SharePoint Integration with SAP Helps a Manufacturing Firm Extend and Enhance Service Management Operations

Business Need

Jyoti is a leading manufacturer, supplier, and global exporter of a wide range of CNC machines and allied equipment.

As a reputed and accomplished organization, it was imperative that Jyoti ensured its products were of premium quality and delivered maximum satisfaction and utility to customers. To achieve this, they needed to effectively manage business processes and collaboration between their service engineers, especially tasks related to machine defects/complaints and service requests.

Jyoti wanted to engage with a technology partner to help integrate SharePoint with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, SAP, to combine the collaborative and ready-to-use capabilities of SharePoint with the business data and processes of SAP.

Solution and Approach

Synoptek (formerly Indusa) developed a SharePoint based complaint tracking portal for Jyoti that manages tasks related to machine complaints, including maintaining complaint records, assigning tasks to service engineers, managing payments, and checking the availability of replacement parts.

Key modules incorporated in the solution include:

• Data related to the client, machine, model, and spare part fetched from SAP for every complaint through the SAP-SharePoint integration.
• Complaint notification, assignments, and appointments managed by the service engineers.
• Document management system with information about the history cards of machines, annual maintenance contracts (AMC), service and purchase orders.
• Service report with visit, customer, and machine information through SAP.
• Automatic notifications to the store for delivery of spare parts in case of replacement, and to the purchase and planning department when spare parts are not available.
• Data from SAP regarding payment details with quote and sales order, and purchase order number maintained in SharePoint.
• Customer payment information, including service charges and spare part repair or replacement cost.
• Reconciliation of quote vs final payment amount received from the customer.
• Management of daily logs, payments made to service engineers, and monthly revenue generated.

Key user roles in the solution include the following:

• Service engineering: This module helps service engineers track the number of assigned visits and expenses and provides information about the status of service requests.
• In-charge: The person in-charge can assign various tasks and track them. They can maintain a check on the number of visits taken by a service engineer to fulfill the service request and can monitor the productivity of the service engineer. They can approve requests for replacements of machines/parts.
• Admin: Administrator can review service requests, common problems in machines and the actions taken by service engineers.

Business Results

The integration between SAP and SharePoint has helped Jyoti provide better transparency amongst their users in terms of their reporting, and in maintaining track of allocation of work and availability of service engineers.

Familiarity and experience of the users in developing system interfaces allows them to perform tasks for core business processes smoothly and quickly, enabling smooth user adoption of the portal.

The service engineering module facilitates tracking the performance of service engineers in terms of tasks and requests.

Central administration and control allows administrators to govern the entire system.

Integration of SharePoint and SAP empowered Jyoti to increase its business process efficiency and improved collaboration between service engineers.