Themes and Challenges For Service Management Solutions In Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

This paper provides an exploratory case study within an SME that is currently selecting a service management solution (SMS) to enhance the existing SAP Business One systems. We examine existing business processes, legacy systems, potential solutions, and vendors with the aim of establishing the field of service management options available for an SME. The data collection centres upon in-depth interviews with SMS vendors supplemented by interviews with key staff members from the SME being studied. The theoretic contribution of this paper is in identifying generic themes and challenges for service management solutions. Moreover, a practical contribution is in a) the critique of SAP Business One as a limited SMS due to the limitation of scheduling to a maximum of 7 service engineers and in b) the proposal of a “requirement/feature mapping” table that can be used for decision making by aligning organisational business process and systems functionality