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21/04/2021
PROMOS News
Something new for the portfolio? Dawonia updates furnishing features from the craftsmen portal at the touch of a button in SAP®
Activity is always a feature of properties. This is simply the nature of things. Apartments regularly undergo construction measures, which lead to a change in the furnishing features. Craftsmen’s services that increase the residential value, such as a bathroom renovation or replacement of a PVC floor with parquet, are common construction measures that housing companies carry out. These updates to the furnishing features must be mapped in SAP®. Thanks to a new report, Dawonia is now making even greater use of automation for this.
The initial situation
With around 30,000 apartments, Dawonia is one of the largest housing companies in southern Germany. The Munich real estate company has been relying on SAP®-based solutions and easysquare apps from PROMOS consult for many years. Thus, at Dawonia, craftsmen’s services are administered using the easysquare craftsmen portal. In the past, if changes were made to an apartment’s furnishing during the course of an order, this resulted in a time-consuming, manual process. Once the service entry sheet was received in Dawonia’s SAP® system, the processor first had to check whether a furnishing feature needed to be updated as a result of the work carried out. If so, this information was forwarded to the relevant specialist department. Only there could the furnishing feature be maintained manually. Dawonia receives more than 400 service entry sheets per month. So the company wondered, would it be possible to automate this manual workflow? “Yes” was the simple answer from our PROMOS expert Eric Hoedke, and project preparations started without further ado.
The automation process
By means of a simple customisation, it was determined that, if a defined craftsmen’s service that adds residential value is carried out, furnishing features should be terminated or added on a key date.
Since then, the responsible staff at Dawonia have been able to automatically update apartment furnishing features. To do this, they can select a specific period, service numbers, service entry sheets, or a particular feature on an input screen and all data records with the relevant criteria are listed in a table. Now the user has the opportunity to see whether and if so which furnishing features should actually be updated. To support with this, it is also possible to jump directly from the list to the corresponding service entry sheet and the original proof of performance, such as an acceptance report or invoice. A status field indicates whether the record has already been processed, there has been an error, or whether an update is not permitted at all, for example, because the standard check has determined that the new feature is only allowed once per rental object.
Paul Schmid, SAP® Business Analyst and responsible project manager on Dawonia’s side, notes with satisfaction: “The solution is as simple as it is effective. We simply had to assign the performance items of the service entry sheets to specific furnishing features. Now the rest takes care of itself. This saves our employees a great deal of time and effort. And the solution contributes to quality assurance, too.”
The report is operated via a simple input screen. The user can select and call up data records here based on certain criteria.
A clear list of all relevant services performed allows the employee to update the furnishing features at the touch of a button.
Technical requirements
The implementation of the solution at Dawonia went off without a hitch. The technical prerequisite for this was that the service items of the framework contracts from the craftsmen portal can be assigned to a furnishing feature. If the service items were ambiguously worded or too finely structured, direct assignment to a new furnishing feature in the SAP® system’s Customising would not be possible, which in turn would prevent an automation process. It must also be clear from the service items that this is a measure that actually leads to a change in a furnishing feature and the work performed is not a simple repair or, for example, painting the apartment white.
Summary
Thanks to the newly designed solution, Dawonia can automatically adapt furnishing features based on the services performed using the easysquare craftsmen portal while observing important checking mechanisms. “Changes to furnishing features in our apartments can now be carried out automatically by a single person, which has allowed us to reduce the manual effort for the individual employee. We are pleased to have taken another small step towards efficiency,” says Schmid, summing things up.
If you are also interested in optimising your processes in this area, please do not hesitate to contact us! Together, we will check the technical requirements and find a solution for your individual needs.
