July 18, 2018

July 18, 2018 | Karen Blazek | Director, Product Marketing

In May of 2018, SAP announced improvements to their Next-Generation Support model, centered around enhancing their impersonal support portal for customers to search and find their own solutions. Based on analysis on recent research papers by Gartner like “Buying the Right SAP Support” and customer testimonials, Next Generation Support essentially means self-service and agents with a low level of expertise manning a help desk. Customers need to prepare a cost optimization analysis against standard, enterprise or third-party SAP support. Are the SAP-provided support offerings available to all SAP customers regardless of release or products implemented? The answer is No.

Facts about SAP Support:

  • SAP’s support model is based on self-service. How much are you paying annually to resolve your own issues?
  • SAP will not troubleshoot your integrations or custom code. Wouldn’t you prefer not to have to prove that modified code isn’t causing your issue?
  • SAP doesn’t have live, instant phone support. While you can schedule a time for support to contact you regarding a specific issue, it will be 72 hours before they respond.
  • SAP’s Next-Generation Support includes expert guidance paths as a cookie cutter solution. Are your issues and your path to migrate to a HANA database identical to other SAP customers?

SAP devotes little time or investment into their support operations. Like other software vendors, SAP recognizes 90% profit margins from their support revenues. However, little to none of the profit is being reinvested in the core ERP applications. For example, if you are an ECC6 customer, you are funding their cloud development and seeing little ROI in your current SAP landscape.

If you are using SAP support regularly, it’s worth analyzing whether the amount you pay for Next-Generation Support is worth the amount and quality of support you receive from SAP.

Comparison:  SAP Support vs. Third-Party Support with Spinnaker Support

Spinnaker Support offers personalized SAP support that is more responsive and comprehensive than SAP’s proprietary support. Instead of being pushed to browse for a problem or answers to “how to” questions, you simply open a Spinnaker Support ticket or call your Account Support Lead (ASL) who will respond within eight minutes on average. The Spinnaker Support team then delivers customer-specific fixes to complex SAP product issues.

We believe that support should be responsive and aligned with the customer, not standardized or generic. In our latest customer satisfaction survey, Spinnaker Support customers reported 98.7% overall satisfaction with our SAP support services. Our enhanced and affordable support is always personalized, allowing for an accurate, comprehensive solution every time.

Conclusion

SAP customers have become increasingly frustrated with the company’s Next-Generation Support, identifying several major pain points. Customer service has declined or become de-personalized while annual support fees have steadily increased. Self-support tools have replaced support agents as the primary means for investigating and resolving application issues.

Spinnaker Support provides an alternative support model that is more responsive, personalized, comprehensive, and lower in total cost of ownership. For detailed highlights on Spinnaker Support’s SAP services, visit SAP Support Services today.