Business ByDesign Service Order Confirmations in the employee time sheet

Blog post updated: May 2021

With SAP Business ByDesign release 2102, service confirmations for service orders will now be visible in the employee’s time sheet.

The work is recorded as a service confirmation, from the Field Service and Repair work center (for example). On Release of the service confirmation, a time entry gets created in the employee’s timesheet, with a reference to it.

Key benefits:

1. Employee: This simplifies the time recording activity for the employee, removing the need to remember and maintain their time sheets based on the service orders they worked on.
2. HR Administrators: It helps administrators get a more holistic picture of work done, and makes it easier to calculate employee utilization.

The service confirmations appear in the employee’s time sheet with a reference to the service order item and service confirmation. The employee can modify the time type, premium pay, start time and end time and other HR specific attributes that do not come from the service confirmation.

With release 2105, the service confirmation integration is available for internal as well as external fulfilment, including the intercompany service scenarios.

How it works :

Every line item of the service confirmation is reflected as a separate time entry in the employee’s timesheet.

Consider the service confirmation that we see below:

There are 2 service confirmations :

1. Equipment Maintenance Inspections, which is a planned service – you can see it has a reference to a service order item
2. Labour change – which is an unplanned line item – you can tell as it does not contain a reference.

These will result in two time entries in the employee’s time sheet – one for each service confirmation line item.

The data for the time recording entry is picked up from the Time Reporting Tab in the details section. Let us review this in detail from the screenshot below :

1. The date of the time entry is picked from the start date / end date. With release 2105, the service confirmation can span multiple days. One time entry is created for each working day within this date period.
2. The start time and end time in the service confirmation are ignored.
3. The Actual duration is what shows up as the duration field in the time entry. With release 2105, units like Days or Weeks are also supported.
4. The time entries are created in the time sheet of the Service Performer

Once the above service confirmation is released (with or without service confirmation), it would be visible in the employee’s timesheet. This is depicted in the screenshot below:

The references to the service order item appears in the Task column. For unplanned services, the reference is the header of the service order.

All the details that are transferred from the service confirmation are read-only. The employee can edit the Time Type, Premium Pay, Start time and End Time, as well as certain other attributes like the Country/State of time recording and the extension fields. Any update would be within the Time administration module itself, and would not reflect back in the service confirmation. Releasing these time entries would make them go to the Active state once again.

These time entries are available in the time recording reports, the data sources being HCMTLMU01 (for valuated time entries) and HCMTLMB01 (for the time sheet entries).

Custom checks within the Validate Times enhancement spot:

Some customers may have had customized validations created for time sheet entries, via the Validate Times enhancement spot. These validations are automatically executed on the release of the service confirmations, with the error messages are displayed on the service confirmations UI itself. This way, no time entries are created that would violate any of the custom validations that were put in.

Feature enablement:

This feature can be enabled via Business configuration, using a scoping option under the Questions Step for the Service and Repair Business Topic:

Additional Features :

With release 2105, we’ve introduced new features that will help ease the integration between the service confirmation and the time sheet, and make it super easy for the employee.

1. The user can distribute work specified in the service confirmation to multiple time entries for multiple days, using an action “Split Service Confirmation” on the time sheet. More details in this blog post.
2. The user can use Hours, Days or Weeks as units of measure in the Actual Duration field of the Service Confirmation. The user can adjust this to suit the time recording requirements using the Split Service Confirmation action.
3. Multi-day service confirmation : The single service confirmation item can span multiple days if required by the user. Dates of time entry in the time sheet can be adjusted using the Split Service Confirmation action.
4. Approval workflow for modified time entries – When an employee adjusts the time entries in the time sheet – entering a time type or premium pay for example, the time entries can be sent for approval to the Reporting Line Manager when they are released. This uses the same business configuration option that is used for time type based time recording.
5. Mobile Time Recording App: The time entries are visible and editable in the ByD Mobile App.

If you have any questions regarding the above feature, you can get in touch with me by either sending a message, or by adding a comment below. If you find some limitations that are important to you, it would be really great if you could create an improvement request on our influence portal , and post the link in the comments section so that our readers can vote for it.

Thank you for reading !