Service Contract Management
Purpose
You can use this business scenario to carry out service processes based on the following:
● Service contracts that were agreed to by customers
● Warranties that were assigned products, installed base components, or objects
Service contracts represent long-term agreements between companies and customers. In service contracts, customers are guaranteed specific services within tolerance limits for certain parameters, for example, within a predefined period. The promised services are represented by service products (for example, maintenance, hotline) which are defined in the individual contract items.
The characteristics of service products are defined in Service Level Agreements (SLA), which in turn are validated by different parameters, such as Availability Time and Response Time. The parameters serve not only to describe the SLAs, but can also be used to control service processing.
Warranties can be flexibly assigned to individual products, installed base components, or objects. When creating service orders, confirmations, repair orders, or complaints, the system automatically runs a background check to see whether a warranty exists and then assigns this accordingly. When calculating prices for the services and service parts in billing, warranties can be taken into account through the use of appropriate discounts.
In the following processes, we explain service contract and entitlement management starting from the creation of warranties and service products, through to contract processing, and finally to the billing of the contract. During its period of validity, the service contract can be the basis for service orders or escalation measures, if for example, the time frames agreed in the SLA are exceeded. Contract and warranty-relevant data can be analyzed in SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI).
Prerequisites
You can implement this business scenario with different releases of the relevant application components. However, only certain combinations are valid. For more information, see:
● SAP CRM Master Guide on SAP Service Marketplace at service.sap.com/crm-inst
● Scenario & Process Component List on SAP Service Marketplace at service.sap.com/scl
Process Flow
The business processes run as follows:
...
1. Product and Warranty Registration in CRM
2. Service Contract Processing in CRM
4. Service Contract and Quotation Analysis in CRM