Service Advisor Dashboard (DASA)
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Introduction
The VSS Service Advisor Dashboard Application or DASA, is a FIORI based application which serves as a landing page for the service advisor to perform daily operational activity.
Business Context
Service Advisor plays an important role within a service workshop, dealing with various kinds of operational task as well as interacting with customers, suppliers, and technical worker. It is crucial that the service advisor is provided with instant information to take informed decision and react in a timely manner. DASA offers the following benefits for the service advisor:
Improves decision making.
Provides at-a-glance visibility.
Saves time and resources.
Easy performance checks and balances.
Up-to-date progress evaluation.
Direct navigation to transactional activities.
Main Features
Features of DASA:
Present instant and adequate information to the service advisor to act on specific tasks or situations, resulting in higher productivity and shorter turnaround time.
Better data visibility supports the service advisor in optimizing time on the right tasks.
Consist of several cards that represent specific business information to the service advisor. The cards include Quick Links, My Additional Jobs, Service Orders by Task Status, My Appointments, Delayed orders, My Task by priority, Current Promotion, No Show, Vehicles ready for delivery, My NPS (Net Promoter Score) and Service Quotation by Task Status.
Navigable: By clicking the relevant cards, the service advisor is navigated to the target object where relevant transactional activities can be performed.
Personalization: cards are movable, navigable, and resizable according to user preferences.
The concept built within DASA considers future VSS dashboard applications such as Parts Clerk Dashboard App and Rental Dashboard App. Structure and common dashboard functions are consumable by future dashboard applications.
Solution Overview
DASA is built adhering to the “Overview Page” concept based on the SAP FIORI Web Design guideline. Refer the following link for reference: https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design-web/overview-page/
DASA consist of several cards that represents specific business information to the service advisor. Cards are containers for the application content and represent an entry-level view of the most pertinent application data for a given topic or business object. The overview page acts as a UI framework for organizing multiple cards on a single page. It can contain several cards that reference the same underlying application.
Each card is prepared or developed with the intention to bring added value to the user, and not just repeated information already offered on another card. Transactional activities should not be executed in DASA. By clicking the relevant cards, the service advisor can be navigated to the target object where relevant transactional activities can be performed.
SAP provides various type of standard cards that can be used for different business purpose, offering different way of data representation. Where relevant, standard SAP cards are used in DASA. However, some cards serve specific business processes and are developed to fulfil the business requirement.
For VSS version 5.0, the following cards are delivered in scope of DASA:
Quick Links
My Additional Jobs
Service Orders by Task Status
My Appointments
Delayed orders
My Task by priority
Current Promotion
No Show
Vehicles ready for delivery
10. My NPS (Net Promoter Score)
11. Service Quotation by Task Status
Technical Overview
DASA is built adhering to the “Overview Page” concept based on the SAP FIORI Web Design guideline. Refer the following link for reference: https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design-web/overview-page/ .
Here is a high-level explanation illustrated in corresponding activity diagrams:
As in typical SAPUI5 application, the corresponding metadata and data must be loaded in the first place, as well as corresponding UI annotations to determine Card layout, especially when rendering the Standard Card. This is accomplished by the means of CDS entities, which are exposed in dedicated service. In case of VSS Service Advisor Dashboard, a dedicated OData v2 service is provided.
Once all the necessary data and metadata from backend are loaded, corresponding cards ought to be rendered. Definitions of existing cards are read from dedicated manifest.json file in the application. Refer to the following link for more detail:
https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/sdk/#/topic/f194b411027e4402a0be0537fa7b803b
SAP, by default, provides various templates of Standard Cards (such as Table, List, Analytical Cards, and others). To check supported Card types, refer this link: https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design-web/overview-page-card/#card-types
However, the standard functionality tends to be limited and only one entity per card can be exposed. This may or may not fulfil some customer specific business requirement. Therefore, SAP provides one more approach to create new cards which is the Custom Card. In Custom Card, you can code your own controller and corresponding views for the content and header area of the card. Refer this source for reference: https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/sdk/#/topic/6d260f7708ca4c4a9ff45e846402aebb.html
In this way, customers are free to use all available SAPUI5 Controls and affect their functionality using additional JavaScript code, thus resulting in ability to read data from more than one entity. You can also customize the card layout with CSS extension if necessary.
An amazingly simple example of Custom Card usefulness came at the beginning of the Service Advisor Dashboard development, where we realized that in standard Carousel Card provided by SAP, you cannot provide an auto scroll functionality, such that another item on the Card appears every few seconds. This is a perfect case for JavaScript, which provides a function called setInterval by default.
Obviously, once all the cards are rendered, you are ready to go and explore the application.