Welcome to the sixth edition of Your SAP Investment Unleashed, a column from Kristen Scheffler, Vice President of Customer Evolution for North America, SAP. As part of SAP Customer Evolution, Kristen is focused on supporting, guiding, educating, listening to, and enabling customers to get the most out of their existing SAP investments.
Last time around, we celebrated VerNeil Mesecher Jr., Senior Director of Customer Engagement Events Liaison for North America, SAP, who recently retired from SAP, and reflected on his long-time support of the ASUG community. In this week’s edition, Kristen explores proactive support options available to SAP customers within their existing solution sets.
After a brief hiatus for some much-needed rest following SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, our column returns to tackle one of the topics that continues to be a core focus area for SAP Customer Evolution, and for the ASUG community: how to get in front of an issue or challenge with your SAP solution before it becomes a problem.
And, no, I am not talking about mind-reading, although that would be nice! I am sure many of the ASUG members reading this column have experienced one or more of these challenges:
- Your solution is running, but maybe not as optimally as you think it should.
- You need to understand and minimize the risk of accidental or intentional system changes by users.
- You’d like to elevate your skills, but you don’t have the budget to spend on ‘training’
You could log an incident (case/ticket/OSS) with SAP, start an expert chat to get real-time interaction, or perhaps even schedule an expert session to set aside time with an engineer to discuss. Each of these are viable options. And it would be proactive to get in touch with SAP Support before a real problem presented itself, right? But what if you could immediately leverage your maintenance/cloud subscription to gain insights, best-practice suggestions from SAP, and access learnings to address these challenges? Too good to be true? Let’s debunk that myth.
Example 1: Your solution is running, but maybe not as optimally as you think it should.
Do you have SAP EarlyWatch Alert (EWA) enabled? And have you noticed less-than-optimal performance or availability from one or more of the components within your SAP solution? If that’s the case, then SAP EarlyWatch Check, with its continuous quality check (CQC), could hold the answer to your problem.
Through remote services like this, experts analyze your system or situation based on real data from your systems or solutions. After each check, you receive a service report with an executive summary, findings, and a detailed action plan to mitigate risks or improve functionality. Various types of CQCs are available; here, find a detailed overview. Through an SAP EarlyWatch Check CQC, experts analyze the components of your SAP solution, operating system, and database to determine how to optimize performance and keep your total cost of ownership to a minimum.
How can you request a CQC? Via the new Get Support application in SAP for Me (SAP Note 1296527). When submitting your request, select Continuous Quality Check & Improvement Services under ‘Product,’ and in 'Product function' choose either:
- Service Request for a Cloud Solution
- Service Request for an On-Premise Solution
If you need assistance submitting your request, you may contact your local Customer Interaction Center (CIC).
Example 2: You need to understand and minimize the risk of accidental or intentional system changes by users.
If you are trying to learn about security fundamentals, gain knowledge of security patch management, manage and monitor user access, or understand how to secure your cloud solutions from SAP and benefit from security related tools, the SAP Enterprise Support Value Map for Security is what you need.
SAP Enterprise Support Value Maps constitute an empowerment and support program that leads you to the knowledge, skills, experts, and services needed to address business challenges and adopt new technologies. Through Value Maps, SAP customers have direct access to SAP experts, interactive social collaboration forums, accelerated learning, and prescriptive guidance.
To learn about all of the available SAP Enterprise Support Value Maps, click here. You will need to register once, but then you will gain unlimited access to Value Maps. The SAP Enterprise Support Value Map for Security will guide you through the information, tools, and services available from SAP Enterprise Support to help you efficiently build and run your SAP systems and landscapes in a secure manner.
Example 3: You’d like to elevate your skills, but you don’t have the budget to spend on ‘training’.
Let’s face it: there is a plethora of information and education out there. Sometimes it feels like we are trying to drink through a firehose that is on full blast.
With SAP Learning Hub, edition for SAP Enterprise Support, which is included in your SAP Enterprise Support agreement or cloud subscription, you can tap into SAP support expertise through the SAP Enterprise Support Academy program.
The SAP Enterprise Support Academy will help ensure key users, IT, and business experts can build and maintain the skills and knowledge they need to navigate system operations, solution supportability, and SAP support infrastructure. This program provides opportunities to build and reinforce knowledge and skills, all while helping you maximize the value of your SAP investment.
Enablement assets can be consumed through a dedicated platform: SAP Learning Hub, edition for SAP Enterprise Support. These assets range from self-paced learning content (i.e. E-learnings, Best Practices) to instructor-led courses like virtual live sessions and multiday workshop-style sessions.
Learn more and sign up for the SAP Enterprise Support Academy here. You will need to register to obtain access once; then, you will have access to the full repository of learnings made available through your support investment. Updated content is always being added to the repository, so you may want to sign up for our monthly newsletter.
As always, I hope this information has been helpful and I would love to hear any feedback, ideas, and topics from you that you would like me to address in future articles, so please don’t hesitate to connect with me.