Search

MORE TRANSPARENCY FOR ON-SITE SERVICE IN THE FOOD RETAIL INDUSTRY

With the introduction of SAP FSM, Syskoplan Reply optimizes the dispatching planning of a food retailer's service technicians.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

Service technicians play a significant role in food retail when it comes to urgent technical maintenance work to keep stores running smoothly.

Against this background, the experts from Syskoplan Reply were responsible for a project at a food retailer with several hundred stores in Germany, which ensures the operational readiness of the IT systems in its stores with over 50 decentralized technicians. These technicians are working both remotely and on-site to resolve faults that occur at short notice, to carry out planned maintenance work, or to implement new installation and conversion projects.


INITIAL SITUATION AND REQUIREMENTS

Prior to the start of the project, the planning of the technicians and their feedback from field service activities was carried out with very little system support, which led to a need for optimization on the customer side.


As a result, the following requirements were identified:
  • full transparency of technician availability and the ability to quickly and efficiently reschedule service calls to ensure fast response times to outages and high utilization rates
  • efficient and clear planning and monitoring of long service projects in just a few steps for optimal support of service dispatchers
  • evaluation of incurred expenses to verify the correct amount of fees for maintenance services and to achieve operational goals
  • correctness, timeliness, and completeness of service confirmations to achieve fast billing with low rework and error rates for services not billed on a flat-rate basis

INTRODUCTION OF SAP FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT

To meet these requirements, Syskoplan Reply experts implemented the cloud-based SAP Field Service Management system (SAP FSM) using a hybrid project methodology.

In five workshop days, a project backlog was created from the functional requirements and integration requirements. For the biggest part, the SAP FSM product standard could be used. Enhancements were mainly necessary for the automation of certain process steps and specific analysis requirements.

FOCUS ON USER ACCEPTANCE

To ensure the correctness and completeness of the requirements, the workshops were held together with the key users of the future system. Subsequently, the requirements were implemented in an agile process model in three sprints, allowing rapid feedback to be obtained through user testing. After the implementation phase, user training took place in a train-the-trainer process to familiarize the users with the implemented functions.

The technical go-live was then carried out by the team. Improvement ideas were collected in a backlog and implemented in a short optimization sprint. The chosen approach meant that users were continuously involved in the system implementation and optimization, and it was possible to achieve a particularly high level of user acceptance.

INTEGRATION OF BACKEND AND SERVICE DESK SYSTEMS

As cloud-based software, SAP FSM offers easy-to-use interfaces. Therefore, integration with the SAP ERP backend system and a third-party service desk system was established so that up-to-date master data is always available in the service processes and on-site service cases can be created directly from first-level support.


PROCESS OPTIMIZATION AND BASIS FOR ANALYSES

With the implementation of SAP FSM, the experts at Syskoplan Reply were able to achieve the following goals in a project with a food retailer:
  • increasing transparency for the dispatchers and thus speeding up response times for critical operations
  • optimization of field service planning and execution by eliminating manual steps
  • acceleration of the overall process through better data quality and faster invoicing
  • establishment of a structured data basis for the analysis of important key figures

  • strip-0

    Syskoplan Reply

    Syskoplan Reply, specialized in consulting services and the implementation of SAP technologies, is gearing its offers towards customers that are preparing for the future and use SAP solutions as the core digital platform for their company. Syskoplan Reply uses the latest SAP technologies such as SAP Leonardo, SAP Cloud Platform and enterprise applications such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP SCM, SAP SRM and SAP Analytics to implement solutions for its customers. The Digital Experience is a core area of expertise of Syskoplan Reply with the SAP C4/HANA Customer Experience Portfolio, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, Mobile and SAP Fiori.