Create ServiceNow incidents directly from RF devices running SAP EWM

SAP Extended Warehouse Management is becoming more and more popular as S/4HANA has it embedded since the end of 2016. One crucial part of it is the management of Radio Frequency devices.

The problem

Just like with other SAP user interfaces (SAP GUI, Fiori etc.) there are a lot of different errors that end users may face. However, reporting problems happening on RF devices is very cumbersome because of two reasons. First, it is very difficult to type in long texts on such a small device. Second, these devices are usually used within large warehouses, so if you want to report an error to a key user who has a laptop or a desktop PC, you have to walk a lot and then tell what happened.

The solution

The ITSM Connector for SAP add-on solves both problems: it allows users to create incidents in external ITSM platforms like ServiceNow, Jira etc. directly from RF devices.

How?

Let me show you. Please note that the screenshots were made in a browser window and not a real RF device, but the same is displayed on RF devices.

When you encounter an error, simply press a (configurable) key combination on the RF device.

After pressing the key combination (for ex. Shift-F1), the ITSM Connector screen is displayed. Here the user can either choose one predefined error template (options 1-5) or create one from scratch (option 6):

If a template is chosen, the subject and long description will be prepopulated with text:

The user can modify the texts if needed and then press the Send button to create the ticket in ServiceNow (or any other connected platform like Cherwell, Jira, 4me, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus etc.). The SAP add-on product then creates the incident and displays the incident number:

From here your existing incident management processes are started in ServiceNow. The end users are usually notified by email when the ticket is created, modified or closed.

Let's see how the ticket looks like in ServiceNow:

As you can see, the ticket is automatically categorized and routed to the relevant team. In this case it is assigned to a support team called "SAP EWM RF", but this can be tailored to your support organization.

Additionally, the product gathers all information related to EWM and the RF device and stores it in ServiceNow (or in a PDF attachment for other ITSM platforms). You'll know the warehouse number, storage bin, RF device details, RF program information etc:

Naturally all details of the last error message are saved too, so the developers can jump directly to the relevant source code section and see why this happens:

All field contents displayed on the RF device are saved too:

Let's check another example with an authorization problem. The user gets the error message:

The user invokes the ITSM Connector using a key combination and now chooses the second template:

The input fields are populated again using dynamic values for the SAP user name, system ID and client number:

The ITSM Connector automatically attaches the standard SU53 authorization report to the ticket, so it is easy to identify the missing authorization:

Here is the missing authorization:

Watch it

You can watch this here:

Support of Liquid UI

If you use Liquid UI, we got you covered. Watch how it looks like on a mobile:

Prefer emails?

The ITSM Connector can be configured that it sends the error reports as emails to preconfigured distribution lists, instead of creating an incident. Check this out here:

Conclusion

The ITSM Connector for SAP product allows your EWM users using RF devices in the warehouse to conveniently create incidents in external ITSM platforms. The help desk can by bypassed by assigning the ticket to the relevant support team automatically. The support experts will have all relevant details saved to the incident, so they can focus on solving the problem instead of trying to get all details from the end user to be able to reproduce the issue.

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