Are you looking for ways to improve your SAP claims management processes and drive warranty cost reductions? If so, you're in luck! In this blog post, we will discuss 11 different ways that you can optimize your claims management system. The SAP ACS warranty management software program is a powerful warranty software tool that can help businesses of all sizes streamline their claims process. But even the best claims management software can be improved with the right tweaks and adjustments. Let's take a look at some of the best ways to make your SAP claims management system coupled with advanced warranty analytics work for you!
Before we start, it's important to note that SAP ACS warranty management software is a powerful tool that can help businesses of all sizes streamline their warranty claims process and exercise robust risk management with regards to warranty claims. Even though it is a very good solution already, it can be improved with the right tweaks and adjustments. Let's take a look at some of the best ways to make your SAP claims management system work to improve your claims management process and reduce the workload of your management resources.
What is SAP Claims Management?
SAP Warranty Claims Management (component LO-WTY) is a module of SAP S/4Hana and ECC. Further, SAP developed a model implementation of LO-WTY as an add-on, called SAP ACS Warranty Management, available through Detering Consulting which represents a new era in claims technology.
See the Big Picture
SAP claims management enables organizations to manage product warranties, warranty claims, service contract claims (aka extended warranty), supplier recovery, and many other aspects such as functioning as warranty registration software for end users.. SAP Claims Management allows you to track the entire life cycle of a claim, from creation through resolution. It is key to uncovering the root causes of your warranty claims and being able to take action to avoid potential losses. The software provides an intuitive interface for creating, managing, and tracking claims as well as automating key business processes.
How Do You Improve SAP Claims Management Processes?
Ensure Your Master Data is Correct
The first step to improving and optimizing your SAP claims management process is ensuring that your master data is correct. This means making sure that all of your customer and product information is up-to-date and accurate. Incorrect or outdated data, including third party data, can lead to errors and delays and have a negative impact on the claim resolution process.
Make Use of SAP ACS Warranty Management Software
SAP ACS warranty management software is a powerful tool that can help businesses of all sizes streamline their claims process. The SAP software provides an intuitive interface for creating, managing, and tracking claims as well as automating key business processes.
Use the SAP Claims Workbench
The SAP Claims Workbench is a valuable resource for SAP users who are looking to improve SAP claims management processes. The SAP Claims Workbench allows users to action, report, manage and track warranty claims with ease. It also provides a grouping and workflow tool for claim specialists to manage their claim queues, and resolve claims that fall out of automatic processing, or audit claims after the fact.
Update Your Labor Rates Tables and Flat Rates
You can improve SAP claims management processes by updating your labor rates tables. SAP provides a comprehensive list of standard labor rate tables that you can use to automatically determine the correct labor rate and cost of repairing or replacing defective products under warranty. You may need to adjust these rates based on geography, region, government rules applying to U.S. States. Flat rate tables are useful to standardize tasks and automatically determine the maximum amount of time it takes for an employee at the repair or service center to complete their work and what type of specialized repair is required.
Integrate Your Suppliers into Your Automated Claims Process
One of the best ways to improve SAP claims management processes is to integrate your suppliers into your automated claims process. This will allow you to streamline the entire process and speed up the claim resolution process in case of pass-throughs or when customer adjudication depends on supplier adjudication results. SAP ACS warranty management software provides a number of tools that can help you achieve this goal, including supplier integration wizards for EDI and web services, and interfaces for exchanging key claims data with your suppliers using various information exchange technologies.
Deploy Your SAP Fiori Claims Portal - It's Integrated OOB!
Another way to improve SAP claims management processes is to integrate SAP Claims Management with your SAP Fiori Claims portal. The Fiori Claims Portal is already integrated with SAP claims, saving your IT organization a massive integration development effort.
The SAP Fiori Claims Portal allows your claimants to create and change claims online, access key information about warranty cases and claim resolutions, from a single location. The SAP Fiori Portal also provides a number of tools that can help you and your service partners manage your warranty cases more effectively, including the ability to manage
- Claims submitted and their status
- Credit memos
- Adjudicated claim statements
- Download RMA (Return Material Authorization) part return labels, and
- RMA shipping documents
Also provided is a popular chat facility that allows claim analysts to quickly resolve Q&A type questions with claimants. Each chat is automatically saved to the claim.
Whether you use the SAP Fiori Claims portal or your own, say Java-based, portal, it is important to integrate service centers, Dealers, and other partners allowed to file claims with you in your SAP claims system.
Implement Automatic Price Calculation
You can improve SAP claims management processes by implementing automatic part & labor price calculation. A powerful and standard SAP feature, claims pricing will allow you to automatically calculate the cost of repairing or replacing defective products under warranty, or determine the price from a prior spare part sales order.
SAP ACS warranty management software provides a number of tools that you can use to achieve this goal, including a preconfigured end-to-end pricing concept, document and item condition discounts and surcharges and tax controls.
Claim Value Calculation Benefits
SAP ACS warranty auto-calculates and provides claim financial values to the claim specialist admin, visualizing top-level financials such as claimed and paid parts, labor, freight, miscellaneous, totals across these sections and any other claim type your organization seeks to track. This section is further enhanced with amount and percentage variances. This report is available on each claim and also as a report across all claims through the workbench. By carefully monitoring these claims processing cost reports, you can drastically improve your financial performance and further reduce your claim costs.
Consider Using the Cloud-Based Claim Management Functionality
The SAP ACS warranty management software provides S4 and ECC on premise solutions unsurpassed by any claim solution out there. However, if your organization is a small to medium-sized SAP user seeking to deploy a cloud-based solution, then consider evaluating SAP’s new, cloud-based claim management functionality that you can use to streamline your warranty claim processes in the cloud.
Integrate SAP Claims Management with Quality Management
You can improve SAP claims management processes by integrating SAP Claims Management with SAP Quality Management. This will allow you to streamline your SAP Quality Management processes, including the integration of SAP defect tracking and quality notifications, supporting Six Sigma or European 8D initiatives.
SAP has a fully developed 8D solution called IQOS
This integration manages customer complaints tracking and resolution into a single workflow process. You'll also have the ability to tie complaints to claims and manage warranty cases through an integrated solution that supports all aspects of your claims management process.
Integrate Claims with Finance and Controlling
In a perfect world, claims management automatically integrates to your financial accounting system. No user ever has to touch anything. Finance and operations integrate SAP FI-CO with SAP Warranty Claims credits and debits, automatically determining the correct GL accounts based on specific claim scenarios. Furthermore, controlling postings to profit centers or cost centers, or controlling internal orders or other cost receivers such as CO-PA (Profitability Analysis) are determined automagically. Your corporate consolidated enterprise reporting receives ground-level claims and service cost postings in real-time, classified in real-time to the right accounts and cost receivers. Claim histories and other reports can help your business leaders refine warranty accruals, resolve unnecessary accrual reserves, and improve the bottom line and cash-flow.
Implement SAP Fiori to Improve the Entire Customer Claims Experience
In above point we looked at benefits of the SAP Fiori Claims portal, but SAP Fiori can go much further than that.
You can improve SAP customer facing processes by implementing SAP Fiori to improve the entire customer claims experience beyond managing only claims in the portal. For example, allowing your customers to purchase spare parts, repair kits, download recalls, service bulletins, technical documents, in PDF format, is good customer service.
Another example is to allow the customer to submit asset operating hours, such as flight hours periodically, to feed performance-based service contract billing processes.
SAP Fiori provides a number of pre-configured, role-based applications that you can use to streamline your customer portal experience.
These applications provide an intuitive and responsive user interface that will make it easier for your customers to submit claims and to track their claim until resolved, as well as manage other customer-facing processes.
Conclusion
SAP claims management processes are vital to the success of your warranty business. SAP ACS warranty management software provides a number of tools, templates, and pre-configuration that provides a fully built-out solution that you can use to improve your claims management processes in SAP. You'll need to decide which SAP claims management improvement tool will work best for your warranty business, based on the nature and size of your company and its specific requirements. If you follow these 11 recommendations, you will be on your way to improving your SAP claims management processes and your bottom line.
Benefit from Our Extensive Experience
We hope that this article has been helpful in providing warranty professionals with information about how SAP ACS warranty management software can be used to improve SAP claims management processes. If you would like more information about SAP Warranty Claims Management, you can get a complete overview of how the SAP ACS Warranty Management solution works, by clicking this button:
