Support a wast of time for SAP PI/CPI

From time to time I get to talk with a person that has been working on SAP PI support for 1-2 years and then are given the opportunity to work as a Developers.

I think this is wasteful for a couple of reasons

• For the SAP Customer that they have to employ a full-time person(s) to perform the monitor. Because they do not trust the system or has too many errors to fix them.
• For the person to spend so much time something that does not bring a lot of development opportunity.

Is support a good way to start your career

I do think it makes a lot of sense to learn from others. It is one thing to attend a course and another thing to develop in real life. Seeing how other people have implemented integration gives a good understanding of the different components. It also gives a good understanding of how you need to create the integration of your self and what not to do.

If you are doing PI support and have to understand why a message mapping fails you can learn a lot about how the queues work and why they fail.

It will make you a better developer if you have been sitting on the cannon.

The story is that the first time a canon fires, the worker that created it needed to sit on it. To ensure they created it well, to improve quality.

I think this has a lot of merits when working with IT. You should be able to support your own integration. Then you will be a better developer because you don't want to create too much work for your self.

There are though limits on how long time you can work on support before you need to develop and learn from your own integration.

Why it is wasteful for SAP Customers

There will always be alerts in your system that will result in an error

• It can be partners that have an FTP server not responding.
• Messages that are missing required information
• Systems not responding or are missing other input
• And 153 other types of errors

In most cases, all of this will be reported as errors in some mailboxes. And then we get the support consultant that needs to go through each error and do the following.

• Is it something that I need to fix
• Is it important
• Do I know how to fix it or is it documented somewhere?
• How do I solve it if it is something we have not seen before.
• Solve the issue or report it to the development team to fix it.
• And then update the status fo the ticket

Many of the steps are above are something that can be automated. So sure the support person is cheap but if a lot of the steps can be improved it is a much better approach. And new and high priority incidents can be resolved faster.

Why time matters in resolution

You have an interface for a business process. If there is a problem with an interface then the business process is not working.

I have seen places where a message failed stopped the delivery of goods. And if had not resolved the issue before a cutoff time it would not be possible to deliver the goods the next day. That would have a large impact on the business.

So it is not just a technical problem but something that created ripples in the business. It is not just IT that needs to fix the problem, someone from the business also needs to help resolve the problem.

Automation

I have seen this "support process" at many clients. We don't care about it it is just something that should work.

I have the idea that over time the alerts in any system should decrease. We should be better at developing code to solve the issues and eliminate the things that cause most problems.

Automation can help classify the errors much easier, and income cases handle the resolution automatically.

Figaf Tools can automate the support

In the Figaf tools, we have to build a simple way for developers/supporters to categorize errors that way it becomes easier for people to manage.

You can forward the errors to the people in charge and give them information on how to resolve the error.

You will save money on the support and error resolution of new critical bugs can happen faster.

The solution costs only 3000 EUR/year pr system you connect it to.

You can read about how we can simplify support for SAP PI/PO, SAP CPI, and SAP API management in just one application.