The details herein contained in this post relate to the solution manager VAR scenario – i.e your organisation acts as a service desk for your SAP customers. Whilst some of the concepts explained here might be of use to a CRM consultant, they are first and foremost destined for Solution Manager consultants setting up their system to track and monitor SLA(Service Level Agreement) response and resolution times (which would probably also apply to an internal support desk as well). This document is merely an extension to the excellent guide that you can find on the SAP service Marketplace called “SAP Solution Manager – Service Desk for Service Providers”– an S number is required to access this resource. This document explains in great detail what you need to do to setup SLA’s in the context of the VAR scenario, but I find that there is a piece missing in it – the setting up of the actual contract and its determination is not explained, nor does it offer advice on how or where this information can be tracked – so my document is the missing link for that.
I will first recap elements that I have setup in my system (that you can also find in the afore mentioned SAP document) and add the elements that I find are missing.
As usual, I encourage you to test this in a test system before rolling it out to your productive clients.
Master data checks and setups
Check your business partner(s)
Double click on your selected business partner to navigate to its record and drop down the list of partner functions.
If you do not see the partner function “sold-to party” (in display mode) , then you need to go and create that partner function for your customer.
Check your IBASE settings
When your customer creates a service desk message, one of the key elements that he will add to his message is the IBASE for which he is reporting the service request. The IBASE (Installed BASE) in this context is a concatenation of characters that identify the system ID + the installation number + the client number. You need to make sure that your customers’ IBASE have been assigned to the correct “sold-to party” business partner. That way, when a message is created the sold to party will automatically be attached to the service request.
To check this, go to transaction IB52 and display your IBASE (usually 1 in the standard system). As you see in my example below, there are multiple SAP clients within one system. I could have the same sold-to party for all clients or individual ones for each one. Business partners can be assigned locally to each client or once for all clients.
I will add the sold-to party once for all clients. To do so, I select my entire system node and select the menu path Goto / partner.
In the next window I indicate the business partner number that corresponds to my customer.
Save your entry.
Check your organizational model
Your organization (sales and service departments) have to be mapped in SAP Solution Manager using transaction PPOMA_CRM. Each organizational structure is super specific to every company, but you can if you want use the one that comes shipped with Solution Manager. Use the SAP guide “SAP Solution Manager – Service Desk for Service Providers” to help you set it up if needed. In the case of this example, I have adapted the one shipped by SAP to my context – SAP uses country DE, but I and my customers are in country AU – I have therefore used that country.
Set up your product hierarchy
Whether you understand the benefits of this step or not it does not matter, this is simply something that you have to do. The hierarchy could potentially be copied from your SAP ERP system if it existed there or you can maintain it locally in your SAP Solution Manager system. The hierarchy essentially helps you structure and segregate your products – for example you may wish to differentiate service products from say educational products, on site from off site service, internal services from external services. If you want to get this step over and done with just to get SLA’s calculated in your system, then again, just follow the “SAP Solution Manager – Service Desk for Service Providers” guide.
Below are snap shots of how I set up the hierarchy in my system. The hierarchy maintenance transaction is COMM_HIERARCHY.
The following set types have been defined.
Define your support product(s)
The next step of the process is to setup a product – the one that we will include in the contract with the customer. I have created a simple product of type “service” called SUPPORT_DESK. The transaction to maintain products is COMPR01. Notice of the product is linked to the category of my hierarchy.
Add the item category group SRVP. We could add the service and response profiles here in the product, but we will add this information in our contract.
Assign it to the sales area Sales/01/01.
Save your product.
Customizing changes and setups
Adding your response and service profiles
The point of all this process is to be able to mirror SLA’s that I have with my customers, in my Solution Manager system. Doing so means that you have contractually agreed with your customers that you will respond to all his service requests within a certain amount of time and that you will provide him with a solution – that resolves the issue – within a set timeframe. To add complexity to this, these time windows are more than likely to be variable depending on how critical the request is. Below are the times that I shall be using in my example.
Priority – - > Response time – - > Resolution time
1 – - > 1 Hour – - > 4 Hours
2 – - > 4 Hours – - > 2 Days
3 – - > 8 Hours – - > 4 Days
4 – - > 16 Hours – - > 8 Days
To set these parameters up in the system, use transaction CRMD_SERV_SLA.
You first need to setup a service profile. The service profile essentially dictates the hours during which your service desk operates.
Click the clock icon to maintain your “open for business” hours.
The service desk is open Monday to Friday from 08:30 to 17:30. Also, notice that the indicated time zone is UTC + 00.
I found that by using my actual time zone which is AUSVIC (UTC + 9), the SLA calculated times were during non business hours (eg 2am). Setting the time zone to UTC+00 has fixed my issues – so I assume that SAP automatically makes that time zone transformation.
The next thing we need to add, is the response and resolution times. I have chosen to only use the priorities of the service requests. I.e for each priority I shall indicate the response and resolution times.
For each priority I have maintained the SRV_RF_DURA (Duration Until first reaction) and SRV_RR_DURA (Duration until service end).
Check the SLFN message settings
I am of course assuming that you are using the standard SLFN service desk message. You need to make a couple of adjustments to it. Go into customizing to SAP solution manager / Configuration / Scenario specific settings / Service Desk / service Desk / General settings / Define transaction types.
If the below settings are not yet made, do them. Essentially we need to indicate how the contract selection will occur and also the how the sales and service entities will be determined in your service message.
Add your product to the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT
Remember that your contract will only be selected if certain elements that can be found in both the contract and the service request are identical. The service product is one of those elements. We will therefore customise the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT to add our service product to inbound service requests.
To do so go to transaction SPPFCADM. Pick the application CRM_ORDER and click the button as shown below (Define action profile and actions).
Assuming you are using the SLFN message for the VAR service desk process, you need to change the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT that is in the profile AI_SDK_STANDARD.
Select the line AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT and double click on processing types.
Switch to change mode and click the change icon as shown.
In the next window that pops up, click the create icon.
Create the container element with the following parameters. Translated, this will add the order product to the business transaction (the SLFN message) at the item level.
Finally and this is very important, you have to indicate the product that you want to add to the SLFN service message. Indicate the product code you created earlier.
Validate your entry and you will now see that the container editor looks something like below.
Save your work and leave the transaction – we can now go and create our contract!
Putting it all together
Create the service contract
Go to transaction CRMD_ORDER and create a transaction of type SLFV – service desk contract. Indicate your business partners and indicate the product you created earlier as well as a quantity (in my case I have indicated 1000 hours).
At this stage you can click on the ‘Organization” tab of your service contract and see that sales and services organizations have been determined – you can also click the “log” icon to see how those entities were determined or not!).
We now need to indicate the IBASE/systems for which this contract can be selected. In your contract item, indicate the system for which this contract can be selected. In my example, this contract can only be selected for two SAP clients that exist in the same system.
Remember that we also went to the trouble of adding response and resolution profiles earlier? Let’s use them. Go to the item data of your service product and in the service data tab, add your profiles.
Lastly we need to release the contract otherwise it is of no use – you need to do this for the header and item level. Go to your contract header – status tab and change the status to Released. Do the same thing at the item level.
Save your contract – you’re done.
Setting up a working layout
This step is optional – it is just going to make you work easier. All the fields that will be populated via this process appear in transaction CRM_DNO_MONITOR in green.
To fully test your work, you will probably create multiple messages and quite possibly go into this transaction multiple times. As it can be a bit annoying to change the layout every time you use this transaction during the testing phase, I created a layout variant called GREEN_SCREEN that only shows the columns that could be populated via this SLA calculation process.
So let’s go and try to create some service desk messages. I’ll create three messages with three different priorities to see how the dates are calculated.
If I now switch to Solution Manager and call up transaction CRM_DNO_MONITOR with my screen layout I get the following.
You can see that system now calculates my initial response and completion dates/times based on my agreed SLA’s.
Enjoy.
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