Service contracts and equipment in SAP Business One: equipment cards, contract types, templates and SLA dates, and where preventive maintenance stops

The equipment card: one serial number, its whole life.

In SAP Business One the machine at the customer's site is an Equipment Card (Service → Equipment Card). SAP's help calls the cards "the database that contains all serial number items that you sold or purchased and for which service can be provided". One card is one serial number: the item, the customer, the address where it stands, the default technician and territory, the delivery and invoice it left on, the contracts that cover it and every service call about it.

A card has a status, and the status decides what you can do with it:

• Active: shipped and in use. The normal status, and with Loaned (a temporary replacement at the customer) the only one a service call accepts.
• In Repair Lab: back with you for repair; it cannot be shipped to another customer.
• Returned and Terminated: back in your warehouse, or out of use. A terminated card cannot be added to a contract or a call.

Cards created by the delivery.

You can type a card by hand, but B1 can also create it for you. In Administration → System Initialization → General Settings, tab Inventory, subtab Items, choose what makes a serial number unique in Unique Serial Numbers by (Serial Number or Mfr Serial No.) and tick Auto. Create Equipment Card. From then on every delivery or A/R invoice for a serial-numbered item creates a card, with the serial number taken from the stock transaction. That is the main reason to manage service equipment by serial number: batches do not get a card. More on that choice in our guide to batch and serial numbers.

B1 is careful with serial numbers that already have a card. If a returned unit goes back to the same customer, the existing card simply becomes Active again; if it goes to a different customer, B1 creates a new card for that customer and sets the old one to Terminated. Equipment the customer bought elsewhere never passes a delivery, so its card is always made by hand, and it shows up only in the Service module, not in inventory. A card can be deleted only while it has no delivery or invoice, no service calls and no valid contract.

Service contracts: what is covered, and how fast.

A Service Contract (Service → Service Contract) records what a customer is entitled to. Its type decides the scope:

• Customer (Business Partner in the window): every item the customer bought from you. The Items tab stays empty.
• Item Group: everything in one or more item groups, whatever the serial number.
• Serial Number: named units only, each with its own start, end and termination date on the Items tab.

On the General tab you set a Response Time and a Resolution Time, the status and the Service Type: Regular, created by hand, or Warranty, which B1 can create on its own. A new contract starts as Draft; only Approved entitles the customer to service, and On Hold and Terminated do not. The Coverage tab sets the days and hours of service, whether holidays count, and whether parts, labour and travel are included. A contract cannot be deleted: you end it with a termination date. Renewal with a Reminder gives an alert before the end date; renewing is then still your job.

Templates, and warranty contracts that make themselves.

Most companies sell a handful of contract types over and over. Those belong in Administration → Setup → Service → Contract Templates: a name, the contract type, response and resolution time in hours or days, a duration in months, renewal and reminder, and the same coverage as on the contract. A contract based on a template gets all of that filled in. A template you no longer sell is marked Expired, so nobody can pick it for a new contract or a renewal.

A template of the type Warranty can also be put on the item: in Item Master Data, for an item managed by serial numbers, choose it in Warranty Template. With automatic equipment cards switched on, every delivery or A/R invoice of that item then creates the card and a warranty contract in one go, one contract per warranty template on the document. For a manufacturer or dealer that is the cheapest bit of administration in the whole module: the installed base and the warranty period build themselves while you ship.

How a service call picks up contract and equipment.

This is where the setup pays off. In Service → Service Call:

• Enter the serial number first and B1 fills in the customer from the equipment card. Only cards that are Active or Loaned and belong to that customer can be chosen.
• Contract No. and End Date show the contract that covers the unit, or "No Contract". You can still save a call without a contract or warranty, but B1 warns you.
• On the General tab, Response By and Resolution By are calculated from the contract's response and resolution time and its coverage hours. Response On is set by the first closed phone call or meeting activity, or by a solution or resolution; Resolution On by a solution or resolution.
• Once the call has been responded to, the contract number is fixed. A technician set on the customer's master data becomes the default on new cards for that customer.

So the quality of your SLA dates depends entirely on the cards and contracts behind them. A call on a serial number without a card, or a contract left in Draft, gets no committed dates at all.

Preventive maintenance: where standard B1 stops.

A contract in B1 knows what is covered. It does not know what has to happen. There is no maintenance plan, no interval per unit, and nothing that creates a service call because a machine is due. What a contract can drive is money: on its Sales Data tab you link a recurring transaction template, which produces a draft invoice every period. The visit itself is not part of it.

Companies work around it with a recurring meeting or task in the B1 calendar per customer, or with a spreadsheet of due dates, and someone turns the reminder into a service call by hand. That works for twenty machines. Beyond that, these are the gaps planners tell us about:

• No interval per unit or per contract, and no meter reading on the equipment card to plan by running hours.
• No structure in the installed base. A card knows which card it replaced, not which installation it is part of.
• Renewal is an alert. Nobody gets a new contract proposed; someone has to act on the reminder.
• SLA dates without a warning. Response By and Resolution By are on the call, and reports such as Response Time by Assigned to look back. Nothing says in the morning which calls will breach today.

Planning boards, checklists and the technician's day are a separate story, told in our guide to the standard Service module.

Before you start: a checklist.

• Serviced items managed by serial number, and Unique Serial Numbers by chosen before the first delivery.
• Auto. Create Equipment Card switched on, and cards entered by hand for equipment you service but did not sell.
• A contract template per contract type you sell, with realistic response and resolution times and coverage hours, and a Warranty template on each item that carries a warranty.
• Holidays entered under Administration → System Initialization → Company Details, tab Accounting Data, so coverage and SLA dates skip them.
• Contracts set to Approved, not left in Draft, and someone who owns the renewal reminders.
• A default technician and territory on each customer, so new cards get them.
• A decision on preventive maintenance: who turns due dates into service calls, from which list, and how often.

How KoonFSM approaches it.

KoonFSM, our field service add-on for SAP Business One, builds on exactly these objects. Service calls, scheduling lines, contracts, equipment cards and attachments stay the standard B1 objects; KoonFSM adds its own fields and tables with the KFSM prefix and writes everything through the Service Layer, never directly into the database. On top of the contracts and equipment already in B1 it adds planned maintenance and SLA monitoring, and the planner's work queue shows unplanned calls by SLA. That part is built and tested against a simulated SAP, together with the planning board and the technician app. KoonFSM is in development: the next step is a test on a real SAP Business One 10.0 and a pilot with real technicians, and there is no price and no date yet. The product page says where it stands.

Sources: SAP Business One 10.0 help documentation (Working with Equipment Cards, Automatically Created Equipment Cards, Enabling the Automatic Creation of Equipment Cards and of Contracts, Working with Service Contracts, Service Contract window and tabs, Contract Templates - Setup, Service Call window and General tab, Managing Recurring Transactions from Service Contracts, Activity recurrence); Database Tables Reference 10.0 (OINS, OCTR, OCTT, OSCL). SAP and SAP Business One are trademarks of SAP SE.