Dear all,
I am working in a B1 function extension project and hoping the community will shed me some light. The company I am working for is changing the business model from purely wholesale/distribution to have some field service added to deals if needed. So under such circumstances we will have some non-inventory items included in a sales document (SO => Delivery => AR Invoice) in order to track labour costs or travelling time while selling the tangible inventory items. But this becomes a very time consuming issue when some out-sourced/sub-contracted labour costs occur - we have to create PO/GRPO to record the costs and update the SO in order to make sure we are not getting paid less than what we have paid out.
In the short term, I am wondering if it's possible to have both non-inventory and inventory items in the same document (Sales Order is basically the starting point where to trigger the sales process in SAP)?
For the long run, we would like to extend the system by using add-ons or customization. I have been walked through some popular job costing/project management add-ons in the market, to be honest, those scheduling and reporting features are very attractive to us and they are on our wish-list. But, in terms of the workflow, most add-ons seem to set the service/job process apart from the standard A/R Sales process. And this seems to be a challenge to our current segregation of duties. An example is that, if with an add-on, our Invoicing staff may need to use the standard SAP AR invoice process for regular sales orders; but will need to switch to the add-on invoicing function to process those orders with service charges. This makes us hesitate to proceed. This also makes me rethink if I am looking at the right add-on segment - should I look at MRO instead of Job-costing? Is there a way (add-on or customization) that can help mange the non-inventory items then attach the costs to the sales order?
The constrain we have is that most our key account customers only accept one SO # against the PO # they send; so we cannot send one item type SO and one service type SO. I tried to develop a Crystal with service costs from a service type SO in a sub-report; but this only helps the reporting side, not for the cost adjustment or scheduling...
While I have reached out to our SAP partner, I also would like to turning to the Community and see if any lucky ones have experienced similar stories to share with me.
Thank you very much for your help and feedback in advance.
Best regards,
Jimmy