IT items and their relationships.
Service orders and confirmations
You can create service orders and service confirmations. You can also track relevant data, such as warranty IDs, working times, materials used, and customer contact information.
Knowledge articles
You can create new knowledge articles or access existing ones. You can assign knowledge articles to related transactions, providing direct access to relevant information and solutions.
Example
An employee of a company contacts the IT service department because their notebook heats up if they play a CD on it. The agent who answers the call creates an incident with the category Hardware
– CD-ROM Drive
. The agent performs
a search for related transactions based on this category and discovers that there is an existing problem with the same issue description. The agent locks the new incident to the problem and informs the caller that someone from IT support will contact them soon.
The problem manager processes the problem by investigating the reason for the issue. After finding out that this is a hardware issue for this specific notebook type, the problem manager creates a knowledge article describing how the issue can be solved. In this case, the CD-ROM drive needs to be replaced, so in addition to creating the knowledge article, the problem manager creates a request for change to exchange the CD-ROM drives of the notebooks for which incidents had been created.
As exchanging a CD-ROM drive will have no impact on the overall IT infrastructure, the request for change is directly approved by the change manager and the defective CD-ROM drives are exchanged without further delay.
The IT support personnel who worked on the incident, problem, and request for change confirm their working times and all requests are closed, and, if relevant, handed over to billing.