How to Prioritize and Speed Up the Processing of your SAP Incident!

[Katie_G]

Read below to understand how providing a clear Business Impact can help to prioritize and speed up the processing of your SAP Support incidents.

If you run into an issue with your system or have a query about a transaction, sometimes you need to contact our Product Experts for technical assistance, and we recommend that you provide as much detail as possible to ensure our teams can get working on this for you. One of the fields we strongly advise you to add is the Business Impact information!

Every business is unique, and the impact of every issue varies depending on the business you are in. We in SAP, like you, really want your issue to be resolved as soon as possible. You know the urgency of the issue, and SAP wants to understand this by considering the effect on your company’s activities from a non-technical perspective. The Business Impact is a tool that we in SAP can use to ensure we are giving the right priority to the right incident.

Here is SAP’s definition of the 4 priorities:

 

If you are ever in any doubt about what priority is needed, see SAP Notes 1281633 and 90835 and of course, you can contact us in the Customer Interaction Center (CIC) for some guidance.

The details we ask for are related to the non-technical element of your situation, and address these points:

• What is the issue: Can you provide a brief description of this issue you are facing?


• How does this affect your business: Do you have any workarounds that can be used to allow you to continue working? What are the consequences if you don’t have a workaround?


• When is this issue going to become more critical – or has it become critical? What timelines are affected? Are there project deadlines that are impacted by this issue?


• Who can we contact in your company if we have any queries about the issue or want to do some troubleshooting with?

Sample Business Impact questions:

Productive System:

• Is the core business severely affected?


• Is there any workaround available?


• How many users are affected?


• How long has the problem been going on?


• What are the consequences if the issue continues?


• Is there any possible financial loss? Under what circumstances?

Test/Development System:

• What project is affected?


• When is your productive go-live date?


• Is this a showstopper for go-live? Why?


• What is the most immediate deadline?


• How many project team members are affected?


• What are the consequences if go-live cannot be completed on time?

Check out SAP Note 1281633 for more details on the business impact questions.

The Business Impact is important for everyone who is dealing with your incident – Product Support Engineers, Developers, our internal Escalation teams, your dedicated SAP Contacts including Technical Quality Managers, Customer Success Managers, Enterprise Support Advisors, SAP Account Managers, Incident Managers and the Customer Interaction Center.

We ask you to provide the Business Impact details when you’re creating your Incident and when you want to change the priority.

You can change the priority yourself if it has one of these statuses:

• Not sent to SAP (saved as draft)


• Customer Action


• Partner-Customer Action


• SAP Solution Proposed

Reach out to us in the CIC to change the priority when the incident has one of the statuses below:

• Sent to SAP


• Sent to SAP Partner


• In Processing by SAP

See SAP Note 1522544 for steps on how to edit the priority of your incident.

I hope this has helped to explain the importance of the business impact when working with your incident in helping to prioritize and speed-up the processing of your incidents!

If you want to learn more about speeding up and managing your incidents, you might want to attend our Incident Management webcasts. Find out about our interactive webcasts or watch them On-Demand here: Customer Interaction Center (CIC) Support Webcast Series

Read more #CustomerInteractionCenter blog-posts Here!