4me Help

Service Level Agreement Fields

The table below lists the fields of the Service Level Agreement form and provides utilization guidelines for each field.

Field Label Utilization Guideline
Name

The Name field is used to enter the name of the service level agreement in the following syntax:

[Service Offering] “for” [Customer]

If a unique agreement ID is given to each service level agreement, then this ID can be added at the start of the name.

Examples:

  • Premium Customer Relationship Management (Siebel) for Widget North America, Sales & Marketing
  • SLA001094 – Standard Email for Widget Europe
Status

The Status field displays the current status of the service level agreement (SLA).

The available options are:

  • Being Prepared – The SLA has not yet been finalized.
  • Scheduled for Activation – The SLA has been finalized. It will automatically be activated when its start date has been reached.
  • Active – Users are currently covered by the SLA. The Status field is automatically changed from “Scheduled for Activation” to “Active” when the start date of the SLA has been reached.
  • Expired – Users are no longer covered by the SLA. The Status field is automatically changed from “Active” to “Expired” at the end of the day that is selected in the Expiry date field.
Customer

The Customer field is used to select the organization that pays for the service level agreement.

When a new SLA is being registered, all organizations of the SLA’s account (and the SLA’s directory account) can be selected, as well as all organizations that are directly linked to the trusted accounts of the SLA’s account. When an existing SLA is updated, and the customer organization of this SLA belongs to a trusted account, then any organization of this trusted account or its directory account can be selected.

Customer account

The Customer account field is used to specify which account’s service level managers are allowed to update the parts of the SLA that are intended to be maintained by the service level managers of the customer. More importantly, this field is used to specify whether specialists of the customer are allowed to see the requests that include this SLA in their Affected SLAs section.

This field is hidden, except when a new SLA is being registered and the organization selected in the Customer field is linked directly to a support domain account and the provider’s account is a support domain account of the same directory account, and a trust has been established between these two support domain accounts. By default, this field is set to the support domain account to which the customer organization is directly linked. But if the requests that affect the SLA should not become visible to the auditors, specialists or administrators of the support domain account to which the customer organization is directly linked, then the support domain account of the provider should be selected instead.

The value in this field cannot be updated once the SLA has been saved for the first time.

Customer representatives

The Customer representatives field is used to select the person (or persons) representing the customer of the service level agreement. When an SLA is activated or expires, an email notification is sent to the customer representatives.

The customer representative can also be used by a provider to assign an approval task to a customer. If it is not possible to select a person from the customer organization, then the provider can select someone from its own organization in the Customer representatives field of the SLA.

Persons who are selected as a customer representative of an SLA are able to see the ‘All Requests’ section in 4me Self Service, where all requests that are related to the service of the SLA (via an affected SLA) are displayed. The customer representative can add notes to a request, withdraw a request, or add it to a watchlist. The customer representative can also access some reports in the ‘Dashboards’ section of 4me Self Service, with the possibility to drill down into the data. To make a dashboard available to a customer representative, this must be configured on the dashboard.

Service provider

The Service provider field is automatically set to the organization that is selected in the Service provider field of the service that is related to the related service offering.

Service level manager

The Service level manager field is used to select the person of the service provider organization who acts as the service level manager for the customer of the service level agreement.

Support domain

Displays the title of the support domain account under which the service for which the SLA is registered is presented when a new request is opened for a user who is covered by the SLA. This field is visible only when the organization selected in the Customer field is registered in a directory account or a support domain account. If the SLA is registered in a support domain account and the original customer organization is linked directly to a different support domain account of the same directory account, then it is possible to select one of these two support domain accounts.

Service offering

The Service offering field is used to select the service offering that specifies the conditions that apply to the service level agreement.

Service instance

The Service instance field is used to select the service instance that will be used to provide the service to the customer of the service level agreement. Only service instances that are linked to the same service as the selected service offering can be selected.

Start date

The Start date field is used to specify the first day during which the service level agreement (SLA) is active.

The time zone of the service offering that is related to the SLA applies to this date.

Notice date

The Notice date field is used to specify the last day on which the service provider organization can still be contacted to terminate the service level agreement (SLA) to ensure that it expires on the intended expiry date. The Notice date field is left empty, and the Expiry date field is filled out, when the SLA is to expire on a specific date and no notice needs to be given to terminate it.

As long as notice still needs to be given to terminate the SLA, the Expiry date field is to remain empty.

The time zone of the service offering that is related to the SLA applies to this date.

Expiry date

The Expiry date field is used to specify the date through which the service level agreement (SLA) will be active. The SLA expires at the end of this day if it is not renewed before then. At the end of this day, the status of the SLA is automatically set to “Expired”.

As long as notice still needs to be given to terminate the SLA, the Expiry date field is to remain empty.

The time zone of the service offering that is related to the SLA applies to this date.

Time zone

The Time zone field is automatically set to the time zone that is selected in the Time zone field of the service offering that is related to the service level agreement.

Remarks

The Remarks field is used to add any additional information about the service level agreement that might prove useful.

This field allows basic text formatting.

Attachments

The Attach file… link is used to attach a file to the service level agreement. Multiple attachments can be added to an SLA.

Invoices
Invoices

The Invoices table field lists all invoices that have been added to the service level agreement. For each invoice, this field shows the invoice date, the invoice number, a description, and the amount of the invoice. The total amount of all invoices of this service level agreement is summed up under the individual amounts.

Coverage
Coverage

The Coverage field is used to specify how people who are to be covered by the service level agreement are to be selected.

Customer account

The Customer account field is automatically set to the account of the customer.

Organizations

The Organizations table field is used to select all organizations which employees and long-term contractors are to be covered by the service level agreement.

This table field is available only when the Coverage field is set to “People of the Following Organization(s) and Their Descendants”, “People of the Following Organization(s)” or “People of an Organization and Site from the Following”. If the coverage option “People of the Following Organization(s) and Their Descendants” is selected, a person is covered if his/her person record is linked to one of the selected organizations, or any child organization below these selected organizations. Similarly, if the coverage option “People of an Organization and Site from the Following” is selected, a person is covered only if his/her person record is linked to one of the selected organizations and to one of the selected sites.

Sites

The Sites table field is used to select all sites at which the people are to be covered by the service level agreement.

This table field is available only when the Coverage field is set to "People of the Following Site(s) or “People of an Organization and Site from the Following”. If the coverage option “People of an Organization and Site from the Following” is selected, a person is covered only if his/her person record is linked to one of the selected organizations and to one of the selected sites.

People

The People table field is used to select all people who are to be covered by the service level agreement.

This table field is available only when the Coverage field is set to “People Selected Below”.

Skill pools

The Skill pools table field is used to select all skill pools which members are to be covered by the service level agreement.

This table field is available only when the Coverage field is set to “Members of the Following Skill Pool(s)”.

Service instances

The Service instances table field is used to select the service instances that consume the service instance for which the service level agreement is registered.

This table field is available only when the Coverage field is set to “Members of Support Teams of the Following Service Instances”.

Use knowledge from service provider

The Use knowledge from service provider box is checked when the knowledge articles for the service instance that is selected in the Service instance field need to be made available to the people who are covered by an active SLA for the service instances selected in the Service instances table field.

Financial Details
Agreement ID

The Agreement ID is the unique identifier by which all the activities that are performed through the coverage of the SLA are known in the billing system of the service provider.

Activities
Activity ID

The Activity ID is the unique identifier by which an activity that is performed in the context of a service offering is known in the billing system of the service provider. Activity IDs can be defined for standard requests, incidents with impact level Top, High, Medium and Low, and for RFCs and RFIs.

Effort Classes
Rate ID

The Rate ID is the unique identifier by which an effort class that is linked to a time entry when an activity was performed through the coverage of the SLA is known in the billing system of the service provider. The effort class represents the type of effort that was performed when working on an activity. Some examples of effort classes are ‘Billable – Normal Hours’, Billable overtime’, ‘Non Billable’ or ‘Senior System Engineer’.