An Insider’s Perspective: Ways to Benefit from the SAP Service Cloud Maintenance Plan

July 23, 2019

In today’s world of competition, most businesses spend a lot of time and money in attracting new customers. But, as long as a business is unable to retain its existing customers, it cannot attain success in the long run. The existing customers of a company are always the target market for its competitors. Therefore, it is very important to provide customers with the best possible service by being more responsive to their needs and expectations.

Preventive maintenance to build reputation

Preventive maintenance helps businesses achieve their objectives by enabling them to provide their customers with better customer service. Scheduled maintenance performed as a matter of practice improves equipment operations, and businesses that do this routinely are able to provide their customers with more dependable service. A lot of companies make the mistake of assuming that customers care only about the quality of service that they deliver. The truth is that customers want both quality as well as reliability, and companies that realize this at an early stage successfully acquire a remarkably good reputation. Businesses survive or perish based on their reputation; naturally, anything businesses can do to enhance their reputation is always a step for them in the right direction.

With SAP Service Cloud, organizations have been able to leverage all service functionalities and have been able to effectively provide good customer support. With the Maintenance Plan feature in SAP Service Cloud, it is a breeze to execute preventive maintenance scenarios by spontaneously generating work tickets based on the maintenance schedule.

Benefits of Service Cloud Preventive Maintenance Plans

Service Cloud Preventive Maintenance Benefits

  • Well-Spaced, regular maintenance helps prevent extensive overhauls
  • Boosts the lifetime of the equipment
  • Improves the efficiency of the equipment by decreasing its downtime
  • Strengthens customer service as teams have fewer cases of random maintenance to handle

How Maintenance Plans Work in Service Cloud

During the maintenance plan creation, the schedule for the maintenance work has to be specified. The Scheduling Conditions of a maintenance plan can either be based on the Counter, Time, or a Combination of both Time and Counter.

  • Based on a counter - An example of a counter-based maintenance plan is an odometer reading of a car. In the case of cars, Service Tickets are ideally created whenever the odometer reading reaches “X” number of miles.
  • Based on a time period – This is when Service Tickets are created maybe every three or six months (or any other time period as the case may be).
  • Based on a combination of a counter and a time period

Scheduling Types

Another element in a maintenance plan is Scheduling Types, which are of three types, namely:

  • Cyclical
  • Fixed
  • One Time

Service Cloud Maintenance

A ticket template is defined within the maintenance plan. When a Service Ticket is generated via a maintenance plan, the entries maintained within that template get automatically populated. You can define the Ticket type. The registered product for which maintenance has to be performed is added to the maintenance plan. It is also possible to add multiple registered products in the same maintenance plan. The terms described are appraised based on the readings recorded in the registered product for generation of a Service Ticket.

After the Maintenance plans are created, Maintenance Plan Runs (MDRO) are defined. Based on the jobs, the tickets are automatically created - if the defined conditions are met. The list of Tickets created through a maintenance plan are visible under the Related Tickets facet.

A Case in Point

One of our customers had purchased an additional warranty of one, two, or three years over and above the standard warranty of one year that was sold along with the products. They wanted us to ensure that the system did not create any service ticket after the lapse of the warranty period. Based on their requirement, we created a maintenance plan with Schedule Type as “Fixed Values” and Schedule Condition as “Time Based.” Here are the steps involved:

Service Cloud Maintenance plan

Under the Plan Definition facet, the conditions were added. The second condition was added by clicking on “Add Condition.”

Service Cloud Maintenance condition

The plan definition was created for two years, as shown below.

service cloud maintenance items

Under “Maintenance Items,” the registered product for which the ticket was supposed to be created was added along with the start date.

Service cloud social view

Thereafter, we defined maintenance plan runs. It was done under the Administrator work center by clicking on Service and Social view.

hybris c4c Service and Social view

The Service and Social view provides a link called “Configure Maintenance Plan runs.”

hybris c4c maintenance Plan

The MDRO was created by following the steps listed below.

“New” >>“New mass data run Object Template run”

Service and social Maintenance plan

The details of the mass data run were entered and the “Set to Active” button was clicked.

service cloud social schedule

The MDRO was scheduled via the “Schedule” button.

hybris c4c maintenance MRDO

The “Recurrence” option was clicked and the start and end time were maintained. Then, we proceeded to Save and Close.

SAP Hybris Service Cloud

After the MDRO was created, we assigned it to the Maintenance Plan. We entered the maintenance plan run that was created in the previous step in the field “MDRO Run” as shown below.

Then, we clicked on the Actions and Activate buttons.

SAP Hybris Cloud for customer

The Scheduled Job (MDRO) then ran according to the defined schedule. In such cases, if the specified conditions are met, the ticket gets created automatically.

Conclusion

The next time you deliberate on ensuring a great service experience to customers, look to getting the SAP Service Cloud for your enterprise that provides all the necessary functionalities for flawless customer service. And, maintenance plans happen to be one out of the many available features that ensure that the customers remain happy. Customer delight is something that all service organizations strive for, and with SAP Service Cloud maintenance planning, most of them have been able to hit the bulls eye.

Ali Faisal

Author: Ali Faisal

Ali Faisal is a Senior Consultant at Knack Systems with over four years of experience and contributions to multiple SAP C/4HANA implementations. He has completed multiple certifications in SAP C/4HANA—SAP Certified Application Consultant (SAP C4C10), SAP Certified in C/4HANA (SAP C4C14), and SAP Sales Cloud (SAP C4C12). Ali is a Commerce graduate and has done his Masters in Business Administration with a specialization in Marketing.

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