Already acknowledged as the leader in providing high-grade, value-for-money maintenance within the business enterprise market, SAP is now taking a quantum leap in total system care and quality. The company is enhancing its maintenance and support services even further by adding a series of proactive checks and monitoring services, including the automatic early detection of potential problems.
"The new offering forms part of our mission to become even more proactive in the maintenance and service area," says Claas Kuehnemann, general manager: services at SAP Southern Africa. "Also, although the results of our last local customer satisfaction survey2 in the services area were good - all 6 and up on a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (satisfied) - our customers indicated there was room for improvement in certain areas. We believe the introduction of TeamSAP Support, as the new programme is called, will go a long way to ensuring this improvement."
Team SAP Support will also ensure greater system availability and lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and will be available to all SAP customers from January next year (1999).
"Maintaining an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is still a complex matter," says Kuehnemann. "Support needs to be of a very high standard, but is further complicated in South Africa due to the skills shortage. Our enhanced services package will ensure that all our customers get the expertise they need.
"EarlyWatch Alert, an automatic monitoring service, forms the basis of TeamSAP Support. Important system parameters are periodically transmitted to SAP and analysed using an empirical database. The result of this analysis, and recommendations for action, are then sent to the customer via the SAP Online Service System. This is a win-win situation for customers and SAP because it will substantially lower the number of escalation cases," he says.
EarlyWatch Alert has been available in the past as an optional extra and has proved to be highly successful in checking the technical health of a system, picking up problems early, and giving excellent recommendations on how to fix these.
"Without this system, customers tend not to report system problems until they have actually happened," says Kuehnemann. "The time elapsing between problem recognition and reporting is often critical to ensuring optimum problem solution. A preventative approach minimises the potential negative impact on a SAP system, which is why we have now bundled it as part of the maintenance agreement."
In addition to EarlyWatch Alert, customers can benefit from other checks at critical implementation points, such as going live with R/3 or upgrading to a higher release, or from additional monitoring services
"To enable this improvement of SAP`s maintenance service, we will be raising the percentage rate for our maintenance charges by two percentage points per year for all new customers," says Kuehnemann. "Existing customers will benefit from the additional service offerings at no extra cost for one year."
Kuehnemann believes this offering will be of particular benefit to medium sized organisations which do not have all the in-house skills, such as Basis and database administration, necessary to manage an ERP system.
"In South Africa, there are a relatively high number of mid-sized companies in our customer base. Now they can run their ERP systems without being concerned regarding support," he says.
1 "SAP clearly and by a surprisingly wide margin has the best price/performance ratio of all vendors analyzed..." Source: "Comparison of Maintenance and Support: Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP`, June 1998, Strategy Partners International
"...in the area of services, especially technical services and support, SAP is at least two to three years ahead of competition." Source: Gartner Group (Erik Keller, SAP Lead Analyst)
2 Customer Satisfaction Survey 1997 - annual survey of SAP AG customers run by global research firm Infratest Burke. The South African portion was carried out by Markinor, with input being fed directly back to Infrastest for collation and analysis.
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