The Role of the SAP Help Desk

Like the SAP Operations team, the role that the SAP Help Desk or SAP Support Center will play in supporting the overall implementation (and perception of the implementation!) seems to be largely downplayed until the big day of Go-Live looms near. Simply creating a SAP-literate help desk will never make the support organization successful, though. Preparing a legacy help desk team to take on the world of SAP troubleshooting and problem resolution is no small chore. In the next few pages, I’ll discuss this from a number of perspectives (also clearly illustrated in Figure 12.8):

• Timing, in regard to staffing

• Breadth of questions and issues to be encountered

• Training, in regard to skillsets needed to address real-time troubleshooting and problem resolution

• Managing end-user perceptions

The SAP Help Desk will tackle issues large and small, with questions originating from end users as well as internal IT and SAP TSO team members. As such, the staffing and education of this team is vital to the smooth transition from supporting legacy system(s) to supporting SAP (and perhaps legacy systems concurrently). And given the fact that the Help Desk team represents the first SAP “face” that many new SAP end users will ever “see,” their customer-facing role can simply not be underestimated. The Help Desk is in a position to leave each end user with either a favorable or a poor opinion of the new system, well beyond the issue that prompted their call to the help desk in the first place.

Staffing the SAP Help Desk

Without question, staffing the Help Desk with enough properly trained, experienced, and pleasant, even-tempered, customer-oriented personnel is critical—all of the education, experience, and tools in the world will be worthless in the hands of a lone help desk technician a couple of days after SAP Go-Live. In my observations, I see help desk staffing in terms of a typical bell curve, where the peak of the curve represents the first few weeks after the big imaginary Go-Live button is pushed. The need for on-call telephone support staff at this time is great, as one of the largest volumes of calls tends to occur in this time frame.

As calls taper off after the first month or two, though, it’s quite normal to scale back the Help Desk. Downsizing tends to follow the growth of the most frequently asked questions (MFAQs, or simply FAQs)—as MFAQs stabilize, the number of help desk calls and therefore technicians shrinks. In other words, when the top 20 questions become a matter of routine, it’s usually time to replace some of your paid bodies with pleasant on-hold telephone recordings, Web-based MFAQs and associated answers, and so on—refer to Figure 12.9 for clarification.

The Help Desk also tends to take additional customer calls after new functionality is added to the system, especially when this new functionality represents a new component or consists of a new method of accessing SAP. Call volumes reflect these changes, often implemented as quarterly change waves. In one case, in fact, I observed huge call times at one of my accounts where SAP Workplace was introduced to facilitate “single sign-on” (access to all SAP components was granted through this simple portal approach), but communication about exactly how to access Workplace had been lacking. The result was a whole lot of extra calls the first two days of the week, from people just interested in logging in to their system.

In another case, when an account finally added the Sales and Distribution module to their core R/3 functionality, but failed to adequately resize or re-evaluate their in-place hardware platform in light of their really poor SD implementation, everyone suffered. Response times went through the roof, and the help desk was swamped with calls for days from users across the board—MM, FI/CO and more, in addition to the unfortunate new SD end users.

In the preceding cases, attention to detail and some level of testing prior to major changes in functionality would probably have taken care of both of these issues before they ever came to light. But both cases also serve to underscore the importance of the SAP Help Desk as a final net, when other nets fail to catch issues, or are used improperly.

Common SAP Help Desk Questions in the Real World

In the name of “pre-go-live training” for one of my clients, I assembled a list similar to the one that follows of common SAP help desk questions and scenarios. This list is by no means comprehensive. For a larger sampling, though, including what I have found to be the most common resolutions/fixes, refer to the Planning CD. In any case, keep in mind that such a “task list” can be easily transformed into the foundation for an SAP Help Desk training plan, too:

• A user cannot print. List two reasons.

• A user cannot log in. List four reasons.

• Explain the process to change a user’s password.

• Response time “seems” to be slow, per a user who has called the help desk—prove that the system is indeed performing to spec by digging out application server statistics and other real-time performance data.

• A user can’t run a particular transaction. List three reasons why.

• A user calls in, and says his job is not completing. How do you confirm this?

• Explain the purpose of Change Management or Change Control to a user wishing to have a change to production implemented immediately.

• Which T-code can you execute to determine whether the previous night’s backup actually completed successfully?

• One of the DBAs calls in and needs to know how big the database is. How do you determine how much of the allocated disk space is actually being used by Oracle or SQL Server?

• The SAP Infrastructure/Basis group calls in. You need to look at table locks or lock entries. Which T-code do you execute?

• A user says that they just ran a transaction and an ABAP dump occurred. How do you look at this dump, or any dump over the last few days?

• During troubleshooting, you determine that the system log generated over the last few days should be studied—how do you do this?

• Explain how to add the ‘SAP_BC_BASIS_ADMIN_AG’ activity group to user ZGEANDE.

• Management just did another forced early retirement, and you have been requested to lock user ANDEGE. How is this accomplished?

I recommend that you add to the more comprehensive list found on the Planning CD as required, and use it to quickly train new hires, or refresh folks who might be shared between various IT help desks or support centers. And as I already stated, use this list to begin assembling a training plan for your SAP Help Desk, covered next.

A Simple Roadmap to SAP Help Desk Preparation

When the appropriate staffing plan is in place, both education and access to knowledge tools tend to be the real keys to a first-class support center. Preparing the SAP Help Desk for their new support role really amounts to the following:

• Mapping tasks and issues (like those described in the previous section) to those that will actually be faced by the client. This includes paying attention to most everything at or above the SAP Application layer of the solution stack.

• Determining the baseline knowledge of the help desk staff. This is often done through IT product and SAP-specific surveys, sample questions, and so on.

• Determining the need for formal training versus on-the-job training versus informal employee or consultant-provided knowledge transfer, depending upon the baseline knowledge of each help desk technician, and your budget, and timing.

• Developing and sharing contact information, escalation processes and lists, and so on with everyone on the help desk team—this must also include a description of what each technical and business team is responsible for.

▸	For details on what “training” amounts to for the various technical organizations supporting SAP, see“Who Needs Training?”, p. 310 in Chapter 9.

Managing End-User Perceptions

At the end of the day, the SAP Help Desk or SAP Support Center directly impacts how end users feel about the new business system. With this in mind, a knowledgeable and courteous support staff can make the difference between a user accepting a one-time short-lived inconvenience and the same user creating and sharing negative long-term system perceptions with his friends and colleagues at work.

This issue is huge, and needs to be recognized as such. When a perception is “out there”—a perception of poor performance or unacceptable uptime, for example—the perception tends to outlive the system itself. We are all familiar with the adage “you can’t squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube”—here is a fine example of that adage at work.

On the other hand, if the support folks are properly staffed, appropriately trained, and have access to the proper knowledge management tools, they will then be capable of identifying the root cause of a problem, or rapidly escalating the issue to the correct team. The perception surrounding the issue might very well actually turn out positive, in fact. That is, the end user might walk away with a sense of pride in the professional manner in which he and his issue were addressed. This, followed by a timely resolution of the core problem, might even instill more confidence in both the system and support team, on behalf of the end user.

Bottom line, invest in your SAP Help Desk. These people represent the front line of your SAP support army, and as such signify a great opportunity to help their customer—and your SAP end users—be successful.