Explaining the Integration Between SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Service and SAP Field Service Management

The above figure shows a comprehensive overview of what a process integrating SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP Field Service Management (also referred to as SAP FSM) could look like. The process shown also includes features covered by other scope items, like recurring services (see scope item Recurring Service (4X5)), and credit memo processing (see scope item Credit Memo Processing for Service Management (4GG)). The use of these scope items is (of course) entirely optional. In the rest of this topic, we will focus on the core process integrating SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP Field Service Management (SAP FSM).

Once a service order is created and released in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, a service call and the corresponding activities are automatically created in SAP FSM. An activity is assigned to a technician in SAP Field Service Management. The technician is automatically updated in the corresponding service order document in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. When an item such as time, efforts, expenses, or material is approved in SAP Field Service Management, a service confirmation is created and automatically completed in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. When all items such as time, efforts, expenses, and materials associated with an activity are approved in SAP Field Service Management, the corresponding service item in the service order is completed automatically in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. When all service items in a service order are completed in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the service order is completed automatically.

In the next section, these steps are discussed in more detail with some example images based on the flowcharts that SAP provides for the 49X scope item. The complete flowcharts can be found using the SAP Best Practices Explorer (see https://rapid.sap.com/bp/).

Key steps:

1. The customer service manager creates a service order with line items.
2. The customer service manager releases the service order.

The customer service manager starts the process by creating a service order with line items in it. These items can represent services, expenses, and/or spare parts that are needed during the service process. The integration with SAP Field Service Management is automatically triggered once the service order is released by the customer service manager.

When a service order gets released either using the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition user interface or using an OData API, a corresponding service call and activity are created automatically in SAP Field Service Management. In SAP Field Service Management, the service call represents a request from a customer related to a certain problem or a desired service. An activity represents a service task related to a service call.

Each service order is replicated to SAP Field Service Management as a service call, each service item is replicated to SAP Field Service Management as an activity under the corresponding service call.

Service parts are replicated to SAP Field Service Management as reserved materials tied to the service call, which can be used later by the technician. Service parts referring to an existing service item in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition are replicated to SAP Field Service Management as reserved material of the activity.

Expense items are not replicated to SAP Field Service Management.

After a service order and its service Items have been successfully replicated from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, service to SAP Field Service Management, the external IDs of the corresponding SAP Field Service Management service call and SAP Field Service Management activities are displayed in the section called Transaction History of the service order and service order item in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

When a service call that has been replicated from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, service to SAP Field Service Management is changed in SAP Field Service Management, the changes are replicated back from SAP Field Service Management to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

The following fields are considered and replicated back to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: Subject, Priority, Contact Person, Employee Responsible, Earliest Start Date, End Date, and Equipment.

When an activity is updated in SAP Field Service Management, the changed fields are also replicated back to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Changes to an activity that is not released yet, are only replicated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition as soon as it gets released. When an activity is assigned to a technician and the assignment is released in SAP Field Service Management, the technician and the planned start and end dates are updated back to the corresponding SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition service Item. After this, planned start and end dates can still be changed in SAP Field Service Management. In this case, when the assignment is released again, the new planned start and end dates are updated back to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition service item accordingly.

The following fields are considered and replicated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: Subject, Technician, Planned Start Date, Planned End Date and Equipment.

If the planned dates of an already released activity are changed in SAP Field Service Management, the change is only replicated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition when there is a new release of the modified activity.

The figure shows an example of replicated changes from SAP Field Service Management back to the service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, service. Again, the following fields are replicated back: Subject, Priority, Contact Person, Employee Responsible, Earliest Start Date, End Date and Equipment.

If the notes of an SAP Field Service Management service call are changed in SAP Field Service Management, these changes are replicated to the corresponding notes in the service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, service.

The same procedure applies to changed notes for an activity. If the notes of an SAP Field Service Management activity are changed in SAP Field Service Management, the changes are then replicated back to the corresponding notes in the service item in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, service.

Key steps:

1. The service manager dispatches the plan and releases the activity.
2. The technician starts working on the activity.
3. The technician updates time, material, and expenses.
4. The technician finishes work and closes the activity.

In SAP Field Service Management, a service call is automatically created once the service order is released in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. An inbound Application Programming Interface (API) takes care of this. The call contains activities and reserved materials needed for the service process. The service manager in SAP Field Service Management dispatches the plan/assigns the relevant service technician to do the job and releases the activity (or activities) to this service technician. An outbound API updates this information in the service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (in other words, the assigned service technician is visible in the service order).

The service technician receives the call on their mobile device as an activity and starts working. They update time, materials, and expenses in the activity. Once the work is done, the activity is closed. The service call and related objects are automatically updated.

Immediately after an already released service order is set back to In Process in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the status of the corresponding service call in SAP Field Service Management is automatically changed to New.

A service order can be set back to In Process either manually using the user interface, or implicitly (for example, as soon as an error occurs for a service order or one of its items) caused by an API call.

In case any change was executed on the service order header or item level since it was replicated to SAP Field Service Management using the release of the service order, this change is then replicated to SAP Field Service Management, along with the relevant status update.

Due to deviating data models in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP Field Service Management, only the main equipment is considered in the integration. If there are multiple equipment references assigned either at the service order header or service item level, only the main equipment is replicated to SAP Field Service Management.

It is recommended that the structure of items in an SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition service order follows some rules:

• The service items are the main items.
• Expense items are sub-items of the related service item.
• Service parts are sub-items of the related service item.

Specific expense products EXP_FSM_ACCOM, EXP_FSM_MEALS, EXP_FSM_TRAVEL and EXP_FSM_OTHER must be created in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and mapped to the existing SAP Field Service Management expense types when setting up the integration.

Key steps:

1. The service manager approves time and effort.
2. The service manager approves expenses and materials.

In SAP Field Service Management, the service manager now approves the time, effort, expenses, and materials that were updated in the service call by the service technician. These approvals create confirmations for the service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition through OData APIs.

Service reports and attachments created in SAP Field Service Management can be integrated back into the service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

After performing a service, a service technician creates a PDF summary report of all the performed work, expenses, and service parts for the service task and gets the signature of the customer on their mobile device. When checking out the activity, this PDF report is automatically assigned to the SAP Field Service Management activity as an attachment. The service technician can also attach other documents like pictures and log files.

These attachments can be replicated automatically to the relevant service item in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Key steps:

1. The customer service manager releases the confirmation for billing.
2. The billing clerk creates the invoice.

In SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the customer service manager sees the confirmations that were created based on the approvals in SAP Field Service Management. The customer service manager can now release these confirmations for billing. This creates a billing document request in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Based on the billing document request, a billing clerk now creates an invoice which leads to an open item in accounts receivable accounting (that is, integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, finance: scope item J59: Accounts Receivable).

When choosing the duplicate / duplicate for button at the activity level in SAP Field Service Management, a new activity is created in the same service call. Similarly, a new service item is then be added to the corresponding service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with the status Released.

The new activity is assigned to the specified service technician. Once the assignment is released in SAP Field Service Management, it is behaving in the same way as when assigning an activity manually to a service technician.

In SAP Field Service Management, after an activity has been assigned to a service technician and the assignment has been already released, this activity can still be unassigned from this service technician. When choosing the unassign button in SAP Field Service Management, a new activity is created under the same service call, but without a service technician assigned. Accordingly, a new service item is added in the corresponding service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, but without an executing service employee.

When an activity is duplicated in the SAP Field Service Management Dispatching Board, a new service item is created automatically in the corresponding service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The newly created service item is created at the same hierarchy level as the original service item.

Technically, it is not a copy of the service item within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, but it is created based on data that is sent from SAP Field Service Management (coming from the duplicated activity).

The service technician reports time effort, expenses, and materials under their own activity on the mobile app. The reviewer selects and approves the Time and Material (T&M) journal entries in SAP Field Service Management and then one or more service confirmations are generated in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

With each approval action, one service confirmation is generated for each activity. The selected Time and Material (T&M) entries of this activity are created as items of this service confirmation accordingly. If multiple time efforts, expenses, and materials for the same activity are approved in a batch, multiple service confirmation items are created within the corresponding service confirmation.

Based on prerequisites of the controlling process within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, one confirmation item must refer to one service order item.

When approving time effort, expenses and materials related to an activity in the SAP Field Service Management Time and Material Journal, a service confirmation is created and completed automatically.

When a service technician approves a material consumption, the service confirmation item always refers to the corresponding service part of the service order that is derived from the external ID of the reserved material that is passed in the payload.

If a technician does not consume an available reserved material, but creates a material effort on his mobile device, the system checks if the unplanned material can potentially refer to an available service part item of the service order, or if it needs to be added. There is a detailed logic available here that the system is following.

When a service call is created in SAP Field Service Management, a corresponding service order is created automatically in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

When an activity is created in SAP Field Service Management, a corresponding service item is created and released automatically in the relevant service order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

This process is meant for exceptional cases only, because the checks that are typically performed when a service order and/or its item is released in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (like a credit check, contract validity and others) are not performed in SAP Field Service Management, when the service call/activity is created. Furthermore, some data might not be determined unambiguously when the service item is added in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. This can lead to errors in the service order that have to be resolved manually.

Examples of data that might not be determined unambiguously include:

• Service order: service contract, service team, organizational data
• Service item: service contract

Even though the service order or the service item have not been created in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition initially, but in SAP Field Service Management, there is no distinction in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (with respect to follow-up processes like controlling integration) between orders initiated in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition or SAP Field Service Management.

When service confirmations for unplanned items are replicated from SAP Field Service Management to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the system automatically creates new service order items for each of the unplanned confirmation items. This is needed based on prerequisites of the controlling process, which requires a reference from each confirmation item to a service order item. The automatic creation of new items in this example is done in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition itself. This feature prevents unneeded follow-up processes for such newly created items, such as a credit check or the creation of a reservation for an unplanned service part.

To activate this feature, you have to do the following:

• Set the feature flag called CRMS4_SRVC_TRANS_UNPLANNED_ITEM in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
• Set the externalized parameter called Handle Unplanned Items in Backend of the iFlow called Route Payload from SAP Field Service Management to SAP S4HANA Cloud to value True.

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition – SAP Field Service Management integration currently supports fixed price service bundles (SVB4 and SVB6) within a fixed price service order (SV02) or a T&M service order (SV01). The sub-items are considered and replicated towards SAP Field Service Management as activities.

When replicating the sub-items to SAP Field Service Management, the spare parts cannot be assigned to one specific activity representing an SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition service item. Therefore, they are assigned to the service call.

Concerning confirmations: in a scenario where a service bundle is used, each service confirmation contains one service bundle item referring to the main bundle item of the service order.

Concerning unplanned expenses or service parts in a scenario where a service bundle is used: in contrast to the scenario where no service bundle is used, the unplanned service part or expense item is not created below the service item referring to the relevant SAP Field Service Management activity. It is however created directly below the service bundle main item.

When approving time effort, expenses, and materials related to an activity in the SAP Field Service Management Time and Material Journal, a service confirmation is created and completed automatically. The service confirmation always contains an additional item, referring to the main bundle item of the service order.

When saving a service contract in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, its service contract items with status Released are replicated to SAP Field Service Management as an SAP Field Service Management Service Contract.

If a service contract item is changed in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and released again, some of its information is updated to the SAP Field Service Management service contract: description, notes, start and end dates, and equipment.

SAP Field Service Management service contracts have no header / item structure. So each service contract item in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is corresponding to an SAP Field Service Management service contract.

The integration solution between SAP Field Service Management and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition supports the execution status of a service item in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, which is used to reflect the progress of a corresponding activity in SAP Field Service Management. This information helps you to stay up to date on the current status of the activity in SAP Field Service Management and to act immediately if its completion is at risk.

The following execution statuses of service items are used in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to reflect the activity statuses in SAP Field Service Management:

Over the years, the integration scenarios between SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP Field Service Management have been enhanced with various additional features. Use the SAP Help Portal (using https://help.sap.com) to find out more about these features.

Some examples are:

• Direct navigation from service orders in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to the related service calls in SAP Field Service Management using the service call IDs that are stored in the corresponding service orders.
• The possibility to replicate the mileage data recorded and approved in SAP Field Service Management to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. This allows for the reporting of the distance covered when completing a service and ensuring proper cost and revenue assignment in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
• The possibility to replicate the reserved quantity of stock service parts in a service order from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to SAP Field Service Management. In this way, it is possible to provide the exact number of stock service parts that have been reserved. This information is used for the further planning of service execution.
• The possibility to replicate the date on which expenses were incurred, mileage was covered, or stock service parts were used as a service rendered date in service confirmations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

• Service contracts can be replicated to SAP Field Service Management directly from within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, without the need for using any middleware. This feature reduces the complexity of the integration and ensures improved performance. In addition, this integration solution also supports the initial replication and synchronization of service contract items from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition as service contracts into SAP Field Service Management.

  This integration has been achieved in the following way: communication scenario SAP_COM_0678 for service contract replication replaces the scenario SAP_COM_0436.

  To activate this feature, you have to perform the following steps:

  • Create a communication system for the communication scenario Service - SAP Field Service Management - Integration.
  • Create a communication arrangement for the communication scenario Service - SAP Field Service Management - Integration.
  • Configure the language for notes of service contracts in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition that are to be replicated to SAP Field Service Management in your configuration environment.
  • Define the mapping of text types of service contracts in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to text attributes in SAP Field Service Management in your configuration environment.
  • Configure SAP Application Interface Framework for the recipient name FSM_SC_RECEIVERS.
  • Delete the communication arrangement for service contract (SAP_COM_0436).
  • Undeploy the integration flow Replicate Service Contract from SAP S4HANA Cloud Public Edition to SAP Field Service Management.