May 23, 2018

May 23, 2018 | Ken Conz | Director, Technical Support Services

When organizations are considering third-party support, it’s common for the SAP technical team (Basis Administrators) to be reluctant or apprehensive about moving away from SAP-provided support. When I was first introduced to the concept of SAP third-party support, I was highly skeptical. After years of working with SAP and their solution portal, I didn’t believe that issues could be found and resolved without SAP code and tool access. After nine years as a third-party support engineer, I am no longer a skeptic.

There is a misconception that organizations cannot survive and thrive without continuous SAP-provided support. However, third-party support organizations typically provide more precise and tailored solutions that even out-deliver SAP’s MaxAttention offerings; for a fraction of the cost. How? SAP often addresses issues in broad strokes, meaning they package solutions in large, all-encompassing support packages or patches. Any Basis Administrator will tell you that these patches often introduce new issues that, in turn, require further fixes to implement a working solution. Catch-all patches can put the system in a cycle of instability for extended periods of time and need significant time and effort for testing. With SAP third-party support, after an initial issue is reviewed, a specific solution is built and modeled. Such solutions resolve the issue strategically, avoiding the introduction of problems unrelated to the primary issue reported. With Spinnaker Support, my team has successfully onboarded and supported numerous companies that run SAP – large and small, private and public. Without driving them to a self-support portal, we provide personalized, fast response service to maintain their extensive configurations and comprehensive SAP environments.

Prospects have believed the SAP myth that they must give up everything that is accessible from SAP’s support portal. Under a third-party support model, SAP still allows customers to get object, developer, and hardware keys for your systems. Information related to security is also available to you via the non-maintenance customer portal.  (Service Marketplace redirects you after you log in with your existing OSS ID).

Getting Started

Spinnaker Support guides new customers through an extensive process during the onboarding phase the termination date of SAP support. This process creates a tight alignment between Spinnaker Support’s hand-picked team of engineers with the customer’s internal team and SAP environments. It facilitates the learning and understanding of the customers’ business processes, IT capabilities, geographic footprint, and product components. This approach reduces issue resolution times and eliminates the need for customers to “tell their life stories” every time they call for support.

Spinnaker Support’s SAP third-party support model is a paradigm shift in the thinking of how SAP support is delivered. It is a safe, proven way to help IT departments become more strategically aligned with the business to address issues and plan projects. Our customers switch even when their innovation plans are aligned with SAP’s long-term product vision because they realize SAP’s future vision does not necessarily support their immediate business needs. We provide customers with world-class software and technology stack interoperability support until they are ready to reunite with SAP’s support.

From one Basis Administrator to another, you can continue to support your organization’s SAP systems, under a third-party support model. Our 20+ year SAP experts augment your internal staff, providing supplemental support beyond customer resource skillsets. This extension to your team has proven to bring out the best results. We handle the heavy lifting. You can focus on strategic, innovative items.  Granted, you won’t have access to all that SAP has to offer on their portal, but nine years removed from SAP support, I can guarantee you won’t need it!

Contact us to learn more about SAP third-party support.