Dispute Management

The Dispute Management ES bundle service-enables the dispute management capabilities of SAP ERP.

Simply stated, the Dispute Management ES bundle provides Enterprise Services designed to help SAP clients better manage invoice-related disputes with customers when one or more processes must be invoked in order to address the underlying claim. It accomplishes this by service enabling Dispute Case functionality - the primary business object covered by this bundle - held within SAP Dispute Management. The Dispute Management ES bundle enables searching for, displaying, creating, and changing of dispute cases. Dispute cases are created when a customer pays less than the original invoice amount for a variety of reasons, including dissatisfaction with a job. A Dispute Case is a record that contains all the information relevant to a disputed invoice and is the central business object tying together all the information and activities necessary to process and resolve disputes. Basically, a dispute case is a virtual file that can provide every employee involved with resolving the dispute direct access to all of the necessary information without having to search through numerous systems or files manually. Employees can enter information and comments as electronic notes, creating an accurate record of how a particular dispute was handled and resolved.

Dispute Management (click to enlarge)

Importantly, this ES bundle also facilitates real-time (synchronous) and asynchronous integration of SAP Dispute Management with other SAP and non-SAP applications, though, as with all enterprise service implementations, some work is involved to write code that invokes the services (the composite application or other type of service consumer). This bundle also facilitates integration with customer interaction centers (areas that provide enhanced customer service by offering multiple contact options and efficient methods to respond to customer queries), customer fact sheet applications, and customer-facing portals, where a customer can create a dispute case themselves. The net result is an integrated, 360-degree view of all customer disputes and related claims and tickets across the enterprise. In all, the Dispute Management ES bundle leverages enterprise SOA by providing communication with SAP ERP, SAP CRM, SAP Quality Management, as well as non-SAP applications through the use of enterprise services. Audience Industries The Dispute Management ES bundle is targeted at all industries with FI-AR backend systems, especially those where CRM-like applications are used. This bundle is also targeted at SAP customers who are already using SAP Dispute Management and want to integrate it with other SAP and non-SAP applications. Roles Managers and clerks. For details on Service Operations, Business Objects and Process Components, please check the ES Workplace. How to Use This ES Bundle Prior to the creation of this ES bundle, there was no automated and integrated way to allow users from various departments, such as call centers and quality management, to create dispute cases to document information about invoice disputes.

Table of Contents Audience For details on Service Operations, Business Objects and Process Components, please check the ES Workplace. How to Use This ES Bundle Use Cases Use Case 1: Dispute Management Integration with CRM - Creating a Dispute Case Use Case 2: Dispute Management Integration with CRM - Changing a Dispute Case Use Case 3: Interaction Center Trouble Tickets Use Case 4: Including Disputes on a Customer Fact Sheet Use Case 5: Allowing Quality Managers to Create Dispute Cases Use Case 6: Enabling Call Center Agents to Create Dispute Cases Informed by Quality Issue Notifications Use Case 7: Handling Dispute Cases through a Customer-Facing Portal System Requirements Related ES Bundles Links SDN and SAP Links

The Dispute Management ES bundle provides an automated method for companies to better manage disputes and to integrate handling of disputes with a number of other systems. As a result, employees who create dispute cases have direct access to all of the necessary information without having to manually search through a number of records and files. It is all contained in an easily accessible format within the dispute case.
Further, each dispute case includes a reason code, which delineates the nature of the complaint and specifies the various business processes involved. A processing status notice can also be logged, which with the reason codes will activate follow-up actions such as notifying relevant employees and/or internal processes, triggering sending an email to the customer, as well as triggering actions in SAP ERP financials or logistics applications, for example.

The result is more efficient and cost-effective handling of disputes, with the following benefits:

• Cost Savings
  Reduced manual work, lowered integration costs with SAP and non-SAP systems, and reduced number of open or disputed invoices (because of increased speed in handling dispute cases)

• Improved Efficiency
  Higher degree of automation and optimized cross departmental communications speed dispute clarification and resolution, more effective communications between applications such as CRM and quality management.

• Integrating with CRM
  Armed with composite applications designed to call the services in this bundle, call center agents can quickly and easily create dispute cases and forward them to SAP ERP for further processing. Call center agents are also able to quickly and easily find dispute cases related to specific customers and get all the information they need about the status and findings of a dispute case.

• Integrating with Quality Management
  Quality managers are able to take Quality Issue Notifications, created in SAP Quality Management, and, when necessary, quickly and easily create dispute cases. As with the CRM integration, these dispute cases are then forwarded to ERP for further handling. The reverse can also be true in that a dispute case created by a customer service representative with a relationship to a quality issue can be made visible to a quality manager. In this way, duplicate dispute cases are prevented while necessary information reaches all affected units of the company. Furthermore, by connecting disputes with quality issues, the financial impact of quality issues can be assessed.

• Customer Facing Portal
  The Dispute Management ES bundle enables integration with web applications so that a customer can check the status of a dispute or file a new dispute online.

Use Cases

The following sections explore seven use cases for the Dispute Management ES bundle. Each is intended to provide a concrete example of the types of functions the bundle supports and shows how different outcomes can be achieved by using the enterprise services in different combinations.

While these use cases demonstrate a few of the ways the ES bundle can be used, they are designed to highlight the flexibility and reusability of the business objects and enterprise service operations so as to provide a clearer understanding of how you can deploy them in your own environment.

This wiki is also the space for readers to share knowledge and collaborate with others who are implementing the Dispute Management ES bundle.

Use Case 1: Dispute Management Integration with CRM - Creating a Dispute Case

Note: This use case presumes that the CRM system has been modified to provide options that invoke enterprise services in this bundle.

In this scenario, a call center agent for a construction company receives a call from a customer asserting that the company's contractor only performed 80 percent of the service, so the customer will only pay 80 percent of the invoice. The call center agent understands that this represents an invoice-related dispute and selects an option in a CRM system to open a dispute case.

After all of the necessary information is entered, the agent saves it, and the CRM system invokes the Check Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case Creation enterprise service. This service operation verifies that all the required information to create a dispute case has been entered. If there are any errors or omissions, the application displays an error message.

Upon correcting the errors, the agent saves the information, which invokes the Check Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Creation enterprise service again.

Since the information is complete and correct, the CRM system then invokes the Create Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case enterprise service. This asynchronous service creates a dispute case in SAP ERP.

Once a dispute case is created in SAP Dispute Management, notices are automatically sent to relevant individuals and organizational units.

Once a resolution is reached, the dispute case is automatically updated to reflect these changes. If a payment is required from the customer, once it is received and posted the system, it can be mapped to the correct dispute case, which can be automatically updated.

The following table summarizes these steps and associated enterprise services:

Use Case 2: Dispute Management Integration with CRM - Changing a Dispute Case

The customer from use case 1 calls back to add to the complaint, asserting that the work the contractor did was of low quality and portions of which have been done incorrectly. The building inspector has asked for modifications, causing the customer to reduce his payment to the company to $7,000.

The call center agent looks up the customer in the CRM system, which searches for any relevant dispute cases for this customer (by invoking Find Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case by Elements). The call center agent clicks on the dispute case number, which invokes Read Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case. The agent can then enter whatever changes need to be made along with the reasons for the dispute given by the customer and any other relevant information.

When the agent finishes entering the changes and saves the dispute case, the application invokes Check Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case Update followed by Change Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case to send the changes to SAP ERP.

The following table summarizes these steps and the associated enterprise services:

Use Case 3: Interaction Center Trouble Tickets

A customer of HDTV Inc. has just purchased a new widescreen television and had the company install it on a wall in her home. However, the television appears to have some electronic problems that have cause the advertised features to not work at all or improperly. The customer contacts the call center for HDTV Inc. and explains her problem to the call center agent. In response, the agent creates and assigns a trouble ticket to the customer complaint. The customer and trouble ticket are then passed on to a technical support representative who then helps the customer troubleshoot the problem.

Often, these kinds of problems can be resolved during the initial customer call, but unfortunately in this case the issue cannot be resolved because the television lacks the functionality to compress the audio range - a feature that helps bring the volume between the loudest sounds and whispered dialogue into a closer range.

To compensate for this lack of functionality, the customer is offered and accepts a credit memo. The technical support person changes the status of the ticket. The composite application has been programmed to recognize that trouble tickets with this status should generate a dispute case. The composite application transfers all the information from the trouble ticket to the dispute case and invokes Check Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case Creation, which validates that the necessary information has been entered. The composite then invokes the Create Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case enterprise service to create the dispute case and send it to SAP ERP for further processing.

Should the customer contact the call center a couple of weeks later to check on the status of the credit memo, the call center agent can look up the dispute case by invoking the Find Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case Basic Data by Elements enterprise service. The agent selects the relevant dispute case from the search results, which invokes the Read Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case enterprise service.

The agent is then able to provide the customer with the status of the credit memo and any other relevant information.

The following table summarizes these steps and the associated enterprise services:

Use Case 4: Including Disputes on a Customer Fact Sheet

In order to be effective, customer fact sheets should provide a 360-degree view of a customer by including the status of the customer, open orders, and any types of complaints or disputes associated with the customer.

To include customer disputes and related dispute cases in a customer fact sheet, the composite application creating the customer fact sheet calls the Find Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case Basic Data by Elements enterprise service. This service searches for all dispute cases related to given customer (and perhaps which fall within a given timeframe).

The composite application then invokes the Read Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case enterprise service to read the details of a dispute case and display them on the customer fact sheet.

Further, the services in this ES bundle could be integrated with services from the Customer Fact Sheet ES bundle or could support a customer fact sheet within another environment such as Microsoft Outlook.

The following table summarizes these steps and associated enterprise services:

Use Case 5: Allowing Quality Managers to Create Dispute Cases

If a customer complains about the quality of a product - whether it is a single television as described in use case 3 or a retailer complaining about an entire shipment of televisions - it is important to track this information in the company's quality management system. This is important for a number of reasons, but primarily to help make corrections to the underlying quality issues. It is also important to track this information in Dispute Management in case the customer disputes the invoice for goods that fail to meet quality standards.

The goal of this use case is to provide visibility between SAP Quality Management and SAP Dispute Management. In other words, a quality manager should be able to see if a customer has opened a dispute case. A Quality Issue Notification, a business object in the Integration of Quality Management Systems ES bundle, contains information related to the quality of a product.

Quality Issue Notifications of certain types could be set up to create dispute cases automatically on behalf of the customer. In essence, for defective goods, the company says to its customers, we know this is defective; we won't charge you for it.

If the Quality Issue Notification creation process has been set up in this way, behind the scenes, creating a Quality Issue Notification would trigger a string of service operations. First, the application would invoke Find Quality Issue Notification Product by Elements enterprise service operation. After finding the product details, the composite then looks for affected sales orders by invoking Find Sales Order Basic Data by Elements. The composite then invokes Read Sales Order Basic Data to obtain information relevant to creating the dispute case. It then creates a dispute case with a predefined description that indicates why it was created and which Quality Issue Notification triggered its creation.

The following table summarizes these steps and the associated enterprise services:

Use Case 6: Enabling Call Center Agents to Create Dispute Cases Informed by Quality Issue Notifications

Call center agents need access to quality information in order to have a fuller picture regarding a dispute. Realizing that the product the customer has called to complain about already has received a Quality Issue Notification may help the agent to ameliorate the customer's concerns.

A composite aimed at call center agents could combine information from SAP Dispute Management with information from SAP Quality Management. It could further draw information from SAP CRM and SAP ERP.

The agent searches for a customer, which invokes Find Customer Address Basic Data by Name and Address. The rep then selects the customer from the list of results, which invokes Read Customer. Using the customer ID, the composite searches for order history by invoking Find Sales Order Basic Data by Elements and then searches for any relevant dispute cases by invoking Find Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case Basic Data by Elements. To provide further details, the composite then uses the Material IDs from recent sales orders to invoke Find Quality Issue Notification by Elements, searching for quality issues related to products ordered in the last six months.

Before even beginning to speak with the customer, the call center agent has an accurate picture of any quality issues related to the products the customer has ordered.

If required, the agent can then create a dispute case on the customer's behalf by entering necessary details, which invokes Check Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case Creation. If all the details were entered properly, the composite invokes Create Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case.

The following table summarizes these steps and the associated enterprise services:

Use Case 7: Handling Dispute Cases through a Customer-Facing Portal

Companies see the wisdom of allowing customers to submit more and more information online themselves rather than having them telephone a call center agent. This approach can save time and money.

The company in this use case already has a customer-facing portal and decides to incorporate dispute case functionality.

When a customer pays their bill on the site (which might use, for example, the services from the Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment ES bundle), if they pay less than the invoice amount, they are presented with a pull-down menu where they specify a reason for this low payment. If the reason relates to product quality, for example, they are then given an option to create a dispute case.

The customer enters all details into the web form and selects an option to save it. This invokes the Check Trade Receivables Dispute Case Creation enterprise service operation. If any details are missing, the customer fills them in. If all details are provided, the web application invokes Create Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case.

Creating this dispute case returns an identifier for the dispute case. The customer can then come back later to check on the status of the dispute case, which invokes the Create Trade Receivables Payables Dispute Case enterprise service operation.

The following table summarizes these steps and the associated enterprise services:

System Requirements

• SAP ERP 6.0
• SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0

Related ES Bundles

Customer Fact Sheet
Integration of Quality Management Systems

Links

SDN and SAP Links

SOA Homepage on SDN
Dispute Management page on the ERP Financials Wiki
Dispute Management page on the Shared Services wiki (nice diagrams of how dispute management fits into the overall receivables process both on that page and on its parent page, Monitoring & Collection of Receivables)