02. 07. 2014
Service Management
19. 06. 2014
Oreste Attanasio
Service Management
Register working hours: Interface EriZone/ERP system
On one hand, service companies use ticketing systems (as OTRS, EriZone etc.) to handle customer requests in a comprehensible way, on the other hand, contracts and cost centers are managed in the company’s ERP system (as SAP, MS Dynamics AX, NAV, Infor). In such cases, one might ask where employees of the service desk should record their efforts: within the ticketing system, within the ERP system or even within both?
Working hours have to be registered within the ticketing system, but since controllers use records from the ERP system to elaborate their periodic reports, working hours have to be registered there as well. Working on both systems, to record a single customer request generates additional effort.
To avoid such double recording, we implemented an interface between OTRS/EriZone and Dynamics AX, which allows automatic transfer of registered working hours from the ticketing system to the ERP system. Clearly, this interface could also be extended to other ERP systems as SAP, NAV etc.
The key advantages of this approach are:
- Employees don’t have to record their efforts within two different systems
- It’s not possible that someone forgets to insert his efforts to the ERP system
In the following, I will show you briefly, how we implemented this interface and accordingly, how the data transfer occurs.
Interface Inbound
In order to be able to extract structured data, that can be loaded into the ERP (Dynamics AX, SAP, Navision etc.), we included specific data extraction fields, on the ticket’s classification step. Data is extracted in real-time (DynamicField_DropDownFromDB) from specific SQL Server Database Views, using the Ticket Requestor (in the sample below 123456) as mapping key with the ERP data. Based on the Customer Ticket Requestor it is possible to extract the required data (here: Customer Company and the related and active support/subscription contracts) from the ERP, which will be displayed one after another in the classification module (through DynamicField_DropDownFromDB).
Interface Outbound
The interface that we have implemented in this special case, prepares the export format with the working hours ready for the Dynamics AX journals, and generates a .csv file with the following output:
The data download request is available on the Agent dashboard through the following dashlet:
The output is uploaded manually (csv upload) into a new Journal, where each employee can insert the registration of the working time. In future, an automatic and periodic upload from the ticketing system to the ERP system could be implemented.
Conclusions
In order to implement such interfaces we need a read-only ODBC connection to the SQL Server and the specific SQL statements that let us extract the required information. The WÜRTHPHOENIX Erizone DynamicField_DropDownFromDB component is very flexible in the data extraction because we can use the selected item of another field as input parameters of its query. So, if you want to have an automatic data population within your ERP (and bypass the manual update), it is possible for us to provide the extracted information in a pre-structured table, where your ERP can access and retrieve them.
Oreste Attanasio
Team Leader Service & Support at Würth Phoenix
I graduated in Applied Computer Science at the University of Bolzano in 2006. After 3 years of experience as consultant in a small IT business IT I decided to move on, and found Würth Phoenix as a good starting point for a career.
After serving several years as a developer, consultant and support engineer, I now lead the Service & Support Team and aim to deliver best quality services to our customers, by helping them using our products together with the strength of Open Source, in which I strongly believe.
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