Insights

Paul Cooper

SAP Enterprise Support Part I - What's going on?

Following the recent preliminary announcement of the first quarter financial results for 2010 by SAP it has become apparent SAP Enterprise Support has had a bigger uptake than people had perhaps expected. With SAP stating that up to 90% of customers are adopting the enhanced licence offering of Enterprise Support. If you sit in the 90% what should you be starting to think about?

SAP Enterprise Support and Solution Manager

Now, for the first time there are agreed contractual SLAs with SAP when issues are escalated (limited to initial response time for Very High and High messages, as well as corrective action response times for Very High messages), but to attain these SAP requires its customers to play their part in the relationship. So SAP has put a number of mandatory requirements into the Enterprise Support agreements for customers to meet, including:

Submission of Very High and High messages to the Active Global Support organisation must be via Solution Manager Enterprise Edition.  This is the first pointer that you need to be running Solution Manager Enterprise Support Edition to meet your prerequisites for this licence agreement.

Outside of this requirement there is a list of prerequisites to attain before receiving SAP Enterprise Support, including:

• Have installed, configured and be using productively, a SAP Solution Manager Enterprise Edition Software system, with the latest patch levels for Basis, ABAP, and the latest SAP Solution Manager Enterprise Edition support packages.
• Activate SAP EarlyWatch Alert for the Production Systems and transmit data to the productive SAP Solution Manager Enterprise Edition system.
• Establish a connection from Solution Manager to SAP and a connection between Solution Manager and the SAP solutions in the landscape.
• Perform the Initial Assessment for Enterprise Support set-up with the nominated Support Advisory Center which is based around SAP standards and documentation, any actions/recommendations deemed mandatory by SAP must be implemented.
• Key to the point above will be the solution documentation available, with organisations required to provide adequate and current details of the configuration and modifications to the SAP landscape and in turn keep these up to date and accessible.
• Establish and maintain an SAP certified Customer COE within twelve months of the effective date of the Enterprise Support Contract.

Customer Center of Expertise (CoE) - What is it?

The CoE is required to fulfil a number of activities and within one year of being activated be certified by SAP via a remote audit. It acts as a permanent center of expertise for the operational SAP landscape and processes, supporting the efficient implementation, innovation, operation and quality of business processes and systems. SAP recommends this is achieved through the utilisation of the RunSAP methodology and exploitation of the best practice end to end standards for SAP Operations. More detail and analysis of the RunSAP Methodology and E2E Standards will be available in part two of this update.

Key Functions of the CoE

• The set-up and operation of a support desk, with an appropriate number of consultants to cover infrastructure and applications across the working day.
• Administration of the SAP contract and management of the license/maintenance audit 
• Co-ordinate any development requests that are to be escalated to SAP.
• Information Management, act as the internal marketer for SAP within the organisation, providing demonstrations, training and information to the user community and wider business.
• Continuous Quality Checks - the CoE is responsible for planning and co-ordinating any CQC service activity in the organisation carried out as part of the scope of the individual Enterprise Support contracts.

In conclusion, much of what SAP has lain down as mandatory or recommend for meeting the requirements of Enterprise Support will already be part of day to day business as usual operations for organisations working in an ITIL or best practice environment. As has always been the case with SAP having the system alone does not bring tangible benefits to an organisation, it's how you use, develop and manage it that counts.

This analogy follows for Enterprise Support, the business benefits and opportunities to reduce your total cost of ownership come from exploiting the tool kit and functionality found in Solution Manager Enterprise Support Edition, the RunSAP Methodology and End to End Solution Operations.