Service Management – Define Partner Determination Procedure and Partner Function

Today’s lesson is another valuable one in my opinion.  The use of partner determination within the service order is incredibly useful in every scenario I’ve encountered.  Not only is it great when you’re doing in-house repairs, but it’s perfect for maintenance plans and field service scenarios as well.  For better or for worse, most organizations I’ve been at still sequence their orders by customer.  For example, certain customers will always get priority.  Often it has more to do with the “squeaky wheel gets the grease”, but sometimes it has big business implications.  No matter what the reason, having partners defined within your service order is useful.  So, with that introduction, let’s get to the good stuff.

Here’s the configuration location.

Right off the bat, you get 2 options.  So, let’s start at the beginning.  We’ll go into the Define Partner Determination Procedure first.

Next up, we need to get into the right area.  There are a lot of options.  When dealing with the service orders for customer service, we pick…  well, you can figure that part out 🙂

Next up, we can have as many procedures as you need.  In this view, you can see that I have one procedure specifically for notifications.  I could share the procedure, or have as many as I need, one for each service order even.  I’m going to look at the SV notification.

Now, if you’re familiar with SD, it’s likely you’ve seen this screen before.  In short, this is the list of all the partners that are available within an order. 

The checkboxes include:

No change Allowed:  After entry, the partner can no longer be changed in the document.

Partner Mandatory:  self explanatory =)

Unique: You can only enter 1 partner of this type in the document.  Things like Sold-To, Ship-to & Bill-to are common.  Things like contact person often allow multiple entries on the same document.

Appointments:  Maintains appointments in calendar.  I have never used this feature.

Now you can add or delete as many partners as you need.  It’s pretty straightforward.

We now backtrack to the first screen, and move onto the second menu option: Assign Partner Determination Profile to Order

Now, you need to define how each order should work. 

Partner Schema: This is your determination profile

Customer: This is the partner that is shown for the customer.

Function of Order Header: This is the partner function you can edit from the main screen.

Special Search: Control which search help is used.  You have two options

• If you do not select the field, the system provides a collective search help for personnel numbers, for example, surname/first name or organizational assignment.
• If you select the field, you can search using the following criteria:
  • People who are assigned to a work center
  • People with particular qualifications who are assigned to a work center

Spl Crit: This is the partner function of capacity requirements records.  This is often an employee responsible or something similar.  It helps to drive capacity if a special person is required to do the work.

Function for Paging: never used this, but it would be the person of contact.

That about covers it.  Again, I can’t stress how valuable this configuration can be if used properly.  Thanks for reading.

If you’re interested in great tips and tricks on SAP service management, variant configuration or production planning, check out my blog at: http://javeLLinSolutions.com/blog/

There is also a link to some SAP Easy Buttons =)

Thanks for reading,

Mike

CTO – JaveLLin Solutions, LLC