When you think about support at your organization, you might be asking one of these common questions: Is my company ready to provide end-user support for break fixes, enhancements, system upgrades, and maintenance support? What are the recommended functions, activities, and team structures that I should establish prior to going live — and after going live — with an SAP application so that my company maximizes its investment while providing service and support to users?

To start, a solid production support agency should be built on Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) principles. SAP Solution Manager is built on these principles, and a successful organization should focus on these core principles when building out a Service Desk and production support framework. SAP Solution Manager can act as the primary tool supporting your production operations.

To successfully use it, you need to have the appropriate internal team structure in place. The primary goal of production support is to respond to incidents and issues that your users identify. For SAP implementations, this function consists of the following roles:

• End user: primary system user. Reports incidents and issues to the Service Desk.
• Internal customer support: Service Desk and level 2 support teams consisting of both technical and functional resources
• SAP customer support: Dedicated SAP team that provides support for any issues that are not resolvable by your internal support teams

In the following sections, I provide you examples of the structure you need to establish in your organization to provide end-to-end response and resolution for issues that your customers or employees may encounter using an SAP solution. There are many business benefits to the thoughtful development of a production support organization. A well-planned issue response strategy results in fast and efficient processes, reduced cost of service, and improved service quality.

Plan for Incorporating SAP Solution Manager

SAP Solution Manager does not always address certain risks that are inherent to establishing an operational support agency. Because it is built to support a wide range of industries and organizations, sometimes it is not customized to meet particular organizations’ needs. As a result, your organization may want to pursue customization. Customizing core code is not a viable solution, so you may need to look into custom configuration options that allow you to add functionality not available in standard SAP Solution Manager. Another risk is support team adoption of SAP Solution Manager. Your support teams probably maintain other programs and applications within your organization, so the rollout of SAP Solution Manager is seen as just another tool they are required to learn.

Begin working with your teams several months prior to your rollout so that they are well prepared to fully adopt the tool and ready to provide assistance on the first day the solution is rolled out to users. I have found that a key way to drive adoption is to use your current support team to propose requirements for your rollout of SAP Solution Manager. They are experts in customer support and issue resolution, and they will know which tools and mechanisms should be in place to successfully provide SAP support at your organization. Use this same team to test your SAP Solution Manager system as you develop the functionality in a lower environment prior to moving the code and configuration to a productive system. This not only provides your team with an opportunity to learn the tool, but it also involves them in the rollout process.

The Service Desk

The Service Desk provides front-line communication with end users. It is the first level of experience that your users have with the support group. It is critical that organizations define what types of questions and issues the Service Desk will support prior to an SAP implementation. In general, a Service Desk can expect to get two types of end-user interactions:

• General inquiries and incidents: General inquiries are usually related to general system navigation, how-to questions, and security authorization. Typically, these should be handled at the initial Service Desk level.
• Incidents: Incidents could involve system downtime, data inconsistencies, and problems with connections to upstream and downstream systems. Incidents have a significant impact on your productive system and should be handled at level 2 of your Service Desk.

The Service Desk should also establish its primary goals related to both general inquiries and incident management. General inquiries are questions that the support team should be able to answer and resolve immediately. You should create a standing guide with the most frequently asked questions and information on how users can reset passwords and obtain access. You can capture this information from SAP Solution Manager as an output of your historical support tickets. The primary goal for general inquiries should be to resolve them upon initial contact.

Incident management may take more time. The goals of the Service Desk during incident management should be:

• Recover the problem
• Understand and address the effect

• Respond to and communicate with the end users

Use Service Queues to Establish Support Groups and Issue Routing Plans

The Service Desk staff in your organization creates support tickets in SAP Solution Manager to manage your responses to both types of end-user interactions. An organization should define each level of support within the Service Desk. You can create service queues for each group (e.g., general ledger, supply chain, and technology) and team within a group (e.g., a Basis team and security team within the technology group). These queues are set up as business partners in SAP Solution Manager and receive a unique business partner IDs, which is typically alphanumeric.

Figure 1 is an example of how you might want to divide up your Service Desk organization into multiple levels to manage Service Desk tickets: they are received by the level 1 Service Desk and routed to specific teams. In other words, Figure 1 shows the organization and structure of a multi-tiered Service Desk. For my example, all end-user interactions start with the Tier 1 Service Desk. If the issue is not resolved there, it is routed to one of the Tier 2 support teams. In my example, there are both functional (e.g., Accounts Payable) and technical (e.g., Security) support teams.

Figure 1

List of teams within a multi-tiered Service Desk

Figure 2 is an expansion of the organizations above and shows how individuals work within each team and how they are assigned to that team within SAP Solution Manager. This example also shows how you can create a team within a team (e.g., the Technology Support group has three teams assigned to it). A business partner ID is created for both the team and the individual assigned to that team. (Note that only individuals with system access are given business partner IDs.) In the example, Tier 1 Service Desk has a business partner ID of 232. The Service Desk Mgr and Service Desk Agent roles are not assigned IDs yet because these are set up as roles in the system and have not been populated with an actual person with system access.

Figure 2

An expansion of the organization showing the roles within each team

The business partner IDs that are generated are unique identifiers for that organization or individual. When logging tickets, these IDs are used to assign a ticket to a person or a team. You can also set up business partner IDs with emails (e.g., personal emails, team emails, or distribution groups, depending on whether the ID is for a team or an individual). In addition to assignments, these IDs are useful for issue reporting and monitoring.

Customer Incident and Issue Reporting Tool

In your organization, the people who log tickets are usually members of your Service Desk team and support staff within the second tiers of your multi-tiered service organization. End users who are fluent with the system and have the appropriate access may also log tickets. To access the support ticket functionality, use transaction CRMD_ORDER (which you can type directly into the menu field or, from the user menu, reach by selecting the Service Desk folder and then CRMD_ORDER). Next, click the Support Ticket button (Figure 3). The Create Support Ticket screen (Figure 4) opens on the Fast Entry tab. This is the section where you enter all the information necessary to track and log your issue. I discuss the second tab, Transaction Data, later in this article.

Figure 3

Initial screen that you see after opening transaction CRMD_ORDER

Figure 4

Example support ticket that displays after clicking the Support Ticket button

When logging support tickets, use business partner IDs to fill in the required fields based on who has reported the issue and which teams and persons are responsible for the issue resolution. In Figure 4, the issue is related to a failed transport, so the ticket was both reported and created by a Service Desk agent and assigned to the Basis team. The owner is a release manager. In SAP Solution Manager, the business partner ID is used in the input fields and the text to the left of the field represents the name or team associated with that ID.

Issue Hand Off from Level 1 to Level 2 Support Teams

Service queues are used to manage the handoff of tickets from your level 1 Service Desk to the various level 2 support teams. In SAP Solution Manager, the support ticket fields that remain constant (i.e., un-editable) are the Reported by and Created By fields (shown in Figure 4). These should be static so the original information regarding who reported the issue and who initially logged the issue cannot be changed.

Fields that you can change and use to manage ticket handoff are the Ownership Queue and Owner fields. You can change them as often as necessary to route the ticket until the issue is resolved. You can configure your system so automatic emails are sent to each person or team as the issue changes owners and status. This requires custom configuration and is beyond the scope of this article. The emails that are generated serve as an alert to the affected stakeholder and provide high-level summary information about the open ticket. These alerts are sent when tickets are assigned, move to a different team, or change status. They are key drivers in the successful and timely resolution of a ticket.

• If you need to send more detailed information, you can manually send an individual email from the system using the send object with note icon in the toolbar of the Create Support Ticket window (Figure 5). You use this function when you need to add more details about the issue or send additional recipients that are not recipients of the system-generated automatic email (if your organization chose to configure this option). Figure 6 shows the screen you use to send a system-generated email.

Figure 5

Access the send object with note icon from the Create Support Ticket screen

Figure 6

Use the system generated email functionality

If your organization is unable to resolve the issue, you can send the ticket directly to SAP. Your organization should have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with SAP regarding issue service and response time. You do not need to use a separate tool for these situations — SAP Solution Manager Service Desk allows you to manage both issues within your organization and those that you send to SAP.

Additional Tools to Support Issue Resolution

Historical information and ticket details are stored in the supplementary tabs in the Transaction Data section of the Support Ticket transaction (you are still in transaction CRMD_ORDER) (Figure 7). This section contains tabs that provide reference information about details entered into the Fast Entry section, as well as information about the action taken and the date of action on each issue. You can tailor this section to your organization’s individual needs through custom configuration, but this is beyond the scope of this article.

Figure 7

Additional tools available under the Transaction Data tab

Additional features of this section:

• Document storage (Documents tab): Manage attachments supporting issue detail and resolution
• Action history (Actions tab): Complete history of actions taken on your issue and ownership assignment changes
• Duration (Partners and Administration tabs): Information on how long the ticket has been opened. Supports SLA reporting and management.

• Customized information: You can use custom configuration to create additional tabs (e.g., the Customer Fields tab in Figure 7) to report information your organization needs that the standard solution does not supply.

Ticket Reporting and Monitoring

Reporting capabilities in SAP Solution Manager support the monitoring of tickets and issue response. You can create reports for individuals, team managers, management, and SLA reporting and monitoring. Standard SAP Solution Manager functionality allows you to search by manually selected parameters (Figures 8 and 9). To access this in SAP Solution Manager, use transaction CRM_DNO_MONITOR. Parameters are organized by category. These categories include:

• Business partner
• Status
• Service process
• Activity
• Organization
• Item
• Subject
• Reference object
• SAP support message

Multiple options exist within each category. You can choose to generate either a detailed report or a simple summary report. Production support teams can use reporting to manage tickets assigned to their team queues and drive resolution of all open issues regardless of team ownership and assignment. Figures 8 and 9 show two parts of one large screen (i.e., you can see Figure 9 by scrolling down from the screen in Figure 8) that displays the options for selecting parameters to drive your search. Enter the appropriate data into these fields to narrow your search and then click the execute icon.  

Figure 8

Search parameter options

Figure 9

Additional search parameter options

After you enter the appropriate data in Figures 8 and 9, the system generates the report in Figure 10. You can add and generate additional fields for the report output through custom configuration, which allows you to select which fields are returned in a report. The standard fields that are returned are the fields on the Fast Entry screen of your Service Desk ticket transaction (Figure 4).

Figure 10

Search output

When data is returned, you can select the numeric ticket ID for an individual item. This takes you directly into transaction CRM_ORDER and that specific service ticket. This functionality allows you to edit tickets directly from the report output.

Other functions available from the report output screen in Figure 10 include:

• Download the report to a spreadsheet
• Sort data in ascending or descending order
• Directly manage or edit a particular ticket, and then return to the report by clicking the ID for a particular ticket
• Refresh data to capture changes in tickets
• Establish user-selected filters