Scheduling and Generating Follow-Up Documents 

 

Use

 

The system calculates the planned dates, that is, the dates on which a service should be performed, for the services defined in the service plan, such as quotations, activities or service orders.

Using date rules, the release dates on which corresponding release objects, such as a service order or contract quotation, are created in the system can be derived from the planned dates.

 

Prerequisites

 

·        You have created and maintained interval templates in the system.

·        In Customizing, you have assigned a date profile and date rules to the item category that you use for service plans. To do this, choose the activity Customer Relationship Management ®Transactions ® Basic Settings ® Define Item Categories in the Implementation Guide and proceed as follows:

¡        Choose the item category intended for service plan items.

¡        Define the date profile on the details screen of the Definition of Item Categories view.

¡        Choose Service Contract in the view Assignment of Business Transaction Categories and then switch to the Item Customizing view, where you can define the date rules for time and counter-based service intervals.

 

Features

 

Planned Date

Whilst the system calculates the planned date based on the interval templates that you define in the service plan item and the interval values defined in the interval template, the calculation also takes date profiles and date rules into account. You can display these in the service plan items, and maintain them if necessary.

Specifics of the SAP GUI:

The set types Service Plan Data and Dates are available for this purpose at item level in the SAP GUI.

Specifics of the People-Centric UI:

In the PC UI, you use the tab pages Service Plan and Service Data at item level.

 

The planned date is calculated on the basis of the start of planning. This is by default the current date when the service plan item is created, since the date rule Current Date is assigned by default to the date type Planning Start in Customizing.

Planned dates can be determined for counter-based scheduling by means of a consumption prediction or a calculated consumption value. For time-based scheduling, the planned date is calculated using the service interval that was defined in the service plan.

 

Release Date

Follow-up documents can be created even before the planned date. The date on which a follow-up document is created before the planned date is defined by the date type Release Date.

You can use a defined lead time to determine when the release date is, that is, when a document is automatically generated in the system and is visible to the service employee.

As soon as the document has been generated in the system, the service employee can confirm and process the document.

 

Generation of Documents

The Post Processing Framework (PPF), which can be performed either manually or automatically, allows the interaction of the dates and actions of the individual service plan items to be monitored, and also allows the generation of follow-up documents.

A background job can be set up for the automatic monitoring that checks at regular intervals if all the scheduled actions comply with the start condition, and if necessary, generates the follow-up documents.

The data from the service plan item is first copied to the item of the new business transaction in Service during the generation of the follow-up documents. Additional data, such as price agreements can be imported from the service contract. The planned dates in the service plan can then be recalculated, and the service plan updated accordingly.

If more complex services are to be used on a planned date, then you can predefine a business transaction template in which the detailed services and their scope are entered, for example, a service order template.

You can assign a business transaction template to a service interval either within a service interval template, or in the contract during the maintenance of a service plan item.