David Carragher | SAP Technical Manager
It is widely known that Spinnaker Support provides a more responsive, 24/7/365 support model than SAP-provided support. But did you know that, in addition to all SAP standard break/fixes, we also cover custom development issues?
That’s right. Unlike SAP’s limited support model, Spinnaker Support’s more comprehensive coverage includes:
- SAP standard and custom code break/fix issues,
- Review and fix of badly performing custom applications, and
- Advice and guidance on custom code improvements in general.
How Does this Help Our Customers?
As an SAP Technical Manager, I regularly work with customers who have heavily customised their on-premise systems. We understand that break/fix issues can occur anywhere, which is why we have broadened the definition of what support should cover.
We believe that the most important result is to have you up and running in as little time as possible. With Spinnaker Support, you receive rapid, live ticket response for all levels of severity. Each of our development team members has a minimum of 20 years SAP development experience and a wide-reaching knowledge in all SAP modules.
The benefits of our model include:
- You free up the time for your internal delivery team since Spinnaker Support can analyse and fix any issues.
- You receive support for your complete system. We find that on average 40% of issues arise from custom code. We are here to bridge that major gap in the SAP support model.
- You receive timelier assistance from engineers who are assigned directly to you and know your specific SAP products and business processes.
An Example Ticket
A customer raised a P2 ticket with us relating to a heavily customised development. The process for tracking customer packages was performing extremely slowly, to the point that the executed functions never completed processing. This situation affected the business’s ability to resolve customer package-related issues in real time and to proactively use their SAP system. The result was cases of suboptimal customer service, costly returns, lost packages, and expensive work arounds.
Using profiling techniques and tools such as the system trace, code inspector, SQL trace, and the Runtime Analyzer, we identified multiple performance issues. We prioritised and classified each issue according to the impact of the change, improvement in performance for the change, and the risk of making the change.
Working together, we addressed changes with large impacts on performance and changed the code to use sorted or hashed tables. The slow performing code was looping on large tables of data then reading large tables within that loop as a subloop. In some cases, these subloops were nested three or more layers deep. Since none of these tables were sorted, the code bogged down by repeatedly reading the same data.
Our team worked closely with the customer to rigorously test the changes. The outcome was a 300% saving in processing time, and the issue was resolved to great satisfaction from the customer.
Even Greater Financial Savings
Spinnaker Support saves SAP customers an average of 62% on what SAP charges for its annual maintenance fees. But the cost of support under SAP is actually greater; it can increase by up to 40% when you need to procure additional assistance for custom developments. That’s yet another reason why moving to Spinnaker Support makes sense and saves cents.
There is no “one solution fits all” scenario when it comes to businesses using SAP. In these uncertain and financially restrictive times, the best way forward is to put your trust in a support vendor that works closely with you and understand your specific requirements and SAP ecosystem.
Please visit our SAP third-party support offerings for more detailed information and contact us directly about your custom development needs.