SAP Solution Manager is a required tool for SAP customers. SAP Enterprise Support is also required. What differentiates the current offerings from their predecessors? What new guidelines has SAP issued with respect to these resources, and how do these changes impact your SAP operating costs and day-to-day support activities? This session provides simple, direct answers to these questions. Education in this session includes:

Comprehensive introductions to updated SAP functionality for systems management through:

• System administration
• Documentation assistance
• Change management
• Monitoring tools for systems and business process operations
• Test management
• Root cause analysis
• Landscape management
• Service desk operations
• Project management
• Service delivery

A comprehensive introduction to new SAP support options for:

• Guaranteed service levels
• Continuous quality checks
• Remote services for technical risk assessments
• Analyzing and maintaining custom code updates
• Enhancement packages
• Support packages

Session presented by: Lori Sanders, Enowa

This session offers new SAP guidelines to optimize your investment in SAP Solution Manager, with lessons on the best ways to define a strategy that makes the most of the enhancements available with SAP Enterprise Support. Draw from lessons on:

• The impact of these newer SAP tools and services on day-to-day support activities and on SAP total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Guidance to prioritize which SAP Enterprise Support capabilities to adopt first (and why).
• Techniques to identify and launch cost-saving and support optimization activities.
• Best practices to properly train technical teams. Strategies to manage complex system landscapes more effectively.

Session presented by: John Krakowski, Jr., SAP America, Lori Sanders, Enowa, Marcel van den Top, BearingPoint

Work centers, the new user interfaces with SAP Solution Manager, now have become the de facto standard that provides access to role-specific functions, work areas, and assigned tasks. All teams that support SAP solutions and landscapes need to understand the work center concept and become proficient at leveraging work centers to access information related to the operation of your SAP systems.

Demos and topics covered in this session offer an introduction to the work centers, their features and functions, and best practices for using these centralized tools for support and administration. Available work centers include:

• SAP Solution Manager administration
• Implementations/upgrades
• Solution document sssistant
• System landscape management
• System administration
• Change management
• Job management
• System monitoring
• Business process operations
• Incident management
• Root cause analysis
• SAP engagement and service delivery
• Test management

 This session also offers demos, guidelines, and best practices to:

• Set up and manage work centers
• Manage favorites, personalize screens, and filter and access relevant messages, alerts, reports, and documents
• Centralize views
• Tailor work centers for use by specific roles
• Foster greater collaboration and coordination across technical teams
• Use work centers with SAP GUI for Windows or SAP GUI for HTML and the new SAP NetWeaver Business Client

Session presented by: John Krakowski, Jr., SAP America, Lori Sanders, Enowa, Marcel van den Top, BearingPoint

Good documentation is essential to technical support activities. It ensures that you can get at the right answers quickly and easily, reducing overall costs and risks. In this session, you will learn the best ways to build, manage, and retain important technical and project documentation using solution documentation assistance.

This session includes:

• Strategies to build and maintain SAP systems, process, and project documentation
• Comprehensive instruction on creating documentation for previously undocumented solutions in system landscapes
• Documentation short cuts and instruction on ready-made SAP documentation templates
• Education to leverage SAP functionality to validate documented systems, release levels, and business processes on an ongoing basis
• Updates from SAP as to why documentation is no longer an option but a requirement with SAP Enterprise Support
• Demos of SAP Solution Manager functionality that automatically analyzes your system and identifies opportunities for standardization and process optimization
• Best practices for organizing and standardizing configuration and documentation information in your SAP applications to create your business blueprint

Session presented by: Lori Sanders, Enowa

This session offers detailed strategies to prevent, diagnose and address system problems and minimize the toll they take on your organization. Customers that adopt these strategies report significant savings and more reliable SAP operations.

This session offers:

• Comprehensive coverage of SAP Solution Manager capabilities for:
  • Performance reporting
  • Transport management
  • Switch framework
  • Connectivity monitoring activities
  • SAP administrative tools such as the DBA and MDM cockpits
• Criteria to pick the right tools and methodologies when addressing system problems
• Expert instruction to analyze alerts and optimize your monitoring activities
• Guidelines to more effectively plan, schedule, and execute system downtime maintenance
• Step-by-step instruction to perform root-cause analysis of system problems
• Strategies to rapidly resolve system problems
• Lessons to get started with new SAP reporting and alert functionality

Session presented by: John Krakowski, Jr., SAP America, Lori Sanders, Enowa, Marcel van den Top, BearingPoint

A large and rapidly growing number of SAP customers don’t simply monitor system activities, they also monitor and manage business processes. When you can spot and fix broken or incomplete processes before users, partners, or customers notice, you can have significant impact on your bottom line and overall customer satisfaction. 

This session takes a detailed look at techniques and strategies now being adopted to optimize the performance and reliability of business processes that rely on SAP systems. Coverage includes: 

• Best practices for utilizing, routing, and managing automatic alerts that are in contact with your business processes
• Strategies to enhance business process performance and reliability, along with recommendations for setting up a meaningful business process structure
• Lessons to train technical teams to take a business process-oriented approach to system monitoring and enable support personnel to analyze technical incidents within the proper business context
• Expert recommendations for setting up an effective framework and procedures for business process monitoring
• Criteria to prioritize actions based on the importance of impacted business process
• A guide to the prerequisites and steps required to set up business process monitoring in SAP Solution Manager
• An exploration of the different types of incidents that can be monitored and the alerts that SAP has predefined and delivered in your system
• Business examples of problems that can be proactively addressed and resolved
• An understanding of how the business process structure in your SAP Solution Manager project, template, or solution directory can be used by the business process monitoring feature

Session presented by: Marcel van den Top, BearingPoint

Have you ever had a process fail because you were not able to anticipate the impact a change would have on a custom object? In this session, see how you can leverage the functionality in SAP Solution Manager to improve the way you manage custom development objects. You will: 

• Receive strategies and tips to keep better track of all your custom objects — what status they are in, who owns them, and what business processes they relate to — and provide easy access to this information beyond the development team
• Accurately determine the test requirements for custom objects and prepare for regression testing
• Quickly estimate the amount of work needed to retrofit your custom objects to a new release, enhancement pack, or extension of your solution
• Know what it takes to perform effective what-if analysis, assess the potential workload you need to change, and determine whether or not you need to extend or retire a particular process or transaction 
• Learn to navigate the custom development management cockpit to identify obsolete custom developments, understand the consequences of an upgrade to your customization, and more

Session presented by: Marcel van den Top, BearingPoint

This session examines the change management challenges associated with an SAP solution landscape and the best ways to keep track of application changes, transports, and business process modifications. It then looks in detail at strategies and tools to optimize these activities. 

In this session, you will: 

Session presented by: John Krakowski, Jr., SAP America, Lori Sanders, Enowa, Marcel van den Top, BearingPoint

Testing is such a critical piece of every IT environment. However, most companies either do too much or too little, resulting in either a waste of critical testing resources or an unstable application that drains money in other ways. This session introduces you to the latest testing tools and capabilities within SAP Solution Manager and gives you strategies and best practices to evaluate and improve your testing procedures and environments. You will: 

SAP Solution Manager offers unique functionality for managing end-user support requests and communicating and collaborating with SAP to resolve critical support and system management issues. Using this functionality will also help you to better understand which areas of your solution need the most attention. Learn more about leveraging this service to integrate your internal incident management processes with SAP customer support and, ultimately, speed resolution of system problems. This session offers valuable guidance on the full breadth of functionality offered in SAP Solution Manager service desk activities. 

In this session, you will: 

• Examine the benefits reported by customers who are using this functionality 
• Learn how to leverage this service to integrate your internal incident management processes with SAP customer support and speed resolution of system problems
• Explore the full breadth of SAP Solution Manager functionality for service and support, and receive important configuration tips for setting it up
• Hear how you can integrate service desk functionality with the SAP OSS system to request support and download SAP Notes automatically
• Learn the steps and issues you face when integrating service and support functionality with third-party service desk tools 
• See how SAP Solution Manager service desk functions complement — and can be integrated with — change request management processes
• Understand how you can leverage service desk functions to resolve issues and problems beyond your SAP environment
• Evaluate the standard service reports that can help you review and track system incidents, and learn when to build your own reports
• Learn how SAP defines, prioritizes, and escalates reported problems so that your support procedures and expectations are in synch
• Receive little-known tips and tricks to enhance and optimize your service desk configuration

Session presented by: Marcel van den Top, BearingPoint

This is where it all comes together — from an end user reporting an incident, to a system administrator reviewing monitoring data, to the analysis, resolution and testing of problems, and approval and application of a change. See a demonstration of how the various work centers come together to support end-to-end SAP solution management. In this session, you will:

• See the application of the seminar’s teachings in a real world example, from when an end user reports an incident, all the way through to the final approval and application of a change
• Run through a demonstration that will show you how the various work centers and functionality of SAP Solution Manager and SAP Enterprise Support work together and enable quick, streamlined resolutions to specific problems
• See how an incident is recorded and how the subsequent handling of message delivery ensures alerts get to the right place
• Learn how different types of support and incident data and events are monitored across various systems
• View an example of how a change request is raised, reviewed, and approved 
• See what is involved in checking a process out of the solution directory and how to automate updates to documentation based on key changes
• Walk through the process for reviewing test scripts, executing actual tests, and reviewing recorded results
• Understand what needs to be done to approve the final change and transport it to production

Session presented by: John Krakowski, Jr., SAP America, Lori Sanders, Enowa, Marcel van den Top, BearingPoint