Overview

Organization – Israel Electric Corporation (IEC), Power Company

Sector – Power, infrastructure

Problem – Service completion reports weren’t issued in time creating other problems. In addition, ABAP-based SAP report wasn’t able to fix the issue. 

Solution – With InsightZAP (formerly known as InsightSAP), the Company was able to create an automated report that surfaced the Service Completion Report which exceeded the defined SLA agreements.

Background

Service Completion Reports are submitted by service providers when a job is completed. All types of service providers require to submit a Service Completion Report that needs to be approved by the Company, prior to issuing an invoice. This is important for several reasons:

(i) the need to pay to suppliers on time (certain service orders could not be paid unless there is an invoice issued, whereby an invoice cannot be issued in some cases unless a Service Completion Report has been submitted);

(ii) Respect to the committed SLA and Process is important for the Company’s reputation;

(iii) Avoid potential relationship or legal disputes between suppliers and the Company in case there are different recollections of memory or understanding on whether a service has been supplied as required.

Pain Point

Until recently, an ABAP Query that extracted information from SAP Material Management (‘MM’) module has been used in order to identify delays in the submission of the Service Completion Reports. However, the ABAP Report could not have answered many questions, nor considered nuances that would have made the monitoring report effective, relevant and valuable. For instance, the ABAP query was not sensitive to different types of service providers, who are bound to different terms of SLA. Furthermore, the ABAP Query did not count business days, but only calendar days. In addition, the ABAP Query was not capable of clustering service providers by organizational units, and dispatch notifications and reports accordingly.

Following a monthly extraction of the ABAP query, several hours of work were required in order to send some information, not all of which is relevant, to key stakeholders. However, since the information was generic, and not tailored to the circumstances nor to the audience, it created some frustrating situations in which the internal stakeholders or the supplier needed to prove that the terms or data derived from the report were invalid or wrong, as they did not reflect their situation, the job performed or the profile of the supplier

Another issue emerged when in certain cases invoices were issued before the Service Completion Report had been submitted, at times without the internal confirmation that the invoice reflected the actual word that was ordered or that took place.

Altogether, the Company was exposed to reputation, legal, financial risks, and invested inefficiently in a repetitive manual process.

Solution: 

The baseline ALV report which was enhanced by Insight was an ABAP Query that was previously produced by the Company. This meant that a past investment was not buried, but rather re-utilized and improved.

There were over a dozen field columns with data from various tables and sources as well as from various formula calculations which were added to the baseline chart. Amongst those columns, the following are interesting to highlight:

• Organizational affiliation data of the vendor who submitted the Service Report.
• Business Unit’s Cluster: several business units needed to be re-classified and clustered together specifically for this report, in order to assure a more accurate affiliation of suppliers to them, followed by a better dispatch of specifically sliced report data. In order to do so, the Company created an excel spreadsheet, converted it with Insight into an ALV format, and associated the given cluster in with the organizational unit
• Number of Business Days count for completed service orders that did not yet receive the submitted Service completion report.
• Various vendor (supplier) indicators, which were retrieved from the EKKO table.

Result

With InsightZAP, The Company was able to create an automated report that surfaced the Service Completion Report which exceeded the defined SLA agreements. This was done by creating a filter with Insight that selected the Service Completion Reports that exceeded in terms of the number of business days the allowed standards. Additionally, the Company could now be sensitive to the nuances between different service provider categories when measuring the adherence to the SLA standards, since each supplier category has characteristics, constraints and timeline different from the other’s.

By using Publisher, key stakeholders, both from Financial and Procurement departments, receive on a regular basis by email information of the incompleted or late Service Completion Reports, only relevant for them. If their portfolio of suppliers have all submitted their reports on time, they will not receive any spam messages.

The Company could have addressed the business need by triggering a standard ABAP development project. However, the Company decided to use InsightZAP instead for several reasons:

(i) Less than 50% of the net development time was invested in creating the report in Insight.

(ii) The quality of the development would not have been as equal in terms of quality of the Insight output, since there were various elements at this operational report which were almost impossible to produce in standard development, especially without any development errors (i.e. re-classification of suppliers and clustering them in a structure relevant only for this report). Other functionalities (such as the accurate dispatching of information by business role) would have been a heavy development investment.

(iii) A development would have required multiple resources to address the business need, e.g. developers, QA, Basis, and investment in composing a detailed requirement document. With InsightZAP, the business analyst was independent in creating the report, thus Time-to-Market and Time-to-Value were dramatically shorter.

(iv) Future considerations: in case of future adjustments and/or system upgrades, a developed report would have needed to be re-developed in order to accommodate any adjustments in content or in the way SAP is structuring its transactions or business entities. With InsightZAP, this risk is eliminated. Any adjustment would be made in minutes, on Production.

(v) Additional possibilities for this report, included within InsightZAP Suite, are considered such as the ability to Pull reports by authorized stakeholders (rather than only scheduled Push) or providing access to stakeholders through SAP UI5 (Fiori), in both cases within seconds, without the need to develop.