Hello friends,
Today I would like to talk about a common mistake, that can cause major delays on processing times of incident: Incorrect component assignment of incident and how to identify the correct component for your SAP Incident.
I often notice that new incidents from customers are created under BW-BCT*, as BW-BCT has over 100 sub components, listing almost all Applications and generic sub areas from SAP products. This happens because the description of the sub components is not accurate in some cases and doesn't specify the area.
Please keep in mind, Components under BW-BCT are reserved for issues related to the installation and operation of SAP application extractors used to load data into SAP BW. Choosing the correct component is an important step during the incident creation because it ensures the fastest processing of your request.
We can see at the following image the example: Under path BW->BW-BCT there are over 100 sub components with simple descriptions like "Customer Relationship Management" or "Documentation". In reality those components are related with logic of data extraction for the ECC application that deals with "Customer Relationship Management" and "Documentation", BW-BCT-CRM and BW-BCT-DOC, respectively.
Another reason this happens is because customer selects the application for the Incident as BW, which will automatically expand BW area for component selection, misleading customer to find the desired component based on the description, which will most likely be under BW-BCT list as it has almost all SAP Applications extraction logics under it.
How to find the correct component for my Incident?
In order for SAP to assign an engineer to work on a customer incident, the incident must be assigned to an active component, that is being monitored by SAP engineers.
Here are a few tips to identify which component is the one for your incident:
Note search
Perform a note search using the SAP SMP (Service Market Place) search tool using SAP xSearch or Note search.
Use key words related to your issue like the transaction code used to reproduce the issue, a table name and the name of the product as in the following example in xSearch, let's try an example: my BPC user has been locked due to incorrect login attempts and I'm trying to find a solution for it:
Notice I'm searching for the text "user locked SU01", the most suited areas would be BC, GRC and SV.
Now look at the narrowing example:
Notice I narrow down the search by adding 'BPC' to the search text. This Narrows the results of Notes from over 280 to only 5, which are for EMP-BPC-NW.
Knowledge Base Article(KBA) or Note
Customers often find a note related to the incident being faced, or even create new incidents based on notes already provided by SAP.
As a general approach, the component where the Note or KBA, was created for, will be the most suited component to create a new incident:
KBA example:
Note example:
.
You can find the Component of a KBA or Note under Header Data section, close to the bottom of the page.
Short Dump
Usually when customer faces short dump, you can see an application component assigned to the dump at the header, for example:
This might be usually the correct component for the incident, but not in all cases.
In order to identify the correct component, you should analyze the dump text description and check the programs and the code section where it stopped.
Check the function module/report or Transaction code component
This is usually the best method to identify the component responsible for working on the issue as it shows the exact component responsible for that part of the code.
There are several ways of doing that, I'm going to explain the one I believe most people will have authorization for and that I believe is easy to do:
1. Open the transaction you are facing the issue and navigate on it one step before reproducing the issue.
2.Go to context menu System->Status.
3.Double click on the Program(Screen) value. The code for it will open.
4.Go to context Menu Goto->Attributes. A small popup will open.
5. Double click on the Package value. A new screen will open.
6.You will see the component at Application Component value.
Checking some of the steps mentioned above should help you identify the correct component. However, there isn't a single formula for all issues. Each issue has to be carefully interpreted to find the appropriate component.
Sometimes even we at SAP have a difficult time to identify what component is correct for the issue. That is why, it is imperative that customers provide a Clear description of the issue with a Concrete example with description of the steps under Reproduction Steps section.
Do you have another tip on how to identify the corret component? If so, please let me know in the comment section.
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