Contents
Introduction
On 28 February 2024, we hosted a webinar for our customers and partners, where I presented a quick overview of SAP S/4HANA Service and integration with SAP Field Service Management (FSM). The recording and presentation are available on our SAP Digital Supply Chain Engagement Hub.
Check out the Hub. Once the registration is done, you can start browsing our in-depth webinars and new product introductions.
The main thing in the webinar was the 10-minute product demonstration, followed by an extensive Q & A. My presentation was about 30 minutes long including the demo; the Q & A part was about another 30 minutes.
In our webinar, we had many audiences with a wide range of interests and focuses – some are close to the service business and field service operations in our customer organizations; others, technical folks from the IT department; and yet others, from our partner organizations and freelance consultants, who help our customers with their service business initiatives and projects. I hoped that the product demonstration would be the visual anchor to connect with the widest interests of the diverse audiences, and the Q & A to supplement it with more in-depth discussions.
Let us know if the format worked or have more room for improvement in the comments.
In this short blog article, you can
- Find a quick recap and a link to the webinar.
- View the 10-minute video demo presented in the webinar.
- Have additional information related to some of technical questions we discussed in the Q & A.
- Continue our dialogues.
SAP S/4HANA Service
We see increasing recognition among businesses globally that a service business is a steady source of margins even in turbulent times and economic downturns. We at SAP have been supporting a wide range of service business processes for decades.
One of the challenges of the service management processes is that they tend to span across a variety of departmental silos – customer service, commercials, service operations, field service, warehouse, logistics, and finance. We offer a portfolio of applications that are designed to work together as a coherent whole to help break through the silos without unnecessary overheads. And yet, each main product can work on its own flexibly to cater to the diverse IT landscape of service management today.
Our portfolio approach is illustrated in the diagram below.
Source: Service Management Software from SAP
For general information on capabilities of SAP S/4HANA Service, refer to the following web pages.
Demonstration
The demonstration follows a scenario for a fictional company that operates in the industrial pumps business. This company buys pumps from suppliers and manufacturers, resells them to its customers, and installs and maintains pumps on customers’ behalf.
The demo scenario is illustrated in the following diagram (from the slide).
Key points of the demonstration to take away are as follows.
- (History of) the logistics value chain from buying materials, serializing them, and selling them.
- Extensible to manufacturing and assembling your products and continue to the after-sale services – an example of coherent connection with logistics value chain across your business.
- Reservation and consumption of stock materials for the service work – another example of coherent connection with logistics across your business.
- Real-time profitability. S/4HANA keeps track of the financial value flow at the same time as things move (logistics value chain).
- Revenue accounting in parallel with things moving (logistics value chain).
- FSM Integration. Demonstrate integration points to/from SAP FSM.
Additional Information for Technical Questions
Architecture Diagrams
If we looked at the demo from a technical perspective, one of the highlights is the integration between SAP S/4HANA and SAP FSM. There have been multiple requests for a diagram that illustrates the architecture and touch points between the two applications.
You can find diagrams in our online documentation along with links to further information about the interfaces and more. We have been working hard to continuously improve the content of the online documentation (you can also send us feedback; the documentation authors monitor it). I invite you to refer to it as the first reference point when you have technical questions about our products.
These pages have detailed treatments of both master data and transactional data relevant for the integration.
- S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and on-premise
- S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
Below is an excerpt from the page for Private Edition/on-premise.
Demo System and Scenarios
In the Q & A, we had a question about how partners and customers might be able to access the system for demonstrations. My suggestion is to see if a “Fully-Activated Appliance” can be of use for your purposes. If you are a veteran of SAP R/3 and SAP ECC, it is similar to IDES, but the difference is you can have it on your cloud infrastructure, such as Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, etc. A Fully-Activated Appliance is what you can access with our SAP S/4HANA trial for on-premise. You can get a “virtual machine image” on our SAP Cloud Appliance Library (CAL) and then you can deploy the “image” on a cloud infrastructure of your choice. You can have full access (SAP_ALL authorization) to an on-premise instance of SAP S/4HANA, fully configured and good for demonstration and exploration.
- SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance: Create your SAP S/4HANA system in a fraction of the usual set...
An overview of Fully-Activated Appliance.
- SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance: Demo Guides
Listing the many demo scenarios configured. You have dedicated PDF documents for Service. Refer to the link in this blog article.
- A Do-It-Yourself Step-by-Step Guide: How to Set Up Your On-Premise System of SAP S/4HANA 1709 at Hom...
I wrote a step-by-step guide to have an S/4HANA system at home with a minimal personal-hobbyist budget for 1709 and 1809. It’s old but I believe the fundamentals should be still applicable to the current release.
Resource-Related Billing (RRB)
We had questions on RRB. I did not delve into this topic in our webinar because I considered it a little more advance topic than the scope of the webinar about FSM integration.
Simply put, RRB lets you bill your customers based on the actual costs of the services you have performed. For example, you may be able to use RRB for a “cost-plus” type of arrangements with customers.
It is a new feature with the 2023 release of SAP S/4HANA for the Service line-of-business. If there are more requests, we will consider a session on this topic along with the rest of the features we collectively call “service with advanced execution”.
Below are some resources relevant to RRB.
Online documentation:
The demo guide for the Fully-Activated Appliance mentioned above has a good amount of detail with screen shots (image below).
Event-Based Revenue Recognition and Item-Based Accounting for Service
As we discussed in the session, event-based revenue recognition is our strategic product direction for functionality to support revenue recognition.
The new strategic way does not use internal orders (this classic way is called “account assignment manager”). The new way is called "item-based accounting," and it enables event-based revenue recognition. I suggest referring to the online documentation for more detail: for example, this page discusses the intersection of Service and Finance.
Regarding the shift from the classic way to the new item-based accounting, I have included a simple diagram illustration and a system demo in my other webinar entitled “2023 S/4HANA Release Highlights: Asset Management and Services” (Service starts at around 29:56; item-based accounting starts at around 33:00), also available on Digital Supply Chain Engagement Hub.
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