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SAP re-certifies Britehouse as Partner Centre of Excellence

Pro-active monitoring and innovation set Britehouse apart as first and second level provider of VAR support.


Johannesburg, 24 Feb 2015

With re-certification confirmed in January, Britehouse has entered its second two-year period as a Partner Centre of Excellence (PCOE) providing value-added reseller (VAR) support to South African customers on SAP's behalf.

SAP requires re-certification every two years. Britehouse was first certified in 2013. Britehouse has also been certified for HANA support, based on Britehouse's establishment in 2014 of South Africa's first Managed HANA Enterprise Cloud Platform.

"We are particularly gratified by the certification as Britehouse can now offer VAR support for SAP Business All-in-One, HANA, analytics, and database and technology," says Britehouse IOSS COE manager, Sharon Miller. "That means our people, processes, and systems met SAP's extremely stringent criteria for a PCOE across a very broad range of SAP solutions.

"The least that this tells our customers is, whatever their conventional first- and second-level support needs are, we can easily provide them. But, as Britehouse usually does, we've gone a step further - to ensure not only that customers can test or upgrade their systems efficiently, but that we can actually pre-empt disruptions to their systems and cost to their businesses.

"That's because we have built our PCOE into the Britehouse Control Centre and have established dedicated teams of consultants who continuously pro-actively monitor a customer's system in order to identify potential problems and make the necessary recommendations for remediation. This also enables us to innovate on behalf of clients on an ongoing basis, keeping their business systems agile and competitive."

The Britehouse Control Centre (BCC) goes beyond the traditional approach of simply delivering SAP functional resources. It is built on SAP Solution Manager's approach of running SAP like a factory, giving PCOE consultants deep insight into the status of customer business processes, IT landscapes and technology, and user experience. This positions a VAR support provider to be pro-active in both support and innovation.

Solution Manager ensures that a VAR support provider has a verified remote connection with the SAP Support network, an operational SAP Maintenance Optimizer, and an understanding of key SAP Solution Manager components such as incident handling, solution documentation, service delivery, and root cause analysis.

In addition to examining the status of a PCOE's use of Solution Manager, the two-yearly audit by SAP of PCOEs also evaluates their incident management systems, test systems, remote connectivity with customers, qualifications of support staff, their own support processes and their understanding and use of SAP support for PCOEs, their deployment of SAP EarlyWatch Support, and the quality of their hotline capabilities.

"From the point of view of both SAP and our joint customers, Britehouse PCOE is the face of SAP in the relationship," Miller says. "So, re-certification provides customers with the official assurance that Britehouse is at least as good as SAP would be in a support situation.

"Customers then have the additional comfort of knowing that our PCOE forms part of the Britehouse Control Centre, which is focused overall on reducing customers' support and running costs and minimising their business risk.

"And, the BCC and the PCOE - and the Managed HANA Enterprise Platform - fall within the Britehouse Innovation, Outsourcing and Support Services (IOSS) division, which is focused on enabling continuous business process improvement made even more potent through economies of scale.

"So, through our PCOE facilities, our customers gain more than support. They gain significant technology and business value-add that drops straight to their bottom line. "As the cherry on the cake, they deal with a local partner; someone they probably already know and trust. Someone who understands their business and their culture and can actually be seen to be working side by side with them."

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