Preparing for PCOE: Common mistakes to avoid in your support presentation

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It can sometimes be challenging to differentiate services available to the direct channel customer from services to be delivered to the indirect channel customer. Thus, for our resellers preparing for Partner COE certification it’s important to understand the difference and ensure the correct content is included in your end-customer support presentations.

Please find below a list of Dos and Don’ts


A support presentation should ideally cover the following topics:

• Introduction: Company overview, Vision, Purpose, Achievements, Best practices'.


• Support Competencies and Capabilities: Availability of services offered, customer references, SAP certification or awards achieved, experience


• Infrastructure, tools, and resources: SAP Solution Manager (if applicable), Incident management system, SAP Support Organization, Service Desk, Experienced support staff, methods of communication (URL link for ITSM, Hotline, E-mail, etc.)


• Support operations, procedures, and methodologies: Describes general support processes and procedures highlighting basic incident handling procedures, as well as outside business hours support, Escalation handling procedures; includes contact information and SLAs


• Basic and optional maintenance services: Incident handling, 7*24 availability, SAP EarlyWatch® Alert reporting, TQCs, Premium services outside of SAP Standard and Enterprise Support


• Partner Responsibilities: Service levels and guarantees, Mode of support (remote/onsite), Availability of support and contact information, Description of services, processes and tools, Criteria for service delivery


• Customer Responsibilities: Remote connectivity, Authorizations and permissions for support staff, Setup of proactive monitoring tools and processes, Identified contacts

 


A Support presentation must not include the following:

• Services offered by SAP to Partners, not to indirect customers, e.g.


• Expert Guided Implementation (EGI),


• Ongoing Quality Measures (OQM),


• Modification Justification Check,


• Custom Code Maintainability Check,


• SAP Partner Support Advisory Center (SAC)


• SAP Enterprise Support Academy


• direct SAP Escalation Interface


• Partner Service Advisor


• RCA for Custom Code

 

• Provisions applicable to direct customer and not to indirect customers:


• Customer Center of Expertise (CCOE)


• Continuous Quality Checks (CQC)


• SAP Enterprise Support Advisory Council (ESAC)

 

• Partner by price statements: e.g. 19% for Standard Support, 22% for Enterprise Support of Partner buy price, fees, penalties

 

• Services that cannot be delivered: e.g. pure Analytics partner that doesn’t have SAP Solution Manager Service Desk should not advise the customer to send incidents via SAP Solution Manager Service Desk or ask the customer to document Solutions and Projects in the VAR’s SAP Solution Manager. e.g. VAR offers to the pure Analytics customer TQC service that can be delivered only to BAiO customer.

 

• Statements where SAP is made accountable for SLA breach

 

• Service levels demanded directly from SAP rather than VAR

 

Check out the SAP Enterprise Support presentations and templates on the SAP PartnerEdge Portal for partners and end-customers. Please note that if you are using the templates provided, your support presentation to the end-customer should be enhanced and personalized with your company’s unique competencies, services, operations, methodologies etc. (refer to the Dos).

See more articles on this topic: Compilation of PCOE Articles