Hi,
Use cases
Our client have an offering in their Catalogue whereby they will supply, install and maintain equipment “as a service”.
For example, an offering could be a WiFi solution that can be installed in any of his customers.
Our client would supply and install this WiFi solution under a minimum term contract arrangement with their customers.
The material would be purchased from their vendors, received in their central warehouse, shipped to and installed on the customer site by one of their field engineers, and once installed the contract becomes active. Our client would maintain the equipment under the contract throughout the contract.
All these activities would be managed in Alliance.
In addition, Our client might provide the same technical solution to the customer, but under a more traditional arrangement whereby the equipment is invoiced to the customer once shipped / installed.
It is of critical importance to Our client that the Ownership of all the material installed on the customer sites is tracked in the system. Under the “As a Service” arrangement, the material is owned by Our Client. Under the traditional arrangement, the material is owned by their customers.
Standard Process Alliance
The standard processes in Alliance to create Sales Orders with “STSI” appear to fit well with the needs of our client.
The Contract Template can be defined as Rental, or not, to identify whether the arrangement is “As a Service” or not.
Associated prices can be defined in the price books for Rental (As a Service), Contract (traditional arrangement), and also Installation prices. The List prices of the material can be set to 0 in the case of As a Service.
However, we are unsure what, if any, functionality exists in Alliance to track the Ownership of the material, once it is installed on the customer sites.
On the installed items screen, the Ownership field should identify who owns the item -
Based on our tests, every installed item seems to get created with the Ownership value of OWN, regardless of the contract it was installed under.
Questions
Whilst we could fairly easily handle the ownership issue through either Process Flows or some custom development, before deciding on the solution we would appreciate responses to the following questions :
1/ Ownership
In the Installed Item Help (GN-10), it indicates that there are 5 system values for Ownership, including the value RENT
These appear in the system –
We wondered if there was any system functionality behind the RENT value – having searched through all the documentation, we cannot find any
2/Process
Is the Sales Order + STSI with Rental Contracts the best way of handling the customer’s requirements? Is there another way of handling the “As a Service” scenario, where the ownership of the material is automatically tracked in the system?
Thanks for your help
Regards
anthony