Service contracts

The Service Contracts menu group is used to create and control service contracts.

The Call Management module provides functionality to register a request for a service contract or a service-contract quotation.

A service contract consists of the following:

The service-contract header, which contains information about the business partners, invoicing, and installments.
The terms and conditions for the service-contract quotation, such as the extent of coverage, the pricing, along with budget information.
The installation group covered by the service contract.
Details of any maintenance plans that belong to the covered installation groups.

The type of terms, and their specification, enable you to vary the conditions of the service contract in a flexible manner. For example, you can vary the type of gross margin control, along with the budget control, and the calculated results can be displayed to the user.

You can create a service contract manually, or copy one or more service-contract templates to the service contract.

After you create a service contract, you can perform price simulations. By varying, for example, the pricing methods, you can calculate and display various final totals and choose within the required gross margin, or seek permission to quote outside this range.

After the details of a service contract are finalized, the service-contract documents can be printed and sent to the business partner.

The business partner reviews the service contract, and decides whether to accept, cancel, or modify the service contract.

Modifications are made according to the business partner's requirements.

An accepted service contract quotation can be processed to become an active service contract. Only one service contract can be active for any installation group.

Service orders can be linked to an active service contract. In this case, the terms and conditions of the service contract are applied to the service order.

Installments are linked to the service contract. These installments govern the type, number, and time at which invoices are sent to the business partner.

An active service contract can be cancelled manually, for example, if the sold-to business partner requests this course of action.

If the expiry date of a service contract is reached, the contract's status is set to Expired. To renew the service contract, the expired service contract is copied to a new contract.

After the financial processing is completed for a canceled or expired service contract, the contract's status is set to Closed. Closed service contracts can be posted to history and deleted.

Note: If a service contract is posted to history, the invoice installments associated with the service contract are also posted to history at the same time.

The settings in the Contract Management Parameters (tsctm0100m000) session control the amount of information that is posted to history.

An installment template must be specified for a service contract.