Managing Administration for SAP Field Service Management

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to distinguish between various configurations at the account and company levels in SAP Field Service Management.

Introduction to Administration for SAP Field Service Management

Who This Course Is For

Welcome to our course, Exploring SAP Field Service Management Fundamentals.

This course has been created with beginner consultants in mind. Its aim is to establish a foundational understanding of field service management using SAP, providing you the proficiency to optimize your client services.

Regardless if you're starting your journey in the field or desiring to broaden your professional expertise, this course will lead you through the essentials of Field Service Management.

From understanding the basics, scheduling and dispatching, to managing field service orders and mobile application management, this course will provide a comprehensive guide to all that you need to kick start your consulting career in SAP Field Service Management.

Why This Course

Imagine a service enterprise grappling with poor scheduling, mismanaged service orders, and issues in utilizing their mobile application effectively. These issues can lead to customer dissatisfaction, loss of business and reduced operational efficiency.

As a consultant in SAP Field Service Management, this course will lay out the critical foundations for you to address these challenges. You'll learn how to optimize service order management, streamline scheduling, dispatching, and how to make the most out of SAP’s mobile applications. This course will provide tools to enhance overall service quality significantly.

Equipped with these skills, you'll be in a position to offer a high-value service to your clients, drastically improving their operational efficiency while minimizing service disruption. Simultaneously, you'll be furthering your professional development in the digital service landscape, setting the stage for continued growth and success in this domain.

What You Will Do

In this course, we’ll tap into a variety of resources to enrich your learning experience. You will dive into deeply detailed content that addresses the fundamentals of SAP Field Service Management.

To help solidify these ideas, we’ve incorporated informative visuals to represent the key notions and procedures. Alongside this, we offer demonstration videos that document the field service management software in action, supplying practical perspectives into its features and capabilities.

We also present content-related videos to further unfold and exemplify important points, reinforcing your understanding and retention of the information.

This blend of reading material, visual aids, and video clips promises a comprehensive and engaging learning journey. So, if you are prepared to explore the world of SAP Field Service Management, let's get started.

Unit 1: Key Topics

In Unit 1, we will be discovering the vital components of SAP Field Service Management (FSM). The unit is divided into two lessons. Lesson One is chiefly concerned with system architecture and configurations at the account and company levels. You will learn about the role and location of FSM data centers (also known as clusters), the difference between an account and a company within FSM and how they are provisioned, and how data is securely managed and segregated within FSM.

Additionally, you will explore the variety of configurations possible at the account and company levels, the types of clients and user interfaces available for interaction with FSM, and ways of managing user access in FSM. The lesson also covers the different types of companies recognized within FSM and why mixing of certain company types is not recommended, the importance of understanding and managing Roles in FSM, the role of Admin Policy Groups in defining user permissions, and the processes of logging into the FSM admin console and end-user interface.

Lesson Two focuses on data management and monitoring within FSM. In this lesson, you'll explore the use of CoreSQL to retrieve data from the company database, recommended maximum data volumes for optimum system performance, and tools like Data Retention and Data Obsolescence Management to manage data volumes. You will also learn about various features available to monitor the overall solution, such as audit logs, authentication & authorization events, and business rule execution logs.

Component Landscape for SAP Field Service Management

Field Service Management accounts are hosted in one of five data centers around the world:

USA
Ireland/Europe
Germany
China
Australia

These data centers are also referred to as clusters. No data is exchanged between the clusters, and no data is exchanged between the Field Service Management accounts. Hosting is provided by Amazon Web Services.

A customer has to commit to exactly one data center per cloud account, that is, the customer's data is not distributed over different data centers.

The tenant (cloud account) is provisioned at the cluster level. For example, if a user is physically located in the US and trying to access an account provisioned in Australia, the data will be accessed in the Australia cluster.

An account is the highest structural element in SAP Field Service Management. Within the account, there can be many companies and users.

Explanations:

An account is the highest structural level in Field Service Management. It can be compared to a system in SAP S/4HANA, but is not equivalent to that.
A company is one of the key structural units in SAP Field Service Management. One or more companies can be associated with an account.
A company can reflect an actual company, or a department or branch within an organization. A company can be linked to an organizational unit in SAP S/4HANA.
Each company has its own database, separate from other company databases. No information is exchanged between company databases.
Organizational structures (OrgLevels, regions) can be objects within the companies and will be discussed in a later Unit.

A company is a database, separate from other companies, that holds configurations, master data, and transaction data. An account can contain multiple companies. Each company has its own database, separate from other company databases. No data is exchanged between company databases.

The FSM company can, for example, reflect a legal entity, a department or a branch within an organization. The company can be linked to an organizational unit in S/4HANA. Organizational structures (like organizational levels, or regions) can also be objects within the companies.

An end user exists within the account and can have access to one or more companies within it. Users who have administration privileges can also access the account as a whole, in order to manage and configure it.

Configuration on the account level affects all companies within the account, while configuration on the company level affects only that particular company.

Configuration on the account level affects all companies within the account, while configuration on the company level affects only that particular company.

Some examples of configurations on account level include:

User management
Authorization/permission management
Access management
Client management
Session properties
creation or deletion of companies

Some examples of configurations on company level include:

Company information
Configurations for:
- Company settings
- Business rules (custom logic)
- Custom objects
- Screen configurations
- Service workflows
- Translations
Configuration backup and distribution
Integration properties

These configurations are explored in the subsequent sections of this training.

SAP Field Service Management consists of various clients and user interfaces for users to interact with the solution.

Administration console/web UI for managing the system, including users, companies, and permissions
End-user web UI (shell) for planning and dispatching, master data management, and so on, or for managing specific company-level settings. The web UI itself consists of several different clients, such as:
- Planning and Dispatching
- Master Data Management
- Smartforms and Feedback
Mobile clients for technicians to use in the field. These mobile applications are only intended for execution of activities, not for dispatching. Dedicated mobile apps exist for iOS, Android, and MS Windows.

End users interact with only one company at a time. Within the UI, they can switch to another company, provided that they have access.

Note

For the web UIs, chromium-based browsers are recommended, for example, Google Chrome, MS Edge, or Mozilla Firefox.

Administrators can create custom clients that are used to identify and manage permissions of integrated systems.

SAP Field Service Management recognizes three types of companies: standalone, ERP, or demo. Each company type has their own specific use cases.

Standalone companies are used for cases without any integration, or with integrations based on SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI). CPI integration is used when connecting FSM with:
- SAP S/4HANA Service (Cloud and OnPrem)
- SAP C4C
- SAP CRM
Companies of type "ERP" is used when integrating with:
- SAP ECC CS/PM
- S/4HANA PM and S/4HANA CS in compatibility mode
- SAP Business One
A Demo company comes with some sample data and configurations, and is therefore useful for demonstration and testing. It is not intended for integration.

The mixing of ERP companies with other company types within the same account is not recommended. This is because certain integration platforms impose their own restrictions on user permissions, which are account-wide. This can lead to unexpected permission restrictions extending to all companies in the account.

Access Management and Data Security

Field Service Management (FSM) offers various ways of managing access for users, clients, and interfaces:

Password Policy: For example, password expiry, requirements regarding password complexity.
Session Configuration: You can set the number of minutes a session will last before the user must login again.
Federated Authentication: Uses SAML 2.0 and SAP Identity Authentication or Microsoft Active Directory to provide users with Single Sign-on access to all Field Service Management applications.
Client Management: Custom Client Id and Client Secret can be generated for systems that use the FSM APIs. Client permissions are determined by assigning a User Group.

Data Security:

Cloud account access is protected by a cloud-based, fine-grained authentication and authorization system.
OAuth token-based, mobile device-to-cloud access allows for login-free app access when the app is used in regular intervals.
Offline data for the mobile apps is protected by native mobile platform data encryption mechanisms.
Data communication with the cloud is exclusively using SSL.

SAP Field Service Management supports data security in various ways, such as the following:

Authentication from mobile devices via protection defined in the cloud.
Optional Single Sign-On with Federated Authentication.
Encryption of data downloaded to mobile devices, without an option to export that data.
Protection by device/OS manufacturers (for example Apple or Google).
Encrypted data communications with the FSM Cloud.

Account Configuration

In FSM, a User represents a single entity that can access and maintain data in an Account or a Company. User data can be maintained in the administration console.

In FSM, a User represents a single entity that can access and maintain data in an Account or a Company. Users are represented in a Company by the corresponding Person record. A User needs to have both a Admin Policy Group (permission group) as well as a related Person record to be able to access Company-related data and features.

On Account level, under Admin → Users, you can view and maintain the corresponding data:

User account information
User Role assignments for the permissions on account level
Admin Policy Group assignments for permissions on company level
link between User and Person records in the individual companies

For a given company, the user is linked to a person (and UnifiedPerson) record in that company. Within the company, the person is referenced as the one who creates and maintains data records, for example, on the createdBy or lastChangedBy fields.

Roles define what the user can do on the account level, relating to objects or settings relevant across the account.

Roles define what the user can do on the account level, relating to objects or settings relevant across the account. Examples of such permissions include:

Create Admin Policy Group
Update User
Update Password Policy
Delete Client

FSM accounts come with several Roles out of the box, such as USER, SUPERUSER, or AUDIT_LOGS. The standard roles can't be changed and in some cases having one of these standard roles is a necessary prerequisite for accessing certain features. It is however possible to define your own roles, with the corresponding permissions.

A user can have multiple roles.

User Policy Groups define what the user can do on the company level. A User can belong to only 1 User Group per Company.

User Policy Groups define what the user can do on the company level. These permissions apply to objects and functions relevant to, and within, a particular company. When the first company is created in an account, FSM automatically creates a number of pre-configured Admin Policy Groups, including for example:

Admin
Dispatcher
Service Technician

Admin Policy Groups define permissions to create, read, update, and/or delete (CRUD) records for all available data objects (~database tables) in the database of an FSM Company. The permissions can be set individually for each data object type. Some examples:

Create Activity = None
Read Business Partner = All
Read TimeEffort = Own
Read Service Call = Objects in same and child org Level (of the user)

Additionally, Admin Policy Groups define:

which Clients and functionality the corresponding users have access to
UI Permissions: visibility of the corresponding menu or permission to perform related actions
certain "Sync Rules" that influence what data is synchronized to mobile clients

A User can belong to only 1 User Group per Company.

The administration console for your FSM account can be accessed via a web browser on your laptop or desktop. To log in, user must have the SUPERUSER role.

Tologon to the admin console for administration of your FSM account, use your the web browser on your desktop or laptop to navigate to https://{cluster}.fsm.cloud.sap/admin/login/auth where {cluster} corresponds to the data center associated with the account (us, eu, de, cn, au). There, type in your account name. Depending on the authentication setup, the system then logs you in (in case of single sign-on) or you're asked to provide additional information, like username and password.

There are four options to sign into the admin application:

Sign in with account (provide the FSM cloud account name and FSM cloud account password)
Sign in with user (possible only for users having the SUPERUSER role)
Single sign-on (SSO) (configuration of SSO required)

To logon to the web UI for end users, use your the web browser on your desktop or laptop to navigate to https://{cluster}.fsm.cloud.sap/auth/login, enter the account name and follow the steps on screen. In addition to the logon options mentioned above, end users also have the possibility to login with their email address, if this option has been activated by an administrator.

Login to the admin console is reserved for users that have the role of SUPERUSER or EXTERNAL_SUPERUSER.

Note

Chromium-based browsers are recommended, for example, Google Chrome, MS Edge, or Mozilla Firefox.

Create a New Company

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Maintain Users

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