Make Better Business Decisions with At-Your-Fingertip Support for SAP Landscapes

by Brendan Spelman, Head of Content Architecture and Business Automation, Lifetime Customer Experience, SAP

In today’s business environment, a real competitive advantage requires a fully optimized technology landscape. To achieve this, organizations must fully leverage the tools available to them and proactively address any issues that arise — before these issues affect the live system. SAP Enterprise Support provides SAP customers with the preparation necessary to meet these requirements.

As part of this preparation, SAP Enterprise Support delivers reports on customers’ support statistics, such as data on support incidents, license compliance, and system usage. In the past, these reports were provided periodically in PDF format, and covered about six months’ worth of data. As businesses move toward becoming agile, real-time enterprises, however, they need more than a static approach — they need the information they want, when they want it, available at their fingertips. To address these needs, SAP offers the SAP Enterprise Support reporting cockpit.

Access to the Right Information

The SAP Enterprise Support reporting cockpit provides a cloud-based, self-service dashboard that helps customers understand the adoption, usage, and performance of their SAP solutions and support services. It also helps businesses pinpoint how to make continuous improvements rather than making them periodically, which was the case when using the PDF report. The tool currently covers SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP C/4HANA, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, with support for SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Integrated Business Planning, and SAP Cloud Platform coming soon. Support for SAP on-premise solutions is planned for later in 2020.

While the PDF report had to be generated by IT teams and SAP support contacts, the reporting cockpit can be configured by administrators and process owners. The dashboard can also be customized to display specific information for different roles and to show data during various timelines — from three months to even 24 months back — enabling a targeted view of information.

Using Information to Make Better Decisions

The ability to optimize the support of their SAP software is not the only value customers are finding with the SAP Enterprise Support reporting cockpit. Instead of just using it to look backward at their data, customers can also use it to plan ahead. The dashboard and visualizations provided by the tool reveal trends that weren’t readily apparent in the PDF report, and customers can use that information to ensure that their processes are efficient and effective, and to inform their business decisions going forward.

One customer, for example, had 100,000 open human resources performance forms in its SAP SuccessFactors system with only 11 forms signed off, meaning that only 11 people had used the form functionality fully. An HR administrator can look at that data graphically in the reporting cockpit and use that data to make a decision — in this case, the likely decision would be to improve the process, since a large number of users are not following it. Another customer was adding users to its SAP system, but the number of active users declined steadily after an initial jump. By visualizing the trends with the reporting cockpit, a system administrator can determine how to address the problem — by easing access to the SAP system or by providing additional training, for example.

Get Started

Get hands-on experience with the SAP Enterprise Support reporting cockpit by launching it via the SAP ONE Support Launchpad with your SAP user ID (contact your company’s super user administrator or SAP Support for assistance). For more guidance, visit https://support.sap.com/esrc.

Brendan Spelman is the Head of Content Architecture and Business Automation for the Lifetime Customer Experience group at SAP. He combines his knowledge gained from SAP product support and center of expertise with a passion for new technology to enhance the customer experience of SAP Enterprise Support.