Technical Articles
Mandatory Business Impact in the Cloud For Customer 2102 release
In order to further harmonize our support processes and decrease our solving time for critical issues we have introduced a new mandatory step when forwarding urgent incidents to SAP Support.
In the upcoming 2102 release of Cloud for Customer it will no longer be possible for key users to forward an incident with priority high or very high from the tenant’s built-in Support to SAP Support without documenting a valid business impact.
This process is the same as found on the SAP Support Portal
Here is how this works :
You are a key user ( admin) and want to send an incident to SAP Support. In the Administrator Work center, under the Incidents view, you select the incident and edit.
Note: end users can only select priority Low, Medium or high, only a key user can upgrade the incident to Very High.
If you are not already the processor of the incident you will use ” take over” or, as an alternative, change the status to “start processing” and “save”.
After analyzing the incident and searching for a solution in the knowledge base, you decide to forward the incident to SAP Support.
In the action menu, select “send to provider”
Since it is a critical issue you decide to select High or Very High priority.
Note: Please always be very cautious when choosing the priority, selecting a high or very high priority when not justified is equal to all passengers of the same plane selecting priority boarding !
If you are unsure, please refer to the below link which is also available in the incident screen in your tenant.
To ensure efficient processing of your incident, please select the appropriate priority.
all mandatory field must be completed, including the application area.
Now add a note for SAP Support ( provider). This should be a detailed description of the issue with all necessary step and authorization to replicate the issue .
Do not save yet , instead click again on “add” and this time select “Business Impact”
Document the business impact. The business impact must be clear and detailed, it should reflect the seriousness of the situation and include the number of users affected, any financial loss immediate or future, any possible deadline, Go Live endangered and any available workaround.
Now click “save” and both notes will be visible in the incident
After saving, the incident status will change to “In process- Provider Action”
A short time after an external incident ID will be created, this ID will be the unique reference you should quote when talking to SAP Support.
If you fail to add a business impact, you will receive the following error message.
One exception to be noted, unlike the SAP Support Portal where the Business impact can only be added once, in your C4C built-in support, the business impact can be updated as often as required !
If your situation changes, if the issue reported is becoming more urgent, if your deadline is approaching or the situation has escalated, then a new business impact can be added at any stage using the same button ” add” ==> ” business impact”
Please note that a Mandatory business Impact is not required for Medium and Low priorities but still recommended .
If you have any questions, please leave a comment .
Thank you for reading !
Hi Francois,
Thanks a lot for sharing this great article. Is there any official customer communication planned to roll out the change? I did not take notice of any announcement in the 2102 release briefing webinar.
Thanks and best regards,
Steffen
Hi Steffen,
There is no major communication planned since it is only an alignment on the global product support processes . The details will be available in the release notes as well as in the product documentation.
We will highlight this change in our customer CIC Webcast this month "getting started with Support"
Details of upcoming Live Webcasts are included here. Replays to watch On Demand here.
We are planning to include this in the upcoming newsletters as well, to be confirmed.
François
Hello François,
So no communication at all, just like when the auto-closure was changed to 14 days.
I am not involved in "global product support processes" and I'm sure many other customers are not. I'm also not "getting started with Support", and newsletters are opt-in, so they have a limited reach.
Why can't the SAP Global Support team communicate with the SAP C4C team to properly communicate such changes in the release webinars?
Thanks,
Catalin
Hi Catalin,
The new feature was documented in the release notes and in the product documentation available since the upgrade of all test tenants 2 weeks ago.
It is also documented on the CX Wiki with the blog, a knowledge article and a video.
https://cxwiki.sap.com/display/c4crelease/2021/02/02/%5BRelease+2102%5D+Mandatory+Business+Impact+for+C4C+Incidents
As a key user I would recommend that you register to received the monthly C4C newsletter, it was included too.
So I would not say that there was no communication.
Please note that there is no change whatsoever in our global processes, as per our Service Level Agreement the business impact was always mandatory when submitting a very high or high incident.
We simply made it clearer by adding a specific field , the process itself remains exactly the same.
Francois
Hi François,
As of Feb 5 (the day before release in test tenants) the documentation/release notes were not available. Best check this also with C4C team, because for the last few releases the documentation is available the day before production upgrade. So it is not 2 weeks, but rather 1 week ago, after this feature had already been changed.
The newsletter is sent at the end of the month, again after the fact. Please communicate with the C4C team in advance, so they can properly include such changes in release notes. You communicated this on Feb 2, after the release was already planned out!
It is not helpful to push information to 6 different channels instead of the main source of information for customers (i.e. release webinar). This is just information overload, not helping to disseminate important information in any way.
I don't think anyone expects to find some of the changes in webinars, others in blog posts, others in KBAs and others in newsletters.
Thank you,
Catalin
Hi Catalin,
Thank you for your feedback, this is noted and will be forwarded to the relevant teams
I must insist that there is no change of process as mentioned in my previous reply the BI was always mandatory.
Thank you
Francois