SME has excellent ability to track and manage your customer’s equipment. Customer Equipment is integrated throughout SME to improve tracking of the equipment and provide your customers excellent support.

The customer equipment can be access is either of two ways:

·         Customer Equipment List: the customer equipment list is located in the customer module under Customer Lists>Equipment

·         Customer Equipment Tree: The customer equipment tree provides a list of each customer’s equipment and provides features such as generating service orders on the equipment, doing return RMA’s, and performing Equipment Audit on the equipment.

 

Customer Equipment can be automatically added from Service Orders, Install Orders, or Invoices by checking “add to customer equipment” check box when adding materials to the order. Inventory items can be configured to automatically have this check box selected by checking the option “Add to Cust EQ” for each inventory item. Equipment can also be added manually through the customer equipment list of the tree.

 

Customer Equipment has a number of features and options for tracking and managing customer equipment:

·         Item Details tab:

o   General Item Information: Holds general information such as item name, serial number, item number, description, quantity, System type, date added, warehouse, condition, status, Hardware (HW) version, software (SW) version, shelf, and bin.

o   Parent Item: Holds information used in the Customer Equipment Tree such as Parent item to provide a hierarchical structure showing sub equipment within a parent equipment. For example you could have a server rack as the top level parent, a server as a next child level, and then components of the server with parent connect to the server. There is an unlimited level of parent-child levels.

o   Reference #: This number provides an ordering for the equipment in the tree. Lowest number (or blanks) show at the top and highest numbers show at the bottom.

o   Custom Fields: SME allows 3 custom fields to be set on the customer equipment. The custom fields can be setup in Setup>Company>Customer Defaults>Custom Fields>Customer Equipment Table section. Just provide a label for the custom fields and they will show on the customer equipment form.

o   Equipment Status fields: Include equipment status dropdown, Instal l Data, Fail Date, MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) and usage hours. Note that usage hours are manually entered.

·         Maintenance tab:

o   Expirations: Track Maintenance Expiration and Manufactuer Warranty Expiration

o   Activities: You can have the system automatically generate an activity when either the maintenance or manufacturer warranty dates expire. Note you will need to set your preferences to “Generate Customer Equipment Expiration Warning” by selecting Preferences>On Startup and select this checkbox and provide the number of days in advance of those dates that you want to create the activity. This will generate the customer equipment expiration warnings and go into the activities of SME.

o   SLA Category: SLA (Service Level Agreement) category sets your commitment to the customer for this equipment. This can also be tied to maintenance contracts. SLA are usually set as either time based: 4-Hour response, 24x7x4 (24 hour per day, 7 days per week with 4 hour response); or they can be set based on how repairs are charged. For example, you could setup a comprehensive coverage where all parts, services, and labor is covered if anything goes wrong. Or you can set to cover labor only. The SLA category settings are in Setup>Company>Lists>SLA Categories.

o   Maintenance fields: Maintenance frequency and price are just reference fields.   Vendor Warranty and Customer Warranty come from the inventory item.

·         Repair History: Shows all the service orders that are linked to this equipment. To show service orders for repair history, you need to select the equipment in the Item Repair tab of the Service Order or generate the service or install order from the equipment tree by right clicking the item and selecting New Service Order.

·         Scheduled Services: Shows all scheduled services for this equipment. (Note: Scheduled services are not recommended, use Recurring Orders)

·         Service History: Shows all equipment designated for repair when service or labor items have customer equipment selected.

·         Kit Items: Kit items can be setup in the inventory item. These are reference items to various parts for the equipment for example parts that should be changed. For example, if the equipment was a specific car model, the kit item might be the oil filter type, the oil type, and the recommended tires.

·         Transactions: Shows all the equipment transactions such as adding, moving to another customer site, etc.