In my opinion, one of the most integral pieces of Service Management is the Repair Procedure. So today I wanted to give you the overview of how it works and where you can configure it. The repair procedure is best described as the in-house road map. It actually maps out, from an SD perspective, how the process should behave whenever you process an in-house repair. The easiest way to understand what I'm talking about is just to show it to you, so without further fanfare, let's jump into it.
Here's the IMG location of the repair procedure configuration. We are going to start at the Define Repairs Procedure since this is where all the fun is anyway :lol:
As you can see, I've created my own custom repair procedure, but SAP does provide you the 0001 & 0002 out of the box. Let's take a closer look at the guts of the procedure now (after you have an understanding, you can come back here and create a new entry, typically I encourage you to copy from an existing procedure, but you can feel free to duplicate what I'll show you next).
Ok, the first thing to understand is that there are 3 main phases of the repair, as far as SD is concerned.
101 - Accept Repair
102 - Start Repair
103 - Confirm Repair
Each of these main steps can have multiple different options that can occur. So if we look at Stage 101 above, you'll see there are 3 different options that can occur, you can receive the item (101), you can send a loaner (104), or you can send an exchange (106). Now, once you decide what the possible options are, you can determine if any of the actions should happen automatically or manually only. In addition, there's an additional box for the confirmation from inspection.
This is a fancy way of saying what you determined after your evaluated the item that was returned to you.
Again, going back to the stage 101, you can see that the return was selected for default. This means that a line item will automatically be added to the sales order as soon as the repair item is added to the sales order. (We'll go into more details next time about the repair sales order & line items). Just understand, that every step in the process needs a line item on the sales order. So you have main item that kicks off the whole process (and tells the sales order which repair procedure to execute), Then you need a new line to accept the item back into inventory (this allows you to create an inbound delivery).
So, now you can see that stage 101 automatically creates the line for an inbound delivery, but will allow you to manually send a loaner or an exchange.
Stage 102 gets a little more complicated, because now you have factor in the evaluation results. Looking at the procedure above, you can see that repair is the default, but you have the option to deliver the product back to the customer without repair, or scrap it as well. Both of these are manual options, but if you choose not to repair the product, either of these could be acceptable actions.
Now, it's important to understand that each stage needs a trigger. 101 is easy because it's triggered automatically, but stage 102 can't happen until the product has been received. 103 won't happen until the repair has been completed (this does include scrapping).
Finally, you can include as many or as few steps in your procedure. this next screen shot shows you the list of steps you have to choose from, and even allows you to rename them, so they make more sense to your organization:
Finally, you need to link this repair procedure. I'm not going into a lot of detail today on this, but next time we'll go deeper into the SD side of this, but if you look at the item category, you'll see a link repair procedure that will be executed:
I hope this helps make sense out of the Customer Service Repair Procedure.. It can be confusing at first, but once you see the logic, you're realize it's quite powerful, and not as cryptic as it once seemed 😃
If you're interested in great tips and tricks on SAP service management, variant configuration or production planning, check out my blog at: http://paperstreetenterprises.com/blog/
There is also a link to some SAP Easy Buttons 😃
Thanks for reading,
Mike
CTO - JaveLLin Solutions, LLC
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