Maximizing the Value of SAP Enterprise Support
Dear Customer,For more than 30 years, SAP has been committed to deliver innovation and to support you and your customers in maintaining your competitive advantage in a constantly changing environment. This year’s introduction of SAP Enterprise Support represents a major step forward in this commitment.
SAP has a long and well-documented record of providing the industry’s most experienced service and support offering. To support our customers and partners, SAP can assist in deploying a full, end-to-end solution operations strategy that allows for the adaptation of existing solutions to changing market and business requirements – and take advantage of the new innovations delivered through Enhancement Packages that will make businesses of our and our partners’ customers more successful. This way, SAP can help reduce the total cost of operations of a customers’ IT infrastructure and support accelerate and significantly increase the return on an SAP investment.
The mission critical support services, assets, and methodologies of SAP Enterprise Support go even beyond maintenance delivering unmatched value to you and your customers.
As a partner, we will become equipped to further increase efficiency in service delivery and generate additional revenue and cash flow from reselling SAP Enterprise Support as well as operational services. Also, we benefit from an improved co-engagement with SAP when delivering the value of SAP Enterprise Support to your customers and make direct innovation accessible.
As a mid-sized enterprise with limited IT resources can now receive services and access to best practices, which help them to operate and manage their SAP-based solutions at level of quality and sophistication comparable to large enterprises, and - equally important - they can achieve this at a favorable cost.
Feedback from mid-sized enterprise customers shows, that they consider further enhanced business continuity (as enabled by the mission critical support capabilities) as well as reduced costs of operations of particular importance to them. In addition, these companies strongly value access to accelerated business innovation by leveraging SAP’s Enhancement Package architecture, as this enables innovation and continuous improvement while simultaneously eliminating the need for costly upgrades or complex test cycles.
In the last few months, we have cooperated with our partners, our joint customers and user groups (SUGEN, regional, and local) to substantially increase the value you and your customers receive from SAP Enterprise Support. As a result of these continuing efforts, SAP is pleased to announce the following enhancements:
- New 7-2 Maintenance Strategy: Complementing the maintenance extension for SAP R/3, SAP will introduce an industry-leading 7-2 maintenance strategy. This strategy will span all your qualified Business All-In-One solutions based on future core applications of the Business Suite, including SAP ERP 6.0. With this change, SAP goes beyond its 5-1-2 maintenance strategy, providing 7 years of mainstream maintenance plus 2 years of optional extended maintenance (at an additional fee).
- New Enterprise Support Service for Enhancement Packages: SAP provides you with up to five days remote advice per year by software architects to assist you in evaluating innovation capabilities of the latest SAP Enhancement Package and how it may be deployed for your business processes requirements of your qualified partner solution template.
In addition to the enhancements stated above, SAP would like to clarify key value drivers of existing SAP Enterprise Support services and hereby substantiate our commitments. The following service elements of Enterprise Support will be committed in a specified manner (Bill of Material):
- Partner Code Support: For qualified Partner solutions built with an SAP development workbench, SAP already today provides mission-critical support root-cause analysis for priority "very high" messages, respecting partner Intellectual Property rights. In conjunction, SAP has eliminated message billing for all priority "very high" messages. Also, for qualified partner solutions based on ERP 6.0 (and newer) SAP will offer up to two checks per year to help avoid conflicts between your own partner Add Ons and SAP Enhancement Packages, based on required minimum documentation.
- Testing Efficiency Improvement: SAP will deliver pre-configured test cases with SAP Solution Manager enterprise edition to help you optimize test activities for SAP and non-SAP systems.
- Guidelines for Configuration and Operations: For future SAP products and solutions, SAP will provide guidelines for pre-defined content as well as best practices for system administration and end-to-end solution operations.
These enhancements and increased commitments demonstrate that our partnership, our joint customers and user groups accelerates innovation while driving return on investment into SAP-based solutions. For more information on the value from these enhancements please contact your Partner, or visit www.sap.com/enterprisesupport and the SAP Service Marketplace.
At SAP, we are committed to your and your customer’s success and we are honored to be your business partner. We look forward to our continued collaboration. If you should have any question, please do not hesitate to contact us via adage@premierconsulting.com