As part of the dunning proposal run, the responsible organizational units and/or positions are determined and based on this information.
Workload balancing is carried out. Only after the workload balancing is carried out, the dunning activity run can create the final activities.
If you want to carry out workload balancing for activities other than collections work items, such as sending reminder letters, it is essential that these activities also have a responsible organizational unit (at least a collection center) assigned.
- Business Rules Framework Plus: evaluation for a contract account or group of contract accounts
- Collection Step: definition of dunning activity, activity priority, dunning interval, charges and interest, alternative collection step
- Organizational Management: responsibility determination
- Capacity Planning & Workload Balancing: definition of max. no. of dunning notices in a dunning activity
Capacity Planning and Workload Balancing
| Activity | Department | Unit | Agent | Max. no. of activities | Release activities from | Alternative activity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early reminder | Collections Region West | Team 1 | 1.500 | N | ||
| Outbound call | Collections Region West | 1.300 | Y → SMS |
- Prerequisite: determination of responsible department, optional: unit and agent
- Upper limit for number of activities that can be processed
- Option to execute an alternative activity
- Option to request explicit release of activities starting from a threshold
Prerequisite for workload balancing is the maintenance of the responsible organizational units and/or positions.
Workload balancing functionality requires further settings in configuration per dunning activity.
You can define the maximum number of an activity that can be carried out by an organizational entity and per dunning run without any additional intervention.
The upper limit per dunning activity can be maintained per collections department, collections unit, and collection specialist. At least the collection department needs to be specified.
When the maximum number of dunning activities for an organizational unit is reached, the remaining activities may:
- Be dropped
- Be replaced by an alternative activity
- Require explicit release
- The subsequent dunning activity run will ignore the dropped activities.
When an explicit release is required, the activity run will only create entries for released activities. The release can only be performed by a report for execution of dunning activities.
The sequence of all items of one activity determines which of them fall below or above the threshold. In order to influence the sequence, ranking needs to be done. The rank of each activity is determined via BRF.
Under Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Business Transactions → Dunning → Dunning by Collection Strategy → Define Capacity Planning for Dunning Activities in the IMG, all settings can be done in order to enter the settings for capacity planning per dunning activity.
The activity is entered in the system via its key, in this case WLI2. The Collections Department and Unit ID of the organizational structure that will process the dunning activity has to be inserted as well.
A collection specialist ID can be entered but this is optional. The Upper Limit specifies how many of these activities can be processed by the organizational entity. If the dunning proposal run resulted in more activities, those may be dropped or replaced by an alternative activity. The system behavior is determined by the settings in the related collection step.
To specify an alternative treatment if the capacity for an activity is not sufficient, go to Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Business Transactions → Dunning → Dunning by Collection Strategy → Define Collection Step.
By clicking the Details button, it is possible to have more information on the collection step.
Under Details, it is possible to see the Alternative Collection Step that is executed if the original collection step cannot be executed due to a capacity restriction defined under the previous IMG steps (Define Capacity Planning for Dunning Activities).
Note
The Release from Upper Limit will have to be entered when you want to restrict the number of these dunning activities per dunning run that can be carried out without an additional release procedure.
Once the upper limit has been reached, the release indicator is set in the dunning header of all dunning notices. The dunning activity run for these dunning headers cannot be executed until after the release.
If a release is to be required for all dunning headers with this dunning activity, the upper limit must be set to '1'.
Moreover, a Maximum Number of Days has to be set so that the release date in the dunning header is calculated from the maximum number of days to release and the date of issue of the dunning notice. If not released by this date, the activities will be canceled.
By setting the Release From, it means that beyond the value specified, there will be always a manual release of the dunning notices so that it is possible to verify the team/unit responsible workload after each dunning activity run.
The Release of Dunning notices is done with a report by using transaction FPM3_RELEASE or following the SAP Easy Menu Path Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Periodic Processing → For Contract Accounts → Dunning Notice → By Collection Strategy → Release Dunning Notices.