by Sandeep Narayan, Services Engagement Expert, Cloud Success Services, SAP
At Cloud Success Services, Your success is our goal, so we place the outcomes you need to deliver at the center of everything we do – designing solutions that unlock the power of your SAP investment.
Whether you’re deploying something new, accelerating to the cloud, or transforming how your business works, our portfolio of Success Experiences, Extensions, and Services helps create the right results, so you can sustain success.
Summarized here in the blog is SAP’s holistic portfolio of service & support offerings, with a few examples from my own experience where we were able to deliver business outcomes, accelerate value, and provide an exceptional experience to our customers.
Companies today face new challenges.
Market dynamics are changing, consumer behaviors are changing, there is a focus on decarbonization, and digitalization has become a necessity.
And there is a shift in technology trends. Machine Learning and AI are being adopted to improve customer experience. Smart devices and Sensors are being adopted to intelligently monitor assets to achieve operational excellence. Big data and distributed computing are being used to handle large sets of data and create actionable insights for better decisions. New technologies like Blockchain and 5G are emerging and helping create new revenue streams.
In this new intelligent era, companies need to be agile, redesign their business processes, and adopt new technologies to stay on top of the industry.
SAP considering the current industry challenges and changing technology trends designed The Intelligent Enterprise.
By definition, “Intelligent Enterprises run integrated business processes, powered by innovative technologies, working together in networks, to increase resilience, profitability, and sustainability”.
SAP Cloud Success Services (CSS) offers end-to-end holistic support and guidance via outcome-based, value-add services, and support across the Intelligent Enterprise, and help enable the digital transformation
At SAP Cloud Success Services, we are a strong well-connected global team of more than 22,500 SAP professionals located in 64 countries and serving more than 180 countries.
Our team is deeply knowledgeable in SAP solutions and well connected with the development and partner ecosystem. Our expertise comes from the fact that we are serving more than 400,000 installed base customers and more than 186 million cloud subscribers globally.
Through SAP Cloud Success Services, we empower you, and your partners to deploy, maintain, run, and unlock the full potential of SAP solutions via the rich portfolio of offerings and longer-term engagements.
Success Experiences, Extensions, and Services from SAP help you stay ahead by making sure your SAP solutions are focused on your business’s top priorities.
These services and support offerings are built with the cloud mindset and designed to help deliver the business results that accelerate success for your company.
Our foundational success offerings start with helping you start successfully.
For each of your SAP solutions, you get consistent, proactive support, enablement, training, content, innovation, and insight – the information needed to realize value as fast as possible from the mission-critical solutions.
This essential success offering also includes collaboration with support experts with a focus on driving outcomes.
From there, you decide where to go as you use the solution, define your innovation strategy, and think broadly about your business.
You can then choose from longer-term engagements that include more individualized or high-touch services or select short-term focused packages that accelerate launch or address specific business challenges across your organization.
No matter what you choose, you get the insight and guidance needed to be successful in the cloud, take full advantage of SAP’s expertise and ecosystem, and keep improving – at your own pace.
Whether you are focused on a particular part of the Lead-to-Cash process, or company-wide initiatives and end-to-end strategies, you get the full commitment of SAP to serve and help you achieve success in your digital transformation journey.
We guide you in designing and applying the right solutions to consistently raise the bar on what it means for your business to run at its best.
Backed by 50 years of industry, technology, and business process expertise, our 20,000+ services, and support professionals work together with you and your partners to deliver continuous innovation and realize rapid results.
Customer success is our goal, and that goal is within reach. We ensure we work together to continually drive successful business outcomes and values that matter most to YOU!
Success Experiences offer ESSENTIAL foundational support offerings, ADVANCED support plans for cloud solutions, and SELECT longer-term broader-scope or short-term pre-defined engagements for your success.
SAP Enterprise Support is our foundational, ESSENTIAL success offering that helps make sure your SAP solution continuously delivers the impact your business needs to continue to grow and thrive.
With Enterprise Support, for the deployed SAP solution, you receive Expert Guidance (value maps or learning journey and advisory), Enablement (support academy, support portal), New Features and Business Outcomes (remote services, releases, updates, patches), and a Digital Support Experience (one-support launchpad, next-gen support options to leverage support experts, early watch alerts, SLAs for incidents).
It is not just a library of information, but you get detailed guidance that shows what information to use, who should use it, and when. Plus, you get the tools and insights needed to manage the entire lifecycle of their application. Example: Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (CALM)
Embedded Launch Activities (EmLA) are included as part of a cloud subscription and help you prioritize and launch a cloud functionality that will deliver immediate impact to your business in a compressed time.
EmLA accelerates the launch through guided enablement, a pre-configured demo environment with how-to tips and adoption touch points to ensure adoption is moving fast enough and you are seeing the business results.
I recently had a customer ask, “Can we enable Success Factors Learning first as it is of high priority to our business today”, to which I replied, “Of course, EmLA is what you need and pointed them to the documentation”
SAP Preferred Success is an ADVANCED support offering that delivers personalized solutions and process expertise per SAP cloud solution.
With SAP Preferred Success, a Customer Success Partner helps collaborate and guides you in the assessment of your business and outlines recommendations for how to effectively put the SAP cloud solution to work.
By blending a clear understanding of your unique cloud solution plans with detailed technology and process knowledge, SAP builds and manages a roadmap for what you need today and where you need to go next.
You get a customized cloud learning strategy designed specifically for your team, solutions, and business needs.
Plus, SAP will deliver targeted checks that analyze the cloud solution usage and provide actionable insight on where to improve and help safeguard business continuity with enhanced Support SLAs.
Together, SAP will help create a clear long-term vision and roadmap that converts your metrics and milestones into a tailored success plan for your cloud journey.
SAP Preferred Success is offered today for cloud solutions S/4 Hana Cloud, CX, HXM, ISBN, and BTP, and our portfolio is expanding.
SAP Preferred Success will help build a cloud mindset, optimize, enhance, and increase your Success in the Cloud.
These SELECT offerings from SAP help drive innovation across your company, tackling strategic challenges as you transform the business.
You can choose longer-term, broader scope options such as Max Attention, or Active Attention where the SAP team embeds itself into your business, or choose pre-packaged short-term technical outcome-focused journeys.
Either way, you get Premium Engagement high-touch services tailored to your individual needs that are chosen from a vast, exhaustive portfolio of available services.
SAP MaxAttention, is the most comprehensive multi-year premium engagement support offering from SAP that covers all deployment models, and solutions, and is the most comprehensive, high-touch, tailored, strategic end-to-end support engagement SAP offers, embedding experts into the heart of your organization to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the challenges, work together on the solutions, and ensure your business agenda and tech strategy are one.
The embedded team Lead Technical Quality Manager (LTQM) and Engagement Lead (EL) ensure you have the right experts from SAP at the right time.
LTQM is the operational lead addressing the IT demands and takes care of services plan and delivery, your escalation point of contact, while the EL supports the strategic design and architectural aspects.
The embedded front-office team is supported by a very strong back-office team of SAP experts from our Intelligent Service Delivery (ISD) Hub and this collaboration ensures the best and most reliable Premium Partnership with SAP.
With MaxAttention you also have access to Experts on Demand (EoD), a team of SAP experts you can leverage when there are critical issues and need immediate attention.
You also get access to a 24x7 Mission Control Center (MCC), a team of SAP experts who are available to engage, troubleshoot, debug, and fix issues during the critical cutover period that may have production or go-live impact or during the hyper care period or even post go-live.
SAP Active Attention is a continuous collaboration engagement from SAP for enabling successful program deployment and operations.
Active Attention offers a comprehensive portfolio of outcome-based services that are tailored to your needs covering all SAP solutions and deployments, and a strong engagement model with a dedicated Lead Technical Quality Manager (LTQM) embedded into the project.
You also get access to experts through Experts on Demand (EoD) and a 24x7 Mission Control Center (MCC) to support you at critical timelines of your project.
This high-touch premium engagement offering is built on proven best practices and decades of experience and gives you access to a global team of SAP experts to ensure your SAP solutions are not only running at their best, but they are also doing specifically what your organization needs to run its best.
Many of our customers have successfully leveraged our Premium Engagement Services to proactively safeguard their go-lives and build a post-go-live operations framework to continue monitoring their systems and process, and keep running smoothly.
One of my other personal best examples, at an account of mine, our customer was live with S/4, Service Cloud, and a few other SAP solutions.
It was around the previous fall, Alex their director of call-center operations reached out to me and said, “our call center representatives are complaining of slow response times executing some processes. ”. Their partner teams were engaged already but were yet to find the root cause, it needed a resolution fast and was not something that could be solved via a support ticket. They needed expertise. We assured Alex, to not worry, Active Attention got this.
We quickly discussed internally, scheduled a ‘Technical Performance Optimization’ service from within our portfolio, which was the best fit service to address the situation, and brought in our experts.
We met with their call center representatives, and had them recreate the scenario, our experts traced, debugged, found the root cause, and provided recommendations to resolve it.
Alex and her team applied the recommendations, which led to the resolution of the issue saving huge $ amounts, which otherwise would be lost in added operational costs. All this within 5 days and Alex was extremely relieved!
As for the root cause, there were custom code enhancements that were done on the UI layer increasing the overall process response times. Our team of experts having decades of experience handling similar situations were able to identify the cause and provide a resolution quickly.
This is one experience, but there are many scenarios where premium engagement has delivered incredible value to our customers, both proactively and reactively.
SAP Business Journeys is SAP’s new addition to the support portfolio to deliver a quick, clear path to solving cross-company challenges.
They combine expertise from across SAP and cover a range of subjects from planning, execution, or quality assurance to education or guidance.
Business Journeys are packaged out of selected premium engagement, professional services, and education services, and it’s all pulled together into targeted packages with a specific scope, timeline, and outcome – creating the result you need in a concise, consumable way.
The dedicated team of experts will work with you using proven bills of materials, methodology, and accelerators to fit your needs and keep you informed every step of the way.
As a result, you can reach across business processes, business units, and the solutions and landscapes you rely on – tackling different aspects of transformation and innovation initiatives to help drive improvement and value company-wide.
To start, SAP is launching five SAP Business Journeys:
Discovery Business Journey for RISE With SAP clarifies all the key questions typically covered in the Discover and Prepare phases of a transformation project – accelerating the path to confirming why and how to move to RISE with SAP and determining clear next steps.
Hyperscaler Transition Business Journey for RISE with SAP covers planning and execution of moving one system landscape to a hyperscaler/RISE environment – from long-term strategic planning to execution, data migration optimization, and operational improvements.
Optimization Business Journey for RISE with SAP provides insights and transparency on business processes and the custom code footprint of a system, approaches to keep a Clean S/4 Core and optimize the move to the cloud and helps you plan for the design of modern back-to-standard business scenarios.
Sustainability Control Tower Business journey is a fast start service engagement package, designed to drive sustainable business outcomes with SAPs holistic enterprise-wide sustainability performance management. It offers rapid time to the first value that will help users set targets, monitor progress, and gain actionable insights from unified sustainability data sources.
Business journey for SAP Product Footprint Management to achieve technical and functional readiness of SAP Product Footprint Management based on an engineered, standardized, proven approach to create a foundation for large-scale product deployments.
Soon, SAP plans to launch more SAP Business Journeys, so you can confidently take on challenges from technology validation and platform strategies to analytics- and sustainability-based goals.
Success Extensions from SAP offers the extra attention you need to accelerate your success.
With targeted pre- and post-go-live services, Success Extensions enhance your support experiences – helping accelerate time to value by simplifying deployment and maximizing ROI post-deployment.
These pre-packaged, pre-defined services and subscription offerings are designed to be easy to consume and easy to apply to your unique situation.
You can put SAP resources and expertise to work right where you need them and free your teams to focus on their important work.
Managed Business Services is a subscription-based offering that tackles operational challenges as an extension of your SAP solutions.
By letting SAP handle specific repeatable business processes, you can free up your resources to focus on the core business.
You can take advantage of SAP’s expertise, delivery efficiency, and scale of automation to execute repeatable day-to-day business processes.
Repeatable business functions such as the release of out-sorted meter reads, billing, and invoice management.
Cloud Application Services (CAS) provide ongoing management of your SAP cloud solutions, so you can speed up innovation and adoption throughout your cloud journey.
With Cloud Application Services, experts who know your background and history manage the cloud applications and help you get the most value out of your current SAP systems – covering everything from application management through data management, security services, and testing services, so you don’t have to.
When you move to RISE, there are technical managed services provided by SAP to manage your infrastructure and system, based on pre-defined SLAs.
You now have an option to let SAP handle the day-to-day operations of your cloud application landscape through our fixed scope CAS package offerings to cover application management, data management, security, and testing as a service.
You can further choose flexible CAS offerings to further improve and transform solutions through our custom-scope CAS package offerings.
With CAS, you can not only let SAP take care of running your infrastructure, system, and solutions but also help you improve and transform as you innovate and grow your solution landscape.
As a result, your Basis team can turn their attention to more critical work.
Cloud Application Services offers a single point of contact for all solution-related customer concerns.
Today, CAS offerings are available across SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Customer Experience Solutions, SAP Business Technology Platform, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions.
In the future, they’ll reach across more of the SAP portfolio to bring more simplicity, value, and focus to our customer teams and business.
Activation and Optimization services provide deployment expertise to help you see value from your SAP solution faster.
Built on decades of experience and packaged into fixed-scope services led by implementation specialists, Activation and Optimization services offer hands-on, focused attention on customer outcomes – like speeding up the go-live date or accelerating innovation post-go-live.
The SAP team works toward those goals right alongside you or with the partner you have chosen.
Plus, if you want to enhance your SAP solution even further, you can explore innovation use cases like employing robotic process automation (RPA) in the right parts of the process or determining how to make the most of other technologies within your solution or assess the impact of business shifts in your ERP solution.
Regardless of what path you choose, you can achieve quick time to value by leveraging SAP expertise, when there is a need for focused attention.
SAP experts are with them every step of the way – reducing demands on their team while delivering specific and predictable results.
A customer of mine was able to leverage the offering, build iRPAs through Business Technology Platform (BTP) to automate tasks of scanning and analyzing photographs taken of their overhead energy transmission lines and creating service orders automatically based on pre-defined thresholds when any abnormalities were observed and the asset needed maintenance. They were able to reduce time and cost by 65% and increase efficiency by 70%.
Similarly, Machine Learning/ AI solutions can be built on BTP to address vegetation management, particularly in areas prone to wildfires.
At another account, through this service customer was able to automate some of their day-to-day functions such as the release of out-sorted meter reads, billing documents, and invoices, which took a lot more time when it was manually performed.
Success Services offer handpick advisory, cloud, implementation, and learning services to support larger transformation projects and highly complex scenarios.
It helps amplify project success with targeted SAP services, training, and partners.
Project Success offers SAP’s unique expertise, systematic outcome-driven approach, and industry best practices during your S/4 transformation.
For customer or partner-led implementations, SAP offers ‘Value Assurance’ to support and safeguard deployment with optional business optimization and design success packages, alternatively, you can choose SAP to prime the implementation through our ‘Advanced Deployment’ offering.
You can also leverage business transformation ‘Advisory Services’ where the SAP team leveraging various tools, workshops, and design thinking sessions helps you map your Strategy and Solution Vision to SAP Solutions and RoadMap.
Through Value Assurance, when the customer or a partner is prime, you can receive planning, safeguarding, and design success support services from SAP with an embedded front-office role, a Technical Quality Manager (TQM) who is responsible for services planning and delivery, and your escalation point of contact.
SAP front-office is tightly connected to our global back-office Mission Control Center (MCC), to ensure you have the right experts and development support available anytime during the implementation lifecycle.
With Value Assurance, you can also receive optional expertise on demand (EoD) and on-call duty services for enhanced support.
Planning & Safeguarding package helps evaluate, analyze, and optimize selected core business processes. Customers can add a Business Readiness package that focuses on design success support services or close to standard services during implementation and lastly also complement the first two packages with the Business Optimization package to handle custom code management and individual platform design.
Value Assurance services complement partner activities across the activate methodology and ensure the go-live is safeguarded.
Value Assurance services are today offered for the smooth start of cloud implementations too.
At a recent customer that I was supporting, the S/4 deployment was led by their partner. They had Value Assurance and leveraging the services they were able to proactively identify the gaps in key areas such as invoice bill prints.
Through the pro-active gap-validation service, we at SAP were able to help identify many nitty-gritty/conditions that had to be handled in their implementation and provided recommendations, which were addressed proactively by the project well before go-live, avoiding unwanted situations where wrong invoices would otherwise be sent to their customers.
With Advanced Deployment, SAP leads the deployment and provides the expertise and services required to successfully deploy S/4 to form the digital core of the Intelligent Enterprise.
Delivery is based on Activate methodology and is tailored to specific application scope.
SAP leverages proven implementation accelerators to build the digital application including configuration, testing, data cleansing and migration, production cut-over, and go-live.
Benefits of Advanced Deployment include, its fast with accelerators (best practices) and methodologies (fit-gap analysis), expertise and resources from SAP, repeatable and standardized services and it can also be complemented with safeguarding services.
Through Partner Success, SAP offers partner enablement and coaching services to our partners to ensure our partners have access to experienced SAP coaches to help drive their client projects to new levels of success.
Partner Success services help provide a consultant-to-consultant conversation for the partner teams, accelerating implementation, improving turnaround time for issue resolution, and limiting customizations.
Project Success and implementation services can also be leveraged to complement partner project plans/activities via an Integrated Delivery Framework (IDF) which helps partners to align with SAP at accounts to reduce deployment risks and cost, increase delivery outcomes and achieve faster time to value.
Partners can also leverage SAP coaching and mentoring in new products and technologies such as the various Industry Cloud, Empowerment on BTP possibilities, co-innovate on new offerings like Utilities Core, Cloud for Energy, Distributed Energy Resources, etc.
You can increase your SAP software adoption and drive greater business outcomes and success through the ongoing enablement of your team.
With Learning Success, you can empower your users to build the exact skills they need to support the organization’s digital transformation.
You can leverage expert guidance to assess educational needs, quantify desired results and customize learning services to your unique needs.
Learning Success delivers you with productivity, non-disruption, change management, and enablement services.
At SAP, that success – customer success – is our goal.
You deserve a guide who understands your future vision and current reality.
A guide who understands your industry and the processes, technologies, and insights it takes to lead it.
That’s why we place the outcomes you need to deliver at the center of everything SAP does – designing solutions that unlock the power of your SAP investment.
Whether you are deploying something new, accelerating to the cloud, or transforming how your business works, SAP is committed to helping you get it done throughout the lifetime of your solutions.
And regardless of where you are starting or where you to go, SAP offers a portfolio of Success Experiences, Extensions, and Services to fit what your company needs.
It’s a complete set of project-specific services, proactive and mission-critical support, training, and enablement; and content, innovation, and insights.
So, no matter how big you are, which SAP solutions you have, how fast you need to go, or what level of support you need, we can help you create the right outcomes to achieve – and hold onto - success.
And SAP Cloud Success Services is committed to making it a superb experience along the way.
Visit our SAP Services and Support page for more information:
https://www.sap.com/services-support.html
Feel free to share your feedback and thoughts in the comment section below.
Thank You!
1.0 Introduction
At Cloud Success Services, Your success is our goal, so we place the outcomes you need to deliver at the center of everything we do – designing solutions that unlock the power of your SAP investment.
Whether you’re deploying something new, accelerating to the cloud, or transforming how your business works, our portfolio of Success Experiences, Extensions, and Services helps create the right results, so you can sustain success.
Summarized here in the blog is SAP’s holistic portfolio of service & support offerings, with a few examples from my own experience where we were able to deliver business outcomes, accelerate value, and provide an exceptional experience to our customers.
Key Takeaways:
- You will learn more about our harmonized portfolio of service & support offerings across all SAP solutions and deployment models
- Know more about our standardized, easy-to-consume, short-term, and long-term tailored services offerings to suit your individual needs
- Learn how SAP can help you achieve quick time to first value for initial solution adoption and a lifetime consumption linked to your business outcomes
2.0 Today’s Challenges
Companies today face new challenges.
Market dynamics are changing, consumer behaviors are changing, there is a focus on decarbonization, and digitalization has become a necessity.
And there is a shift in technology trends. Machine Learning and AI are being adopted to improve customer experience. Smart devices and Sensors are being adopted to intelligently monitor assets to achieve operational excellence. Big data and distributed computing are being used to handle large sets of data and create actionable insights for better decisions. New technologies like Blockchain and 5G are emerging and helping create new revenue streams.
In this new intelligent era, companies need to be agile, redesign their business processes, and adopt new technologies to stay on top of the industry.
SAP considering the current industry challenges and changing technology trends designed The Intelligent Enterprise.
3.0 SAP Intelligent Enterprise
By definition, “Intelligent Enterprises run integrated business processes, powered by innovative technologies, working together in networks, to increase resilience, profitability, and sustainability”.
SAP Cloud Success Services (CSS) offers end-to-end holistic support and guidance via outcome-based, value-add services, and support across the Intelligent Enterprise, and help enable the digital transformation
Figure 3.0 SAP Intelligent Enterprise
At SAP Cloud Success Services, we are a strong well-connected global team of more than 22,500 SAP professionals located in 64 countries and serving more than 180 countries.
Our team is deeply knowledgeable in SAP solutions and well connected with the development and partner ecosystem. Our expertise comes from the fact that we are serving more than 400,000 installed base customers and more than 186 million cloud subscribers globally.
Through SAP Cloud Success Services, we empower you, and your partners to deploy, maintain, run, and unlock the full potential of SAP solutions via the rich portfolio of offerings and longer-term engagements.
4.0 SAP Cloud Success Services
Success Experiences, Extensions, and Services from SAP help you stay ahead by making sure your SAP solutions are focused on your business’s top priorities.
These services and support offerings are built with the cloud mindset and designed to help deliver the business results that accelerate success for your company.
Figure 4.0.1 SAP Cloud Success Services and Support
Figure 4.0.2 SAP Cloud Success Services and Support Explained
Our foundational success offerings start with helping you start successfully.
For each of your SAP solutions, you get consistent, proactive support, enablement, training, content, innovation, and insight – the information needed to realize value as fast as possible from the mission-critical solutions.
This essential success offering also includes collaboration with support experts with a focus on driving outcomes.
From there, you decide where to go as you use the solution, define your innovation strategy, and think broadly about your business.
You can then choose from longer-term engagements that include more individualized or high-touch services or select short-term focused packages that accelerate launch or address specific business challenges across your organization.
No matter what you choose, you get the insight and guidance needed to be successful in the cloud, take full advantage of SAP’s expertise and ecosystem, and keep improving – at your own pace.
Whether you are focused on a particular part of the Lead-to-Cash process, or company-wide initiatives and end-to-end strategies, you get the full commitment of SAP to serve and help you achieve success in your digital transformation journey.
We guide you in designing and applying the right solutions to consistently raise the bar on what it means for your business to run at its best.
Backed by 50 years of industry, technology, and business process expertise, our 20,000+ services, and support professionals work together with you and your partners to deliver continuous innovation and realize rapid results.
Customer success is our goal, and that goal is within reach. We ensure we work together to continually drive successful business outcomes and values that matter most to YOU!
5.0 Success Experiences
Success Experiences offer ESSENTIAL foundational support offerings, ADVANCED support plans for cloud solutions, and SELECT longer-term broader-scope or short-term pre-defined engagements for your success.
5.1 Enterprise Support and Embedded Launch Services
SAP Enterprise Support is our foundational, ESSENTIAL success offering that helps make sure your SAP solution continuously delivers the impact your business needs to continue to grow and thrive.
With Enterprise Support, for the deployed SAP solution, you receive Expert Guidance (value maps or learning journey and advisory), Enablement (support academy, support portal), New Features and Business Outcomes (remote services, releases, updates, patches), and a Digital Support Experience (one-support launchpad, next-gen support options to leverage support experts, early watch alerts, SLAs for incidents).
It is not just a library of information, but you get detailed guidance that shows what information to use, who should use it, and when. Plus, you get the tools and insights needed to manage the entire lifecycle of their application. Example: Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (CALM)
Embedded Launch Activities (EmLA) are included as part of a cloud subscription and help you prioritize and launch a cloud functionality that will deliver immediate impact to your business in a compressed time.
EmLA accelerates the launch through guided enablement, a pre-configured demo environment with how-to tips and adoption touch points to ensure adoption is moving fast enough and you are seeing the business results.
I recently had a customer ask, “Can we enable Success Factors Learning first as it is of high priority to our business today”, to which I replied, “Of course, EmLA is what you need and pointed them to the documentation”
5.2 Preferred Success
SAP Preferred Success is an ADVANCED support offering that delivers personalized solutions and process expertise per SAP cloud solution.
With SAP Preferred Success, a Customer Success Partner helps collaborate and guides you in the assessment of your business and outlines recommendations for how to effectively put the SAP cloud solution to work.
By blending a clear understanding of your unique cloud solution plans with detailed technology and process knowledge, SAP builds and manages a roadmap for what you need today and where you need to go next.
You get a customized cloud learning strategy designed specifically for your team, solutions, and business needs.
Plus, SAP will deliver targeted checks that analyze the cloud solution usage and provide actionable insight on where to improve and help safeguard business continuity with enhanced Support SLAs.
Together, SAP will help create a clear long-term vision and roadmap that converts your metrics and milestones into a tailored success plan for your cloud journey.
SAP Preferred Success is offered today for cloud solutions S/4 Hana Cloud, CX, HXM, ISBN, and BTP, and our portfolio is expanding.
SAP Preferred Success will help build a cloud mindset, optimize, enhance, and increase your Success in the Cloud.
5.3 Max Attention, Active Attention, and Business Journeys
These SELECT offerings from SAP help drive innovation across your company, tackling strategic challenges as you transform the business.
You can choose longer-term, broader scope options such as Max Attention, or Active Attention where the SAP team embeds itself into your business, or choose pre-packaged short-term technical outcome-focused journeys.
Either way, you get Premium Engagement high-touch services tailored to your individual needs that are chosen from a vast, exhaustive portfolio of available services.
5.3.1 MaxAttention
SAP MaxAttention, is the most comprehensive multi-year premium engagement support offering from SAP that covers all deployment models, and solutions, and is the most comprehensive, high-touch, tailored, strategic end-to-end support engagement SAP offers, embedding experts into the heart of your organization to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the challenges, work together on the solutions, and ensure your business agenda and tech strategy are one.
The embedded team Lead Technical Quality Manager (LTQM) and Engagement Lead (EL) ensure you have the right experts from SAP at the right time.
LTQM is the operational lead addressing the IT demands and takes care of services plan and delivery, your escalation point of contact, while the EL supports the strategic design and architectural aspects.
The embedded front-office team is supported by a very strong back-office team of SAP experts from our Intelligent Service Delivery (ISD) Hub and this collaboration ensures the best and most reliable Premium Partnership with SAP.
With MaxAttention you also have access to Experts on Demand (EoD), a team of SAP experts you can leverage when there are critical issues and need immediate attention.
You also get access to a 24x7 Mission Control Center (MCC), a team of SAP experts who are available to engage, troubleshoot, debug, and fix issues during the critical cutover period that may have production or go-live impact or during the hyper care period or even post go-live.
5.3.2 Active Attention
SAP Active Attention is a continuous collaboration engagement from SAP for enabling successful program deployment and operations.
Active Attention offers a comprehensive portfolio of outcome-based services that are tailored to your needs covering all SAP solutions and deployments, and a strong engagement model with a dedicated Lead Technical Quality Manager (LTQM) embedded into the project.
You also get access to experts through Experts on Demand (EoD) and a 24x7 Mission Control Center (MCC) to support you at critical timelines of your project.
This high-touch premium engagement offering is built on proven best practices and decades of experience and gives you access to a global team of SAP experts to ensure your SAP solutions are not only running at their best, but they are also doing specifically what your organization needs to run its best.
Many of our customers have successfully leveraged our Premium Engagement Services to proactively safeguard their go-lives and build a post-go-live operations framework to continue monitoring their systems and process, and keep running smoothly.
Real-life Example:
One of my other personal best examples, at an account of mine, our customer was live with S/4, Service Cloud, and a few other SAP solutions.
It was around the previous fall, Alex their director of call-center operations reached out to me and said, “our call center representatives are complaining of slow response times executing some processes. ”. Their partner teams were engaged already but were yet to find the root cause, it needed a resolution fast and was not something that could be solved via a support ticket. They needed expertise. We assured Alex, to not worry, Active Attention got this.
We quickly discussed internally, scheduled a ‘Technical Performance Optimization’ service from within our portfolio, which was the best fit service to address the situation, and brought in our experts.
We met with their call center representatives, and had them recreate the scenario, our experts traced, debugged, found the root cause, and provided recommendations to resolve it.
Alex and her team applied the recommendations, which led to the resolution of the issue saving huge $ amounts, which otherwise would be lost in added operational costs. All this within 5 days and Alex was extremely relieved!
As for the root cause, there were custom code enhancements that were done on the UI layer increasing the overall process response times. Our team of experts having decades of experience handling similar situations were able to identify the cause and provide a resolution quickly.
This is one experience, but there are many scenarios where premium engagement has delivered incredible value to our customers, both proactively and reactively.
5.3.3 Business Journeys
SAP Business Journeys is SAP’s new addition to the support portfolio to deliver a quick, clear path to solving cross-company challenges.
They combine expertise from across SAP and cover a range of subjects from planning, execution, or quality assurance to education or guidance.
Business Journeys are packaged out of selected premium engagement, professional services, and education services, and it’s all pulled together into targeted packages with a specific scope, timeline, and outcome – creating the result you need in a concise, consumable way.
The dedicated team of experts will work with you using proven bills of materials, methodology, and accelerators to fit your needs and keep you informed every step of the way.
As a result, you can reach across business processes, business units, and the solutions and landscapes you rely on – tackling different aspects of transformation and innovation initiatives to help drive improvement and value company-wide.
To start, SAP is launching five SAP Business Journeys:
Discovery Business Journey for RISE With SAP clarifies all the key questions typically covered in the Discover and Prepare phases of a transformation project – accelerating the path to confirming why and how to move to RISE with SAP and determining clear next steps.
Hyperscaler Transition Business Journey for RISE with SAP covers planning and execution of moving one system landscape to a hyperscaler/RISE environment – from long-term strategic planning to execution, data migration optimization, and operational improvements.
Optimization Business Journey for RISE with SAP provides insights and transparency on business processes and the custom code footprint of a system, approaches to keep a Clean S/4 Core and optimize the move to the cloud and helps you plan for the design of modern back-to-standard business scenarios.
Sustainability Control Tower Business journey is a fast start service engagement package, designed to drive sustainable business outcomes with SAPs holistic enterprise-wide sustainability performance management. It offers rapid time to the first value that will help users set targets, monitor progress, and gain actionable insights from unified sustainability data sources.
Business journey for SAP Product Footprint Management to achieve technical and functional readiness of SAP Product Footprint Management based on an engineered, standardized, proven approach to create a foundation for large-scale product deployments.
Soon, SAP plans to launch more SAP Business Journeys, so you can confidently take on challenges from technology validation and platform strategies to analytics- and sustainability-based goals.
6.0 Success Extensions
Success Extensions from SAP offers the extra attention you need to accelerate your success.
With targeted pre- and post-go-live services, Success Extensions enhance your support experiences – helping accelerate time to value by simplifying deployment and maximizing ROI post-deployment.
These pre-packaged, pre-defined services and subscription offerings are designed to be easy to consume and easy to apply to your unique situation.
You can put SAP resources and expertise to work right where you need them and free your teams to focus on their important work.
6.1 Managed Business Services
Managed Business Services is a subscription-based offering that tackles operational challenges as an extension of your SAP solutions.
By letting SAP handle specific repeatable business processes, you can free up your resources to focus on the core business.
You can take advantage of SAP’s expertise, delivery efficiency, and scale of automation to execute repeatable day-to-day business processes.
Example:
Repeatable business functions such as the release of out-sorted meter reads, billing, and invoice management.
6.2 Cloud Application Services
Cloud Application Services (CAS) provide ongoing management of your SAP cloud solutions, so you can speed up innovation and adoption throughout your cloud journey.
With Cloud Application Services, experts who know your background and history manage the cloud applications and help you get the most value out of your current SAP systems – covering everything from application management through data management, security services, and testing services, so you don’t have to.
When you move to RISE, there are technical managed services provided by SAP to manage your infrastructure and system, based on pre-defined SLAs.
You now have an option to let SAP handle the day-to-day operations of your cloud application landscape through our fixed scope CAS package offerings to cover application management, data management, security, and testing as a service.
You can further choose flexible CAS offerings to further improve and transform solutions through our custom-scope CAS package offerings.
With CAS, you can not only let SAP take care of running your infrastructure, system, and solutions but also help you improve and transform as you innovate and grow your solution landscape.
As a result, your Basis team can turn their attention to more critical work.
Cloud Application Services offers a single point of contact for all solution-related customer concerns.
Today, CAS offerings are available across SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Customer Experience Solutions, SAP Business Technology Platform, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions.
In the future, they’ll reach across more of the SAP portfolio to bring more simplicity, value, and focus to our customer teams and business.
6.3 Activation and Optimization Services
Activation and Optimization services provide deployment expertise to help you see value from your SAP solution faster.
Built on decades of experience and packaged into fixed-scope services led by implementation specialists, Activation and Optimization services offer hands-on, focused attention on customer outcomes – like speeding up the go-live date or accelerating innovation post-go-live.
The SAP team works toward those goals right alongside you or with the partner you have chosen.
Plus, if you want to enhance your SAP solution even further, you can explore innovation use cases like employing robotic process automation (RPA) in the right parts of the process or determining how to make the most of other technologies within your solution or assess the impact of business shifts in your ERP solution.
Regardless of what path you choose, you can achieve quick time to value by leveraging SAP expertise, when there is a need for focused attention.
SAP experts are with them every step of the way – reducing demands on their team while delivering specific and predictable results.
Real-life Examples:
A customer of mine was able to leverage the offering, build iRPAs through Business Technology Platform (BTP) to automate tasks of scanning and analyzing photographs taken of their overhead energy transmission lines and creating service orders automatically based on pre-defined thresholds when any abnormalities were observed and the asset needed maintenance. They were able to reduce time and cost by 65% and increase efficiency by 70%.
Similarly, Machine Learning/ AI solutions can be built on BTP to address vegetation management, particularly in areas prone to wildfires.
At another account, through this service customer was able to automate some of their day-to-day functions such as the release of out-sorted meter reads, billing documents, and invoices, which took a lot more time when it was manually performed.
7.0 Success Services
Success Services offer handpick advisory, cloud, implementation, and learning services to support larger transformation projects and highly complex scenarios.
It helps amplify project success with targeted SAP services, training, and partners.
7.1 Project Success
Project Success offers SAP’s unique expertise, systematic outcome-driven approach, and industry best practices during your S/4 transformation.
For customer or partner-led implementations, SAP offers ‘Value Assurance’ to support and safeguard deployment with optional business optimization and design success packages, alternatively, you can choose SAP to prime the implementation through our ‘Advanced Deployment’ offering.
You can also leverage business transformation ‘Advisory Services’ where the SAP team leveraging various tools, workshops, and design thinking sessions helps you map your Strategy and Solution Vision to SAP Solutions and RoadMap.
7.1.1 Value Assurance
Through Value Assurance, when the customer or a partner is prime, you can receive planning, safeguarding, and design success support services from SAP with an embedded front-office role, a Technical Quality Manager (TQM) who is responsible for services planning and delivery, and your escalation point of contact.
SAP front-office is tightly connected to our global back-office Mission Control Center (MCC), to ensure you have the right experts and development support available anytime during the implementation lifecycle.
With Value Assurance, you can also receive optional expertise on demand (EoD) and on-call duty services for enhanced support.
Three Value Assurance packages are available:
Planning & Safeguarding package helps evaluate, analyze, and optimize selected core business processes. Customers can add a Business Readiness package that focuses on design success support services or close to standard services during implementation and lastly also complement the first two packages with the Business Optimization package to handle custom code management and individual platform design.
Value Assurance services complement partner activities across the activate methodology and ensure the go-live is safeguarded.
Value Assurance services are today offered for the smooth start of cloud implementations too.
Real-life Example:
At a recent customer that I was supporting, the S/4 deployment was led by their partner. They had Value Assurance and leveraging the services they were able to proactively identify the gaps in key areas such as invoice bill prints.
Through the pro-active gap-validation service, we at SAP were able to help identify many nitty-gritty/conditions that had to be handled in their implementation and provided recommendations, which were addressed proactively by the project well before go-live, avoiding unwanted situations where wrong invoices would otherwise be sent to their customers.
7.1.2 Advanced Deployment
With Advanced Deployment, SAP leads the deployment and provides the expertise and services required to successfully deploy S/4 to form the digital core of the Intelligent Enterprise.
Delivery is based on Activate methodology and is tailored to specific application scope.
SAP leverages proven implementation accelerators to build the digital application including configuration, testing, data cleansing and migration, production cut-over, and go-live.
Benefits of Advanced Deployment include, its fast with accelerators (best practices) and methodologies (fit-gap analysis), expertise and resources from SAP, repeatable and standardized services and it can also be complemented with safeguarding services.
7.2 Partner Success
Through Partner Success, SAP offers partner enablement and coaching services to our partners to ensure our partners have access to experienced SAP coaches to help drive their client projects to new levels of success.
Partner Success services help provide a consultant-to-consultant conversation for the partner teams, accelerating implementation, improving turnaround time for issue resolution, and limiting customizations.
Project Success and implementation services can also be leveraged to complement partner project plans/activities via an Integrated Delivery Framework (IDF) which helps partners to align with SAP at accounts to reduce deployment risks and cost, increase delivery outcomes and achieve faster time to value.
Partners can also leverage SAP coaching and mentoring in new products and technologies such as the various Industry Cloud, Empowerment on BTP possibilities, co-innovate on new offerings like Utilities Core, Cloud for Energy, Distributed Energy Resources, etc.
7.2 Learning Success
You can increase your SAP software adoption and drive greater business outcomes and success through the ongoing enablement of your team.
With Learning Success, you can empower your users to build the exact skills they need to support the organization’s digital transformation.
You can leverage expert guidance to assess educational needs, quantify desired results and customize learning services to your unique needs.
Learning Success delivers you with productivity, non-disruption, change management, and enablement services.
8.0 Summary
At SAP, that success – customer success – is our goal.
You deserve a guide who understands your future vision and current reality.
A guide who understands your industry and the processes, technologies, and insights it takes to lead it.
That’s why we place the outcomes you need to deliver at the center of everything SAP does – designing solutions that unlock the power of your SAP investment.
Whether you are deploying something new, accelerating to the cloud, or transforming how your business works, SAP is committed to helping you get it done throughout the lifetime of your solutions.
And regardless of where you are starting or where you to go, SAP offers a portfolio of Success Experiences, Extensions, and Services to fit what your company needs.
It’s a complete set of project-specific services, proactive and mission-critical support, training, and enablement; and content, innovation, and insights.
So, no matter how big you are, which SAP solutions you have, how fast you need to go, or what level of support you need, we can help you create the right outcomes to achieve – and hold onto - success.
And SAP Cloud Success Services is committed to making it a superb experience along the way.
Learn More:
Visit our SAP Services and Support page for more information:
https://www.sap.com/services-support.html
Your feedback:
Feel free to share your feedback and thoughts in the comment section below.
Thank You!
- SAP Managed Tags: