Efficient troubleshooting

Some customers still have memories of the Service Desk of Solution Manager 7.0 EHP1 in their bones. Back then, the service desk and ticket handling were fully integrated into the SAP GUI and thus hardly usable as a central, company-wide incident management tool.

The processing of tickets took place with the SAP GUI in the Abap stack. This is extremely difficult to convey for an enterprise-wide tool. With Solution Manager 7.1, however, a great deal has changed here.

The current version of the Service Desk is - just like the Change Request Management - completely based on the CRM Web GUI and thus on the one hand easy to use.

At the same time, customizing is so simple that even customers without extensive training or in-depth CRM know-how can be expected to use it: Customer-specific fields, including input help, are defined via a graphical interface - the Solution Manager automatically generates the necessary extensions to the data structures in the background.

I always receive praise for this from customers in live demos when we adjust fields and interfaces directly in the demo.

SAP has also significantly improved the range of functions compared to earlier releases. In addition to classic incident management, problem management is also part of the service desk and makes it possible to bundle tickets into problems.

Management of messages according to stored service level agreements is possible. KPI reporting can be used for both the service desk and change request management.

As always, a key advantage over all other help desk solutions is the seamless integration of SAP products. Messages can be opened directly in the service desk from the SAP GUI.

Relevant data such as the component, SAP system, client and the transaction in which the user is located are also supplied. Incidents in Solution Manager can then be forwarded directly to SAP if processing by internal IT is no longer possible.

Manual use of the Marketplace service is then no longer necessary.

In addition to the topics that can be mapped "out of the box", so to speak, as part of the scope of delivery, I and my team are always concerned with the topic of mail notification for ticket changes.

Relatively little is mapped here in the scope of delivery, so that we usually map customer-specific enhancement implementations here. Here, too, the spectrum ranges from the classic notification of ticket changes to mails in which a diff (before/after comparison) is sent.

The Service Desk unfolds its full integration especially in interaction with Change Request Management. Change requests can be created from incidents, or changes can be created directly if the problem cannot be solved immediately, but changes to customizing or workbench objects are necessary. The integration into test management has also been successful: Usually, faulty test cases lead to incidents in the service desk, which are then processed accordingly by the responsible IT employees and key users.

While now the topic of incident management and service desk is not an absolute hype topic, I still talk again and again with interested parties whose service desk is getting on in years and who want to talk about a new version or a new implementation.

Especially for customers with an Enterprise Support contract, it is worth considering Solution Manager as an alternative and convincing yourself of the extended range of functions.

Since a great deal is already included in the scope of delivery, implementation is limited to a concept, customizing and organizational anchoring. Smaller add-ons in the area of mail and notification management can quickly create added value.