Troubleshoot like the Experts! Externalizing SAP’s methodology for resolving product related issues

At SAP we understand customers would prefer to resolve product issues on their own, rather than logging a support incident with SAP Product Support.

To help customers resolve their own issues without our involvement, we have started to externalize our methodology for resolving product related issues. We call this ‘Troubleshooting by Scenario’. Troubleshooting by Scenario means you can follow exactly the same steps and methodology that a SAP support engineer or developer would follow to isolate the issue.

‘Troubleshooting by Scenario’ provides customers with a list of scenarios. Example scenarios are ‘Promotion Management’, ‘Process crashes’, ‘Install problems’, ‘Scheduling problems’, and ‘Report refresh problems’ to name but a few.

(To start with we are providing one scenario “Promotion Management”, within one product area “Business Intelligence Products”, in order to get your feedback before we expand this innovative idea further.)

Within each scenario we provide a list of hypotheses (something to test or high level symptoms). For example “Problem with the meta data of the source or target repository” or “Known workflow causes a problem” or “Individual object causing a problem somewhere” are all hypotheses.

For each hypothesis we explain:

• the purpose (of the troubleshooting task)
• the ‘tool’ name (and details of the tool)
• a rating (to help you pick in case you’re not sure which one to use first)
• why the tools is suitable
• how to use the tool (for that particular hypothesis)
• next steps

The idea all along, is for customers to self-serve and resolve issues without the need to contact SAP. Of course there may be times you will need to contact SAP to help isolate or resolve an issue and certainly when a defect requires a new code-level fix.

Please watch this video

and visit the Promotion Management Troubleshooting Scenario at http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/Promotion+Management+Problems

Your feedback is most valuable, please either comment here, use the survey or contact me via Twitter.

I’d be delighted to hear your opinions.

Thank you.

Matthew Shaw                          Twitter:@MattShaw_on_BI                Feedback Survey