Does anyone know how to do an RMA in ServiceNow?

[charlottesmith]

We're on Istanbul, just received ServiceNow in August, and none of us can find a way to do an RMA in there against a PO where the line items have been received in.

In order to create accurate accounting, asset, and Purchase Order reports someone must know how the RMA process works in this system but the "Product Documentation" on ServiceNow's website has nothing around it….

Searching out the Community pages I read articles around a Hackathon four years ago where someone created a custom RMA process for a company, another about how a 911 call handling company had a custom solution made, a few posted questions about coding (most with no replies or not answered), and this one for "Creating a child request and pasing variables" which did have a reply and was marked as 'Answered': https://community.servicenow.com/message/1314318#1314318 It too has coding in it and it references that "There might be oob solutions for that, though, of which I am not aware." So even then the person who answered the question didn't know if there was a way to do it out of the box.

I found this from 2014 on Juniper's website: https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos-space14.1/topics/task/operational/junos-space-serv...   So whether that means that Juniper is using ServiceNow and that's their documentation on how they do it, I don't know…

Using the search button and typing "RMA" on ServiceNow's home page, yielded a case study from 2015 where Integration Partners in Lexington MA had purchased and installed it and on the second page it states that they can run metrics around RMA's but doesn't actually infer there is an RMA/PO process anywhere: https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow/documents/case-studies/cs-sn-IntegrationPartners-C...

Does anyone know how to do an RMA in this program?   Keep in mind, I'm Procurement, the actual buyer in my company, I'm not a developer nor a programmer.   This is information I need to bring back to our Procurement team and likely to our guy who was tasked with supporting this program.  

Thanks in advance!!

[mcconnellsj]

Hello Charlotte

I wonder if you received a solution internally for the functionality you required?

The short answer to your original question is "No" - there is no out of the box RMA workflow.

However I am embarking on an enhancement for our company to create one.  We have identified three RMA types:

- DOA (within 30 days of goods received)

- Advance Replacement (covered by an extended warranty)

- OOW (out of warranty, chargeable)

I guess your case is the DOA, where the RMA is raised as part of Procurement. Our requirement is usually during the customer support phase, Advance Replacement.

Depending on your own situation, I am happy to share our solution with you once developed.

[kellirh401]

Hey Steven-

Did you ever get anywhere with your solution.  I'm working on one myself right now and thought I might inquire with someone else that is working on the same process.

Thanks,

Kelli

[mcconnellsj]

Hi Kelly

We have just started development, however here is our design in plain words.

Incidentally we are primarily working in customer service, so RMAs are usually spawned from a CASE, however the design would be the same for any task (incident, problem etc).

- The "Raise RMA" is a Service Catalog item
- We create a button on the Case form that points to this item
- The requested item contains variables containing the asset to be RMAd, customer, reference to parent Case
- On completion of the RMA, a new Configuration Item is created with the new serial etc
- The new Configuration Item replaces the old one and linked to the Asset record

All of the above is going to need some scripting to work, along with a new RMA workflow that prompts for the RMA reference and new serial at different points in time.

Why a Service Catalog item?  Well we kind of figured that raising an RMA <could> be used in the future by any part of the system, so putting it in the catalog seemed the easiest way to make it available.

Note that our requirement is two-fold:

- A mechanism to raise RMAs and have a record of them
- A way for Asset Manager to see the lifecycle of an Asset (we may create a field on the Asset that has a simple list of old serials and the new).  When the Asset Manager searches for a serial, it will always be found.  We continually get reports and lists from customers, internal Sales of serials that may be out of date, so the search for them needs to find the Asset first time, even if it has been replaced

I will update this post with our progress / final solution.

[JoAnn Obruba]

Hi Steven,

Did you ever come up with a solution for the RMAs?

Thanks!

JoAnn