Strategize your Service Parts Business to Get an Edge Over your Competition

For the wide range of businesses that deal with physical plants, heavy machinery or any equipment that consumes maintenance materials, spare parts management has to be a major consideration.
Successful businesses focus their service parts organisations on two critical success factors. These critical factors are the ability to provide superior service levels to both your customers and service engineers and minimising operational costs associated with procurement, logistics, and inventory. Successful businesses focus on their service parts organisations emphasizes on these critical factors, along with innovative marketing and pricing strategies.
After-sales service has become an essential part of manufacturer success, with an increased focus on staying competitive and maximizing revenues. This is can only be accomplished by understanding that a unique strategy for service and parts must be utilized to address issues in planning, procurement, warehouse operations, fulfilment, customer satisfaction, and repairs.

Four Key Factors Defining After-Sales Success:

• Service parts management viewed as a unique, end-to-end business process, requiring specific resources and attention, separate from manufacturing strategies
• Operations are optimized to reduce costs in planning, procurement, logistics, customer service, and inventory management
• Visibility and awareness of operations with suppliers, dealers, and third party partners
• Organization meets customer’s expected service levels in a timely and efficient manner

Key Features of SAP Service Parts Management (SPM) Solution

Servicing is designed to achieve maximum customer satisfaction. The SAP SPM solution provides optimum cover for the processes involved.

Parts Planning & Procurement

SAP Service Parts Planning (SPP) was developed specifically for the service parts business. It accounts for multilevel distribution structures with vertical and horizontal product flows, including forwards and backwards directed logistics.

• Supply Monitoring & Analysis
• Demand, Supply and Inventory Planning
• Distribution Logistics
• Supplier and Customer Collaboration
• Internal Assembly / Repair
• External Procurement

Parts Warehousing

SAP Supply Network Collaboration (SNC) ensures seamless integration of your suppliers as a permanent part of your supply chain network, based on the “best fit strategy “to better manage and collaborate with your suppliers.

• Returns and Repair Logistics
• Inbound and outbound Processing
• Internal Warehouse Processing

Parts Fulfilment

SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) including global availability check (gATP), ensures efficient task planning and execution for superior order processing, as well as customer oriented offer and request processing. With gATP, availability and delivery times can be confirmed immediately at the time of customer request.

• Pricing and Marketing
• Order Processing Including gATP
• Claims & Returns
• Fulfilment Monitoring, Operations Management and Service Fulfilment Management
• Field, Mobile and Shop Service

Service Parts Analytics

• Supplier and Partner Performance
• Operational and Financial Performance
• Service Demand Performance

Integrating with External Applications

SAP enables integration with external applications through SAP NetWeaver platform. The service parts management capabilities of SAP service and asset management are integrated by design with SAP NetWeaver and provides easy integration with legacy systems, third party applications and partner systems creating a common,accurate,real time visibility into all service and service parts activities. These service parts management capabilities are adaptive, integrating service supply chain and coordinating all service parts activities to meet customer’s demands.
With a wide range of self-developed, external, and third party applications being used in the service parts supply chain we have identified and developed integration templates which are compatible with virtually every parts process; including:

• Management Systems Supplier
• Warranty
• Parts Catalogs & Technical Info
• Pricing and Dealer Systems
• Customer Technical Support
• E-Commerce
• Shipping/Logistics/3PL Systems

SAP SPM helps you meet the demand while simultaneously reducing your inventory cost for service parts. The SAP service and asset management solution integrates all parts planning, procurement, order administration, warehouse management, transportation and analytics into one comprehensive SPM system that is accessible to employees, partners, suppliers and customers in your extended services parts supply chain.
Dr. Shashi Kumar Reddy Arjula Practice Lead – SAP Customer Engagement and Commerce Solutions in YASH Technologies.

• SAP
• Service Parts Management
• supply chain management