3. Vendor software problems

Symptoms: When either testing or maintaining your SAP software you will find errors, enhancements, or bugs within your software that cannot be addressed with your current project team. These errors, bugs, and needed enhancements do not originate from having customized or implemented SAP incorrectly but are rather triggered due to a deficiency with the vendor software. Depending on the severity of the problem the impact to your business could be manifested in different manners such as:

a. Client/end user dissatisfaction,

b. inability to roll out a specific planned system functionality,

c. financial losses, and

d. Unstable system 

The vendor software problems can go unresolved for prolonged periods. Furthermore, lack of controls, participation from the SAP client and audit trails can cause the software vendor problems to erroneously become closed when in fact they were never resolved.  

Suggestions: Assign a point of contact from your SAP implementation to monitor and follow up with all OSS notes, suggestions and patches from the vendor. The assigned point of contact should document all attempted resolutions to fix the problem and whether they were successful. The point of contact should also produce and distribute a daily report of all software vendor problems to avoid having problems fall off the edge of the earth due to no responses from the client side after the vendor suggested a solution to the problem.  

The SAP client should also assign a priority level and discuss expected resolution dates to the software problem with the vendor. For instance being unable to run Payroll in production could be catastrophic to the business and should have a successful resolution within 4 hours whereas not being able to generate a form could be a problem with a workaround that can wait 5 days for resolution.