"The first transaction is a result of the seller’s work, while each of the subsequent ones is to the credit of the efficient service department".
Most car users would ask themselves – if this is so easy, why does nobody apply the above rule? Malice? Laziness? Lack of competence? In some isolated situations it might be the case but the vast majority of service departments in a variety of industries ranging from Xerox copiers and cars through to complex manufacturing machines produced within a unitary production process face the same problem – a lack of the system which would make the existing procedures more effective. That is why some documents are lost, service departments mainly serve individual customers appearing there, instead of making every effort to win new orders. Another problem is that it is hard to evaluate the effectiveness of each service engineer or the whole department.

Service Calls Registering and Processing

Problem: A service engineer has no instant access to the service history of a piece of equipment being serviced, to the serial numbers of the integrated subassemblies. While accepting a piece of equipment for servicing, he does not know whether spare parts are available or how much it may cost to repair it.

Example: S.O.S. is an authorized dealer and service company of Xerox copiers. Because of the fierce competition in the market, the profit margin on the sale of the copiers has been decreasing over the last few years. Following the example of foreign companies from the same industry, S.O.S. has decided to try its luck at the equipment service and the sale of consumables. However, it turned out that press advertisements and price reductions were not as successful as expected, but even the costs incurred were much higher than an increase in the sale of consumables. There was much better response to the free-of-charge technical services of Xerox copiers. Unfortunately, from the point of view of the Service Department Manager, "harvest failure" would best describe that state of affairs. S.O.S. was in no way prepared for providing instant information, planning service engineers’ trips to deal with outside office service calls and projecting a demand for spare parts with the customers’ interest rising threefold. The S.O.S. owner faced the following dilemma: whether to turn a blind eye to the profitability of the department, pay his employees for the overtime office hours and serve all the customers or whether to send a customer empty-handed and lose the opportunity to develop the most profitable department of the company.

Solution: SAP Business One as one of the few integrated management systems allows complete processing of service operations. All that is needed isr of a machine given by a customer or entered in the form of a bar code by a service engineer to see the whole history of its repairs. One may just enter the index of a spare part to see if it is available from the service department warehouse, the main warehouse or one of the service engineers’ cars. Each service call which has already been processed may be loaded into the solution database, which is helpful both while performing untypical repair works or while training new employees.

Additional advantage: While selling consumables to a customer, the system can be configured in such a way that after a specified period of time it will remind service engineers to contact the customer again. It is the cheapest and the most effective way of winning new orders.

Service Contracts Register

Problem: A signed service contract is both a source of stable income for a company but at the same time a source of potential risks connected with the reaction time, repair time or substitute equipment etc. specified in the contract.

Example: S.O.S. signed a large contract with a bank for servicing a few dozen Xerox copiers in the bank branches all over Warsaw. The contract is prestigious, profitable but… risky for S.O.S. in the event of failing to comply with the reaction times specified in the contract. The Manager of S.O.S. Service Department wonders how to organize the service engineers’ work to guarantee the required reaction times. The best idea would be that the service engineers shift depending on their location at a given moment – e.g. the one that is closest to a given bank would go there. However, he knew from his own experience that problems of the exchange of information between service engineers would arise. Before going to a customer, a service engineer must have access to the history of the piece of equipment to be serviced, customer’s contact data, customer’s working hours and specific clauses of the service contract. It is impossible to exchange all the data in case of each breakdown, bearing in mind that the service engineer who has already worked for a given customer may not be available at that moment. It seems that the only solution would be to assign at least two regular service engineers to the contract for the necessity of securing it.

Solution: in SAP Business One system all service contracts concluded with customers can be registered. Each contract contains information on the service availability, the reaction time, customer’s addresses under the contract. Moreover, each contract is accompanied by a list of equipment pieces serviced including precise parameters and then the history of repairs. There is also complete information on people to contact, the arrival map and preferred substitute equipment.

Additional advantage: The code of a service contract may be added to the information on all the costs related to its execution. Thus, it is possible to easily calculate the profitability of each contract, a given type of equipment piece serviced or a particular service engineer.