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 NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI) 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.

The example planning application shows how managers on different planning levels can 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 BI InfoCubes, you can easily compare planning and actual data using analytical tools in BI.

The strategic service planning is not ready-to-use scenario. The strategic service planning process is an example for a planning application illustrating what a planning scenario in the service area looks like. If you want to integrate a planning business process into your service business scenario you have to set up an individual planning application tailored to your planning requirements. The standard configuration of the strategic service planning can be used as a template for an individual planning application. In addition, the standard BI content objects including a central planning InfoCube can be used.

Prerequisites

The standard BI planning content and the standard BI content is activated in SAP BI. You can find the details of the delivered BI content objects in the standard BI documentation. For more information, see Configuring Strategic Service Planning.

Process Flow

The following business process runs in SAP BI, with the exception of the first step:

       1.      Perform situation analysis

Managers on all levels analyze the current situation of their service business using queries in BI in preparation for strategic service planning.

       2.      Vice president selects business unit

       3.      Plan 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 service contract products

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 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 system automatically rolls the regional managers’ planning data up to the vice president.

   13.      All level check plan or 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 BI.

   15.      Monitor plan or actual comparison

Managers check the accuracy of their past planning using queries in SAP BI.

   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 BI and the planning application for Strategic Service Planning, see the SAP Library for BI Business Planning and Simulation.

·       For more information, see the SAP Library under Documentation ® mySAP Business Suite ® SAP Customer Relationship Mgmt. ® mySAP Customer Relationship Management ® Analytics ® CRM BI Content ® Service.