Europe-wide service management between field and office staff

The TAM (Technical Asset Management) project was developed and implemented for a well-known customer in the dialysis sector. The project focused on the provision of seamless support and maintenance services for medical equipment and machines through the appropriate service technicians in a European environment. Following the development of the TAM software for field staff on a Lotus Notes basis with a SAP interface, this project now finds application in Germany as well as in many European subsidiaries.

The field technician can now access all the required master data from SAP on his laptop when carrying out comparable service activities and evaluating machine data from various international locations. This greatly facilitates the creation and electronic transfer of service reports. The reports can be processed in SAP by the office staff and the subsequent billing procedure can also executed with greater speed. The performance of the technician and the billing parameters are also greatly improved as the master data provides a solid evaluation basis (incl. contract-related information) and statistical evaluations of the device history and error codes.

In addition, the technician can check stock levels and have follow-up orders forwarded to the service personnel via e-mail. He simply selects the spare parts that were used from his stocks and after they have been transferred to SAP they will be subtracted from his consignment stocks.

The technician then carries out a replication with the server in the morning or evening thus ensuring that all completed reports are transferred to SAP. In SAP, the transferred data is checked against the SAP master data. The reports are saved as “service orders” and are added to the unfilled orders so that they can be accessed by the service personnel for approval and billing purposes. The process is rounded off with numerous evaluation possibilities that have been implemented in SAP for the machines (incl. the complete history) and the service reports.

Through the successful establishment of a link between the centralized SAP system and the flexible possibilities of a Lotus Notes application, the customer's ultimate objective of achieving smooth cooperation between the technician in the field and office staff has now been met.