About Items, Units and Servicing

Your company might service items that you manufacture, as well as items manufactured by other companies. The forms shown in this topic allow you to record service characteristics of items and related information, for example, lists of skills that allow partners to work on certain items.

Units

Units are serial-tracked items that are serviced by your company. They can be either the top-level finished good or any subcomponent. A unit may or may not exist in the standard Service Management 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 Build Unit on Shipment on the Service Parameters form to automatically create new units whenever a serial-tracked item is shipped on an order.
Create a unit manually with the Units form.

Use the Unit Maintenances form to view all existing unit maintenance records for a customer and create new records in bulk.

Customer units and customer items

Customer units and customer items are customer-derived terms. They are the serial numbers or specific identifiers that the customer uses for a unit or item, rather than being the user-assigned unit or item ID.

For example, your company may use a car's VIN number as its unit ID. Your customer may refer to that same car as "Vehicle 1". You can save this customer unit ID on the Units form record for the VIN number, so that you can search on the Customer Unit Vehicle 1, instead of obtaining the VIN number from your customer.

Customer units are displayed on the outputs for the Service Order Work Order Report and Order Invoicing report.

Units and the SX.e Integration

If you are integrated with SX.e, the purchase order-related fields on the Units form are not displayed.

The Original PO Cost field is populated from the InventoryCount BOD and the Date to Start Depreciation field is populated from the Fixed Assets form, if the current unit is associated with a fixed asset.

On the Unit Rental Ranking ROI DataView, the original ROI is calculated using the Original PO Cost value. The current ROI remains unchanged.

Configuration Tracking

You can store information about the parts that make up a unit in a structure called the unit configuration. The unit configuration is useful if your company manufactures equipment that consists of subcomponents that can be replaced later. Each component can have its own serial number and warranties associated with it. The installed and removed date is recorded at the component level, so users can view the As Built, As Is and As Was for any date.

As Built: The Bill of Materials used when the unit was manufactured, created, or assembled
As Is: The components that currently exist on the unit today
As Was: The components that existed on the unit at any given time in the past

Warranty Tracking

Warranties are tracked at both the unit and the component level. For example, a car has one warranty, but the tires on the car have a separate warranty. The system tracks whether a warranty is given by the manufacturer or through the vendor for purchased parts existing on a unit. You can set warranty durations by both expiration date and a meter amount such as miles, impressions, cycles, etc.

Registration History

Service Management tracks each owner of a unit, with the date ownership was taken by the consumer. Both the Sold To customer and the end consumer are recorded, so if the unit is registered or transferred, the system can record the event.