Equipment Management: General Information

You perform the configuration of the equipment management functionality if the company that you are configuring tracks services performed on pieces of equipment and their components, and if the company sells equipment to customers and later provides maintenance for it.

This topic provides a general overview of the configuration steps that you have to perform before you start entering equipment-related entities and processing service contacts in the system.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn how to perform the initial configuration for the equipment management functionality. In particular, you will do the following:

• Learn about the settings that have to be specified
• Enable the needed system features
• Specify the minimum required settings for the equipment management functionality

System Features to Be Enabled

To be able to configure and use the equipment management functionality in the system, you need to first enable the following features on the Enable/Disable Features (CS101000) form:

• Service Management: Is required for service management; allows you to configure service order processing.
• Equipment Management: Allows users to manage and track equipment as well as process equipment service contracts.

Prerequisites

The company configuration, sales order management configuration, and service management configuration must be completed before you implement the service management functionality. For details, see Company Without Branches, Order Management with Inventory, and Basic Service Management Configuration.

Before you start implementing equipment management functionality in the system, on the Numbering Sequences (CS201010) form, the numbering sequence for equipment entities has to be created in the system.

After all prerequisites have been met and the necessary entities have been created, you can specify equipment management preference settings, including warranty settings and billing.

Configuration of Warranty Calculation

On the Equipment Management Preferences (FS100300) form, you select how the system determines the start date for the calculation of warranty periods. You select one of the option buttons under Calculate Warranty From as follows:

• If the warranty period is calculated from the sales date of the equipment or component, you select Sales Order Date. The date of the sales order document is used as the start date of the warranty period.
• If the warranty period is calculated from the installation date of the equipment or component, you select Appointment Date. The actual date of the appointment is used as the start date of the warranty period.
• If the warranty period is calculated from the earliest date between the sales date and the installation date, you select The Earliest of Both Dates.
• If the warranty period is calculated from the latest date between the sales date and the installation date, you select The Latest of Both Dates.

Configuration of Billing Settings

For service contracts with standardized billing, in the Billing Settings section of the Equipment Management Preferences (FS100300) form, you have to specify the type of the billing document to be generated. You do one of the following under Generated Billing Documents:

• If company generates billing documents for service contracts with services only, you select the AR Documents option button.
• If company generates billing documents for service contracts with both services and inventory items that were sold to customers along with the services, you select the Sales Orders option button. With this option selected, you can create shipments if needed and add additional freight costs.

When you have selected the document type, the default settings for it to be used in the billing documents appear on the form; specify the needed settings.

To configure the system to automatically activate the next period when an invoice is generated for the previous one, you select the Automatically Activate Upcoming Period check box.