About Service

The CloudSuite Industrial Service management solution works with many different service industries. It is flexible enough to work in different service environments because of the parameters that you can set up, so you must understand all of the available options before you start setting up your system. The Service parameters determine how the system defaults certain data elements, processes transactions, and shortcuts certain tasks. Most of the codes used in Service are user-defined, so you can create industry-specific terms for reason codes, resolution codes, priority codes, etc. Often it is helpful to use an implementation consultant to determine the best way to configure the system for your type of business.

The Service module includes these major areas:

Incidents
Units
Service orders and scheduling
Service Contracts

About Incidents (Call Center)

Use the Call Center to record phone calls, log issues, dispatch service engineers, resolve issues, and build a searchable database (knowledge base) of information to assist with future recurring issues. The Call Center works for both service departments that resolve issues by dispatching a service technician or those that resolve most issues over the phone.

The structure of the Call Center includes these areas:

Incidents: An incident is created by the service support representative to record customer contact and unit information for items that your company supports. A support representative uses a reason code to classify the incident. The first line of support at this point can be to use the incident activities attached to the reason codes to resolve the issue.
Events: Events record all transactions that occur during the life of an incident, for example, phone calls, emails, dispatching a service technician or creating a SRO. You can define a set of event activities, similar to a checklist of tasks, that the event owner (the person trying to resolve the problem) can attempt when trying to resolve the incident.
Service Request Orders (SROs): These orders are created to collect all costs related to resolving an incident. SROs are also used to bill customers for items used to resolve incidents.

For more information about incidents, see Using the Call Center to Add and Track Incidents.

About Units (Asset Management)

Units are serial-tracked items that your company services. A unit may or may not exist in the standard CloudSuite Industrial serial master. Units can be added to the system in several different ways:

Run utilities that create the unit upon the completion of a job when the finished goods are put into inventory. These utilities can be run every night on the Background Queue, to pick up any new units that have been created during the previous day.
Select Auto Create Unit on Shipment on the Service Parameters form to automatically create new units whenever a serial-tracked item is shipped on a customer order.
Create a unit manually with the Units form.

About Service Orders and Scheduling

When work needs to be performed that requires materials, labor, or other miscellaneous expenses, you create a SRO. The SRO is used to track expenses and to invoice the customer for any non-warranty items. The SRO allows for multiple lines and items, so you can include different types of service calls on one order. For example, service on larger items could use one line item with multiple operations (tasks). Service orders on smaller items could have multiple line items with only a few operations.

For more information about service orders, see Using SROs to Track Service Requests, Transactions, and Billing.

About Service Contracts

You can use contracts to track maintenance agreements for a customer. Contracts include a user-definable service type that identifies the level of service that the customer purchased. You can set up multiple units (serial-tracked service items) under one contract, in situations where a customer wants to receive only one invoice.

The pricing of a contract is set by one of these methods:

Fixed amount: This is determined by specifying the annual amount of the contract.
Calculated amount: This is determined by accumulating the amounts for each contract line item, and lets you charge different rates for different types of units or services under one contract.

Contracts can be billed monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. You can run a report that lists customers whose contracts are up for renewal. When the contract is invoiced, standard A/R information is created so the invoice flows directly into the customer's outstanding balance in the back office system.

For more information about Contracts, see Using Contracts to Track Maintenance Agreements for Customers.