Leading Automation Products Company switches from traditional R/3 Service Management to the SAP CRM Service Solution

The Company:

This organization provides Industrial Control and Automation products to markets in the Americas . Customer is the world's largest manufacturer of ac drives and motion control products, including adjustable frequency drives servo amplifiers, servomotors, machine controllers, and motion controllers.

The Challenge:

After years of continuous growth, organization realized that their current SAP Service Management processes were no longer sufficient to efficiently serve their growing customer base.

With the release of SAP CRM 5.0 which was highly focused on the Service Module, and the stop on new developments of the Service Management module in ECC, the client opted to implement the new SAP CRM Service solution and phase out their highly customized R/3 SM processes.

Customer decided to hire The Principal Consulting to lead and work together with the internal team to design and implement the new Service Solution. The new solution included the following processes:

• Install Base Management to replace the equipment and Functional Locations
• Complaints Management (through Interaction Center Web Client)
• In-House Repair (Quotes, Repair Orders, Exchanges, Evaluations, Parts Returns and confirmations)
• Field Service (Quotes, Service Orders, Confirmations using Adobe Interactive Forms)
• Service Contracts and Warranties
• Resource Planning (RPA) with WFM Add on in CRM
• Integration with ECC processes (Logistics, CATS ,CO and Billing)

The challenge was twofold:

1. The solution had to go live before a certain date, leaving the team only 4 months to implement the first release.
2. The budget was tight and the second release needed to be implemented with a smaller team mostly consisting of internal employees.

The TPC Solution:  

The first release went live on time and within budget due to:

People: TPC and customer resources were teamed up to maximize the knowledge transfer. The PMO was light, made quick decisions and thus left more in the budget for the other resources. Strong functional and technical resources (on and offshore) were working together closely and had direct access to the business team to clarify requirements.  

Process: After a short prep phase TPC conducted focused blueprint sessions with the key users and the support team of the current service solutions resulting in a detailed blueprint document which was used by both the functional and the technical teams for the build. During the build we scheduled multiple walkthroughs to confirm the project was still on track. In the meantime the business team prepared the test case scenarios and training materials. The rollout was phased by functionality and to avoid painful and time consuming conversions we left the functionality in SM operational until all legacy orders were closed out. .  

Technology: We implemented the business processes making use of the portal, IC Web and the SAP GUI. Although many minor and some major developments were needed; CRM 5.0 proved to be a worthy solution to improve customer's Service Processes.

Change: End users were invited to walkthroughs to confirm the new processes and learn at the same time. They were also involved with integration testing. With this and the end user training the expectations were sufficiently managed to prepare the business for the go-live.

After the first release most of the TPC resources were rolled-off the project and the customer resources were able to implement the remaining Service functionality with limited outside help.