sap standard for incedent management

© 2009 SAP AG

Incident Management Version: 2.0

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Version: 2.0

October 2009

SAP Standard for Incident Management

Whitepaper

Active Global Support

SAP AG

SAP® Standard Incident Management

© 2009 SAP AG


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Change history:

Version Date Changes

1.0 April 2007 Original version

2.0 October 2009 Major revisions of chapter 4, 5.2, and 5.3


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Table of Content

1 Management Summary ........................................................................ 4

2 Application Life-Cycle Management ................................................... 5

3 Incident Management Standard at a Glance ...................................... 8

4 What is the Basic Concept of the Incident Management .................... Standard? ........................................................................................... 10

4.1 Architecture and Process Flow ...................................................................... 10

4.2 Incident creation and dispatching .................................................................. 11

4.3 Incident processing ....................................................................................... 12

4.4 Send solution proposal .................................................................................. 14

4.5 Close Incident ............................................................................................... 14

5 How to Implement the Incident Management Standard? ................ 15

5.1 Methodology ................................................................................................. 15

5.2 Organizational ............................................................................................... 15

5.3 Technical ...................................................................................................... 16

6 How to Measure the Success of the Implementation? .................... 18


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1 Management Summary

Managing complexity, risk, costs as well as skills and resources is at the heart of implement-ing mission critical support for SAP-centric solutions. The complexity rises even further with the trend of outtasking and outsourcing of process components. To help customers manage their SAP-centric solutions, SAP provides a comprehensive set of standards for solution op-erations.

Out of this set of standards, the incident management standard describes the process for incident resolution. This helps customers to accelerate the resolution of incidents, to increase the availability of the IT solution and minimize negative business impacts, and to gain 100% transparency on issues and challenges.

This document provides details regarding the incident management standard. It explains the basic concept of the standard, describes the different steps within the process flow, and pro-vides details on the implementation of the standard. This includes a description of the metho-dology and information regarding the required configuration.


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2 Application Life-Cycle Management

Companies expect from their IT departments that mission-critical business applications run smoothly, without business disruptions, at low cost, and that they can be adapted easily to new requirements. It is the mission of Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM) to achieve this. SAP’s ALM portfolio consists of processes, tools, services and best practices, to man-age SAP and non-SAP solutions, throughout the entire application life-cycle. For details about the complete portfolio, please refer to http://service.sap.com/alm.

According to the IT infrastructure library (ITIL), the application management life cycle com-prises six phases:

Functional and non-functional requirements are collected and evaluated during the requirements phase.

In the design phase, the findings from the requirements phase are used to specify how the application or IT operation processes are to function, and which IT applica-tions should be used to map the processes.

In the build and test phase, a system landscape is set up and configured to imple-ment and test the planned scenarios and processes.

The deploy phase is the transition from a pre-production environment to production operation.

The operate phase groups tasks that are performed after system startup, to ensure the availability and stability of the solution. These tasks include activities such as sys-tem administration, system monitoring, business process monitoring, message processing (Service Desk), root cause analysis, issue management, and service deli-very.

The optimize phase collects key figures and data from the live solution, to reduce costs or improve performance.

ALM processes span the six phases, to ensure stable operation of the IT solution while enabling accelerated innovation. Optimizing these processes reduces costs and ensures the highest quality of IT operation.

Typically, multiple teams are involved in the ALM processes (see Figure 2.1). They belong to the key organizational areas Business Unit and IT. The names of the organizations differ from company to company, but their functions are equivalent. For example, a program manage-ment office communicates business requirements to the IT organization, decides on the fi-nancing of development and operations, and ensures that the requirements are implemented. On the technical side, the application management team is in direct contact with the business units. It is responsible for implementing the business requirements and providing support to end users. Business process operation covers the monitoring and support of the business applications, their integration, and the automation of jobs. And SAP technical operation is responsible for the general administration of systems and system diagnostics. Further specia-lization is possible within these organizations. For example, there may be separate experts for different applications within SAP technical operations, in larger organizations.

http://service.sap.com/alm


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Figure 2.1: Organizational model for application life-cycle management

Two things are the key to optimizing the collaboration of the groups involved: a common in-frastructure, and a clear definition of the collaboration processes, including the activities in-volved, responsibilities, and service levels. The infrastructure is provided by SAP Solution Manager as a collaboration platform. It provides role-based access to all functions required (provided either by SAP Solution Manager itself or by integrated tools), via work centers. It also provides all related information, centrally, so that all stakeholders involved have easy access to the information they require. Many customers have defined collaboration processes. SAP has leveraged the experience of these customers, and of its own application life-cycle management experts, to create best-practice descriptions of important ALM processes. These documents are published as E2E Solution Operations standards in SAP Service Marketplace at http://service.sap.com/supportstandards. Customers can refer to these standards when optimizing their own IT processes.

With Run SAP, SAP provides a methodology for the implementation of the End-to-End Solu-tion Operations standards. The road map for Run SAP guides through defining the scope of the operations to be implemented, preparing a detailed plan, doing the setup, and running SAP solutions. Moreover, it helps to find the right strategy and tools to implement ALM. The road map provides not only what needs to be implemented but also information about how it needs to be implemented, in the form of implementation methodology documents and best-practices documents.

Currently, SAP provides the following standards:

Solution Documentation and Solution Documentation for Custom Development define the documentation and reporting required for the customer solution

Incident Management describes the incident resolution process

Remote Supportability contains five basic requirements that have to be met to optim-ize the supportability of customer solutions

Root Cause Analysis defines how to perform root cause analysis, end-to-end, across support levels and technologies

http://service.sap.com/supportstandards

http://service.sap.com/runsap


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Exception Handling and Business Process and Interface Monitoring explains how to define a model and procedures to manage exceptions and error situations during dai-ly business operations, and how to monitor and supervise mission-critical business processes

Job Scheduling Management explains how to manage the planning, scheduling and monitoring of background jobs

Data Integrity and Transactional Consistency avoids data inconsistencies, and safe-guards data synchronization across applications, in distributed system landscapes

Data Volume Management defines how to manage data growth

Change Management enables efficient and punctual implementation of changes with minimal risks

Test Management describes the test management methodology and approach for functional, scenario, integration and technical system tests of SAP-centric solutions.

System Monitoring covers monitoring and reporting of the technical status of IT solu-tions

System Administration describes how to administer SAP technology to run a custom-er solution efficiently

Custom Code Management describes the basic concepts of custom code operation and optimization

Security describes basic activities to setup, maintain and evolve security measures for the operation and organization of SAP solutions.

Upgrade guides customers and technology partners through upgrade projects

Out of this list, this white paper describes the standard for Incident Management.


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3 Incident Management Standard at a Glance

An incident is an event that does not belong to the standard operation of a service and which interrupts or reduces the quality of a service.

Based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the objective of Incident Management is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either the business or the user, at a cost-effective price.

A problem is a root cause of one or more incidents.

The primary objectives of Problem Management are to prevent incidents from happening and to minimize the Impact of incidents that cannot be prevented.

Figure 3.1: Application Life-Cycle Management in the context of ITIL

IT Service Management focuses upon providing a framework to manage IT-related activities on behalf of business customers. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines have been established to help IT organizations to provide efficient, customer-oriented IT service man-agement.


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SAP`s tool for IT Service Management is SAP CRM with the coverage of e.g.:

Incident and Service Request Management

Service Desk

Knowledge Article Management

Problem & Change Management

Service Level Management

Object Management (with optional integration into SAP ERP)

Ensuring business continuity, accelerating innovation, and reducing risk as well as total cost of operations while protecting your investment is the key challenge for each IT organization. Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM) addresses this challenge with an integrated ITIL-based approach.

Application Life-cycle Management provides processes, tools, services, and an organization-al model to manage SAP and non-SAP solutions throughout the complete application life cycle. SAP Solution Manager is SAP´s solution to cover the customers’ needs of ALM. Ac-cording to ITIL, the recommendation is a combination of ALM and IT Service Management. But if customers just go for ALM with SAP Solution Manager, there is an SAP focused solu-tion available for processing incidents and changes within SAP Solution Manager.

SAP Solution Manager supports the processes of Incident Management and Root cause analysis and offers a high collaboration with SAP Support backend and leaves possibilities for Non SAP incident integration. This helps customers to lower the meantime to resolution and by this to increase the availability of mission critical business processes and to gain 100% transparency on issues and challenges.


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4 What is the Basic Concept of the Incident Man-agement Standard?

4.1 Architecture and Process Flow

There are various people and roles involved in the process flow of Incident Management. On the one hand, there are the creators of a support message, end users working in a satellite system or key users creating messages for end users.

And on the other hand, there are the people working on the message, the message proces-sors in application management supported by other groups in the IT organization. Depending on the number of levels of the support organization (for details, refer to chapter 5), these groups of people may consist of employees with different levels of expertise.

Another important part in the message solving process, although it is not located at customer site, is the SAP Global Support Backbone with its possibility to search for SAP Notes. The final instance of problem solving is the SAP Support organization or the support organization of a partner, respectively.

Figure 4.1: Simplified Incident Management process flow example


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Based on the simplified Incident Management process flow example (Figure 4.1) this chapter explains how the basic concept can look like. Please take notice that the process flow can look different from the example, dependent on several influences.

These factors are for example:

Company size

Support level agreements in customers organization

Partner involvement

Operation processes implemented like usage of custom code management

Usage of external support tools

4.2 Incident creation and dispatching

Case1

If a central IT help desk tool is used for all incidents (SAP and Non SAP), the end user or key user will create a ticket in that User Interface or use other communication channels to get in contact with the service desk team. The Service Desk, according to ITIL, is a help function. The Service Desk is responsible to the lifecycle management of the incident or service re-quest. After the creation of the incident, the central service desk will analyze the incident and provide the user with the ticket number. The Service Desk employee keeps the user or re-questor informed about the progress or potential workarounds. Non-SAP focused incidents could be managed with an IT Service Management tool like SAP CRM or any external Help Desk tool. The SAP focused incidents will be forwarded to the SAP Solution Manager via a standard 3

rd party interface.

Case 2

In case the SAP Solution Manager is connected to the SAP Application, the end users can create a message in the managed system directly from the transaction in which an error oc-curred. To do this, they simply choose Help -> Create Support Message or use the appropri-ate entry in the portal. They enter a short text, a priority, and a problem description in a dialog box. The name of the component in which the error occurred is automatically added by the system.

This is not the only information that SAP Solution Manager automatically acquires to provide effective and targeted support for the SAP solution. Every message saves technical data such as the system ID, the client, the Support Package version and the transaction in the background. This minimizes the number of questions sent to the reporter by the service desk employee and also accelerates the support process.

If end users do not have the authorization to create their own messages in the satellite sys-tem, a message can be created directly in SAP Solution Manager. Not all end users create messages themselves; instead, in the event of an error or a query, the end users contact key users who are more knowledgeable and who can answer many questions before the need


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arises to create a message. For those questions that remain unanswered, key users create their own support messages in SAP Solution Manager.

Saving the support message automatically sends it to the service desk in SAP Solution Man-ager and marks the end of message creation. The reporter of the message is then notified that the message was created in SAP Solution Manager, along with the message number in the form of a system message.

The support message can now be accessed in the service desk. Here, the system can auto-matically assign it to the respective support level using the SAP component, the priority, and other attributes.

4.3 Incident processing

The staff involved in message processing can be notified by email, fax, or SMS, for example. Message dispatching occurs via background processing with condition checks. As such, it is also possible to start an SAP workflow through actions using SAP standard functions. The interaction between workflow and approval allows messages to be selectively stopped or sent to SAP.

You can monitor incoming messages and the status of message processing in the service desk via a monitor. The standard system of SAP Solution Manager Service Desk offers a myTeam filter and provides a view to facilitate processing.

The teams who are processing the incident are belonging to the Application Management according to the organizational model for application life-cycle management (chapter 2). They will take the message in process perform several steps to analyze and collaborate with other experts and teams such as Business Process Operations, Technical Operations and Custom Development.

Solution Database and SAP Notes

An employee in the customer’s support organization assumes the responsibility of solving the incident by taking on the message. The first step is to search for an existing solution to the problem as described by the reporter. The customer’s own solution database in SAP Solution Manager can be used for this.

Initially, the solution database is empty. Later on, it is filled with data by the customer’s sup-port organization. This database can be used to record known solutions. As the database fills with problems and the corresponding solutions, it becomes a useful, time-saving tool be-cause the customer support organization can search through existing solutions.

The solution database employs a classification method, which you can use to search based on subject, solution type, symptoms, and attributes such as release information. Implement-ing the service desk allows you to extend standard functionality to include customer-specific search criteria.


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If the problem has not previously occurred and is not documented in the solution database, the service desk employee can search for SAP Notes directly from the message. Performing a Notes search via the service desk is considerably more effective than a manual search on SAP Service Marketplace, because the search criteria are automatically filled with data of the support message.

Select the appropriate SAP Note(s). You can attach the notes to the support message. If the SAP note contains a description of the solution or a workaround to this incident, the solution proposal will be sent back to the user.

If the SAP Note(s) contains customizing or code corrections the interface to the Change Management will lead to the creation of a Change Request.

Perform Root Cause Analysis

In today’s heterogeneous IT landscapes, finding the root cause of an incident can be chal-lenging. The complexity of available access channels, when combined with the multiple backend technologies available, creates a need for a structured approach in order to isolate a problematic component and thereby fix the root cause. Furthermore, this approach must be supported by tools that help customers do this as efficiently as possible, following SAP Best Practices. Root Cause Analysis is an own End-to-End Solution Operations standards. Please refer to this document for further details. However, Root Cause Analysis is more than just a standard defined by SAP; it is a procedure implemented with a set of tools that is shipped with SAP Solution Manager.

Forward Incidents to SAP

If you cannot find a suitable SAP Note on SAP Service Marketplace and the root cause anal-ysis has been performed without a solution to solve the incident, it might be necessary to forward the incident to SAP Global Service & Support & Partner Ecosystem.

Create an internal note in the message describing which measures were attempted to find a solution and forward the problem message to the downstream support units.

One of the unique features of the service desk in SAP Solution Manager is the option of col-laborating with SAP Global Service & Support & Partner Ecosystem to achieve shorter solu-tion times, as targeted information allows SAP Global Service & Support & Partner Ecosys-tem to better process your message. If the various support levels of the customer support organization cannot solve the problem, send the support message along with a message for SAP (including attachments, if necessary; you can decide which text modules of the message are to be sent to SAP) to SAP Global Service & Support & Partner Ecosystem.

Open target system for remote support

Remote service connections are an important component of this collaboration because they give SAP Global Service & Support & Partner Ecosystem the opportunity to access your sys-tem in order to understand the nature of the problem in your specific environment.


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Access information is saved in the secure area for secure support. This area allows only au-thorized SAP support employees to access your systems, thereby protecting your applica-tions from unauthorized access. The service desk integrates the secure area into SAP Solu-tion Manager so that the logon data for SAP Active Global Support can be saved to the se-cure area directly from the support message. The user interface is the same as the previous one on SAP Service Marketplace; support message integration merely facilitates more effi-cient management. Data is still saved in the secure area and protected using the basic, famil-iar safety concepts.

You can inform the respective support employee that he or she now has access to the sys-tems via the Update SAP Message action in the support message.

4.4 Send solution proposal

Depending on the setup of your support process, either SAP Global Service & Support & Partner Ecosystem or the support organization of your service provider processes the mes-sage and returns it to you along with a proposed solution or a question and an updated sta-tus. You can track the status of the message at any time in your service desk.

When a solution is proposed, this is visible in the transaction monitor and the support em-ployee may receive e-mail notification, if this option is activated. The support employee then evaluates the proposed solution and triggers a change request, if necessary. When the solu-tion has been implemented, the support employee informs the reporter about the change in status. Then, the reporter tests the proposed solution and confirms it.

4.5 Close Incident

The service desk employee closes the message and documents the solution for the internal solution database, so that other support employees have access to the solution.

After having found a solution or workaround for the problem or incident, a new knowledge article, which represents the solution to the issue, might be created so that it can be used for quick issue solving if a similar issue is reported.


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5 How to Implement the Incident Management Stan-dard?

5.1 Methodology

When implementing Incident Management, you have to consider the following. Operations Standards and Processes are embedded in operations frameworks. The frameworks have a holistic approach. The Customer COE framework complies with the SAP Standards for Solu-tion Operations, including such international industry standard frameworks as ITIL. SAP pro-vides a comprehensive, integrated analysis framework to gauge the competence and maturi-ty of SAP operations as well as to set measurable targets for continuous improvement.

Developing an end-to-end support process necessitates that internal support processes in the company can be defined and transparently mapped. New roles must be created for the Application Management unit at the customer site to guarantee trusted communication and a tight collaboration between all parties involved. These new roles will be part of the cross-units team that is the Customer COE. The functions, roles and responsibilities are to be defined and established.

Achieving optimal collaboration requires both, a clear definition of the end-to-end process and a common collaboration platform. As the trend toward out-tasking and outsourcing IT servic-es continues to increase, the ability to share information becomes increasingly important.

Furthermore, tools need to be evaluated and the defined processes including roles will be set up in the system. The SAP Solution Manager service desk provides a preconfigured solution for this, which is optimized for SAP-specific support requests.

5.2 Organizational

The Customer Center of Expertise (Customer COE) drives transparency and integrated quali-ty management for resolution of critical challenges across SAP solution operations. The Cus-tomer Center of Expertise Program serves as a source of information, methodologies and tools to help customers in their commitment to quality management and the continuous Im-provement of SAP solution operations. It validates the processes that customers carry out to perform these activities, as well as process compliance with the SAP standards.

SAP customers can obtain Primary Certification for their Customer COE. This certification validates that an organization fulfills the minimum requirements needed to provide a solid foundational infrastructure for interaction with SAP.

After customers have completed the Primary Certification, they are eligible for the Advanced Certification. Advanced Certification covers a broader scope of SAP solution operations. This certification validates that the Customer COE team has mastered the use of key functions, processes, roles, skills, and tools based on SAP standards for solution operations and the Run SAP methodology. This incorporates the set-up of an integrated quality management


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approach to ensure the establishment of four quality manager roles. SAP identifies the Quali-ty Management Roles for Safeguarding, Integration and Validation, the Quality Manager for Business Continuity, the Quality Manager for Protection of Investment and the Quality Man-ager for Business Process Improvement.

All of these roles are involved and working together to set up and work on a continuous im-provement of the Incident Management process.

5.3 Technical

The Service Desk in SAP Solution Manager is SAP’s tool to manage incidents efficiently across the customer business unit, customer IT, SAP and SAP partners. In addition, the Ser-vice Desk has an open bidirectional interface to send and receive incidents to and from other ticket systems. This could be required if customer IT tasks has been outsourced or outtasked to service providers who use their own help desk.

Figure 5.1: Service Desk Configuration

SAP Solution Manager Installation

SAP Solution Manager EHP1 needs to be installed according the Installation Guide. It is rec-ommended to have the latest Support Package Stack implemented.


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SAP Solution Manager Basic Configuration

The Basic configuration is successfully completed with the guided procedure in transaction: SOLMAN_SETUP. The Basic configuration includes also the Standard Service Desk configu-ration. Please check the status of the automatic configuration in “Basic configuration”. All status should be green. The managed systems for which you want to create messages have to be maintained via the “Managed system configuration”.

Master Data

Users need to be created and passwords and roles will be assigned.

Maintain business partner and assign the user, systems and clients, he is responsible for.

S-User for SAP Service Marketplace with authorization to create support messages need to be assigned.

Customer specific configurations

Based on the standard Service Desk, customer specific adoptions and developments can be done using e.g. profiles, custom fields and BADI´s

Integration/Interface to 3rd

party service desk as well as to Testing, Change Management and Project Documentation is available.

For further information, please consult the media library for SAP Solution Manager at SAP Service Marketplace


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6 How to Measure the Success of the Implementa-tion?

To measure the success of the Incident Management Standard, you can check the efficiency of your support processes. The following statements will be true for efficient support processes:

End users can easily create error messages and send them to a central support or-ganization working in the SAP Solution Manager.

Support employees use advanced tools to process the error messages and deliver fast problem resolution.

Collaboration with SAP Active Global Support works smoothly.

Furthermore the reporting based measurements of the following indicators compared to agreed service levels and/or benchmarks will help to determine the success of implementa-tion and show areas of potential improvements.

Total number of incidents (as a control measure)

Breakdown of incidents at each stage (e.g. logged, work in progress, closed, catego-ry, etc.)

Initial Reaction Time (IRT)

Mean Resolution Time (MRT)


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