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The best customer service delivered effortlessly via a fully integrated system!

Aim for the stars and provide excellent customer service. Discover all the benefits in this blog post.
Arne De Craemer
Arne De Craemer
FSM blog customer service header

This blog is the second in a series of 4 blog posts. In the first blog we gave a rough overview of the possible integrations of SAP Field Service Management with various SAP backend systems. In this part, we will dive deeper into the integration with SAP Cloud for Customer, part of the SAP Customer Experience (CX) suite, without going into too much technical detail. We will integrate both platforms using SAP Integration Suite as a middleware.

As a short recap, we shortly explain what SAP Cloud for Customer and SAP Field Service Management are in the next two paragraphs.

SAP Cloud for Customer (SAP C4C) is a software as a service (SaaS) platform for sales and service. SAP C4C helps you to manage day-to-day sales and service interactions more efficiently. It aims to reduce call center costs and to increase the operational efficiency of your service teams by providing a single view of the customer and so much more functionalities. One of its core functionalities is the creating of Service Tickets (e.g. to follow up on a problem a client has).

Service Ticket Overview C4C

SAP Field Service Management (SAP FSM) is a solution that allows your company to connect your entire field service operations. The advantages? It helps you to register and plan your service team effortlessly and offers your customers the best satisfaction. All this is made possible with mobile tools, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the Internet of Things. SAP FSM solution is deployed in the cloud and is available as software as a service (SaaS). This means that the software is available from any Web Browser.

Dispatching Board FSM

Benefits

So you could ask yourself now, what is the benefit of integrating these two specific systems?
Both C4C and FSM handle the service aspect of the customer experience. Integrating both systems will make sure the overlapping aspects are synchronized, hence reducing overhead and introduces a seamless experience. Integrating both solutions allow your company to use every system for their best usage and focus only on their strongest key functionalities.

For example: when a customer needs help, he can either call your helpdesk which allows your people to register the ticket in C4C or the customer can scan the serial ID, barcode or QR code on the bought asset and register a ticket himself via the web portal or chatbot of FSM. The ticket that was created either via the helpdesk person or via the customer itself will be scheduled in FSM using the best dispatching board available. The technician who must solve the problem of the customer will have access to all the linked documentation of that specific asset, is able to check the history of the asset and so much more.

On a more technical note, this means certain business objects will be synchronized and mapped onto each other. The most important mapping for this integration is the synchronization of SAP C4C Service Tickets to SAP FSM Service calls. For example, when the call center receives a notification that something is wrong, they will create a Service Ticket in SAP C4C, they might attach items needed for the replacements to be made. When the technician is working on the service call, he will spend time and materials. These will then be reflected from SAP FSM to the SAP C4C Service Ticket. Of course, master data also needs to be synchronized.

Data Flow C4C FSM

Set up the integration

Okay, so now you might wonder how to set up this integration.
As we discussed earlier, we integrate SAP Cloud for Customer with SAP Field Service Management (FSM) using SAP Integration Suite as a middleware (C4C <-> Integration Suite <-> FSM).

As a resulted benefit of this architecture, the logic for integrating these two platforms is nicely contained on the Integration Suite platform, while both C4C and FSM are simply set up to output using their standard APIs.

The integration between C4C and FSM with SAP Integration Suite can be split in the following steps:

  1. Prepare and configure the C4C system
  2. Prepare the FSM system
  3. Configure SAP Integration Suite
  4. Migrate existing data

1. Prepare and configure the C4C system

After setting up trust configurations (Certificates, technical users, etc), firstly the project set-up in SAP Cloud for Customer needs to be extended, to be able to export the needed objects to FSM. Therefore, we need to extend the Project scope. Then we set up the needed Communication Systems and Communication Arrangements, and tweak the Activity List with code list mappings which map some C4C structures to FSM structures such as Service Call Types, Service Call Problem Types, Service Call Status, Service Call Origins.

Service Call Settings

2. Prepare the FSM system

In FSM, we enable the FSM Connector, filling out the target URL and authentication. Since the FSM company we use is fresh, we chose to have a one-on-one mapping for the different kinds of types of Service Calls, Service Call Problems, Service Call Status, etc. More complex mappings are possible however.

FSM Connector

3. Configure SAP Integration Suite

In SAP Integration Suite, we use a predefined package provided by SAP called “SAP Service Cloud Integration with SAP Field Service Management”. This package contains 22 integration flow artifacts and 1 value mapping artifact. An integration flow (iflow) is an automated workflow used to synchronize data. One flow is used to synchronize one object in one direction (from C4C to FSM or the other way around).

Here we need to simply configure all the integration flows using the URLs of our FSM and C4C system as well as credentials, and some additional parameters such as FSM account, FSM company, etc. The value mapping can be used to map more complex objects such as C4C category ID mapping to FSM Problem Types. More complex customizations to the synchronization logic can be implemented by maintaining custom user exit iflows.

4. Migrate existing data

Now about master data… Since the C4C tenant, we want to integrate was pre-existing, there is quite some data on this platform already. To make sure both systems can synchronize future data correctly, the initial master data needs to be imported in FSM. While this migration of data is also possible using iflows in SAP Integration Suite, we chose to export the data from C4C using the data workbench to get better insights in the data. We can then use spreadsheet tools like Excel to manipulate the data to fit the data model of FSM, where the data will be uploaded. Newly created master data will be transferred using the previously set up iflows in SAP Integration Suite.

This concludes the overview of the integration of SAP Cloud for Customer with SAP Field Service Management, using SAP Cloud Integration as a middleware. In the next blogpost of this series, you can find more details about the integration of SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP Field Service Management!