Customer service and customer satisfaction have become increasingly important over the last decades. That means that the SAP solution that assists the users in their daily business needs to evolve with this trend. The handling of customer returns has been covered in the SAP sales processes for a long time, but it was a fixed process that might not meet all your business expectations.
How SAP ERP and S/4HANA Returns Processing meets modern business needs
That is why SAP introduced advanced return management. This SAP ERP and S/4HANA product allows you to process customer returns through multiple scenario´s such as credit memo´s, but also the automatic creation of a Free-of-charge order. Moreover, it is assists in the logistical follow-up of the returned goods. Through an inspection, you can decide where the returned goods should be sent to. For example, into the unrestricted stock, to the scrapped stock or even to back to the vendor. This all means that you can meet more business requirements in advanced return management, react faster and be more efficient.
Because all these choices and their follow-up actions are not very transparent in the system, SAP has created a return overview to show you which steps have been taken and which steps are still open on your return.
What does Advance Return Management look like in S/4HANA?
Customer refund through a credit memo
I want to start with an example that looks closest to the original return processing, provided by SAP.
You can create a return order, process the return delivery (automatically), skip the inspection and process the credit memo request. This process doesn´t highlights the flexibility of advanced return management, but it shows the change in structure of the return order. As you can see below, multiple fields are available especially for the returns processing, e.g. the follow-up activities and the type of refund. For fast processing, we chose follow-up activity “immediately move to stock” and marked “materials received”, that means that the goods receipt will be finished automatically without warehouse activity and no inspection is needed because the goods will immediately be moved to the free available stock.
When the return order is saved, you can go to the return overview. This provides a transparent overview of the steps and their status in your returns processing. The only opens step is the processing of the credit memo request.
Please notice how the statuses on the top changes once the credit memo is processed.
But what if we want to perform the inspection to determine the logistical Follow-up? And, what if the customer requests replacement materials instead of a credit as the customer refund?
Customer refund through a replacement material
It starts again from the return order where you choose the appropriate follow-up activity (to include the inspection) and uncheck the “Materials received” checkbox. We selected the replacement material as refund control.
You perform the goods receipt and then you can process the inspection. This can be done with transaction code MSR_INSPWH.
You need to maintain the header information and the details per item. The most important settings are the logistical follow-up activity and the refund. Below you will find a list with the options for logistical follow-up. These options make advanced return management much more flexibility compared to the classical return processing in SAP ERP. Furthermore, it can be integrated with the service and EWM modules.
The header data is taken over in the items. As you can see, you can also define additional information for the replacement material, like quantity or even material number.
Important is to not only save but also confirm the inspection. Otherwise, the follow-up activity might not be properly carried out, as you can see from the free-of-charge order below. As long as the inspection is not confirmed, the order is not created.
Once the inspection is finalized, the free of charge order will be triggered and it can be processed. The same goes for the logistical follow-up within the warehouse.
Do you have any further questions about the returns management process in SAP S/4HANA?
Schedule a free web meeting in which we will be happy to answer your questions.
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