In SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) teams carry out all technical operations on the lower layers of your environments (operating system and databases), as well as most SAP BC operations. However, a certain number of technical actions remain the responsibility of the customer and/or his outsourcing partner (around 20% for the ERP S/4HANA part), as shown in the last 2 lines of the table below.
Outsourcing actions in Rise
Overview of RISE subscription service categories
| Standard services | All tasks/services included as part of standard services, covered by the Service Fee and performed by SAP , as acquired by the customer under the contract. |
|---|---|
| Optional services | Optional services : tasks/services not covered by the Standard Services and which are not and cannot be covered by Cloud Application Services (“CAS”). These tasks/services: may be chosen by the customer; are subject to charges for additional services; must be contracted specifically and detailed in the customer’s contract (original contract or via a modification request); can be performed solely by SAP |
| Additional service | Additional services: include one-off tasks/services that are not covered by the Standard Services, the Optional Services or the Application Cloud Services. These tasks/services: can be chosen by the customer ; are subject to additional service fees; can be performed solely by SAP |
| SAP Cloud application services ” CAS ” subject to additional service fee. They must be performed by the customer where applicable and if the SAP CAS service is not used | Cloud application services (“CAS”). Can be performed by the customer: include tasks/services that can be performed by the customer, but the customer can choose to have SAP perform them. CAS are subject to fees for additional services as agreed in the customer’s contract. |
| Excluded tasks | Excluded tasks are tasks/services that can only be performed by the customer and are excluded from Standard Services, Services. |
The roles and responsibilities matrix is available in full in French
As of March 2021, SAP identifies 516 services remaining the responsibility of the customer or their partner.
Not all of these services contain everyday tasks, but an SAP Rise customer might have to perform them.
Note that these 516 services concern all Rise Private Cloud-compatible SAP solutions, such as :
- Third-party software
- SAP Data Services (DS)
- SAP BusinessObjects, Business Intelligence (BI)
- SAP PI
- Enterprise Portal
- Sybase IQ
- OpenText Solutions
- SAP Information Stewars
- …
SAP outsourcing activities in Rise
As an SAP RISE customer, you can choose to manage these tasks, which are not performed by SAP, or to entrust them to your outsourcing partner:
- Application supervision (processing restart, dump analysis, analysis of EarlyWatch Alert reports, etc.),
- Transport, print and certificate management,
- Job scheduling,
- SAP account and authorization administration
- Pre/post Refresh operations (table export/import)
- Etc…
In addition to these recurring activities, you will also be responsible for a considerable amount of management time. In fact, you’ll need to interact with SAP’s ECS teams via “Service Requests” to coordinate the technical operations they’ll need to carry out throughout the lifecycle of your environments, such as patching databases, updating SAP kernels, Cloud Connector certificates, etc. These tasks will be scheduled during maintenance slots that you’ll have defined in advance.
In short, you need to ask yourself whether you have the capacity to take on all these activities… or not!
In a small but important detail, the SAP Rise offer is changing the role of SAP BC consultant. If you have SAP BC administrators on your staff, you should be aware that they will have to adapt to this new role, which is more focused on coordinating the operations performed by SAP than on carrying out the tasks themselves. Indeed, even if SAP is in charge of BC gestures, it is imperative to master the prerequisites as well as the impacts of each of the planned operations. A good knowledge of the BC module and a command of the English language are therefore essential to secure day-to-day operations.
When should you choose your outsourcing contract?
As far as possible, plan to be supported as early as possible. Ideally, this should be done before or during the project. This will enable your partner to set up, for example, the supervision of target environments via Cloud ALM during the early stages of the project.
The RISE offering is still in its infancy, and at present we find that future RISE customers often choose the project integrator for facilities management, as common sense would dictate.
This is not a general rule, and as RISE matures, it’s highly likely that certain integrators will stand out for their quality of service (and that’s our intention!). If the project is encountering difficulties, or the relationship with the integrator is no longer up to scratch, it may be time to consider another partner;
Cloud ALM: the monitoring solution for an SAP Rise landscape
Cloud Application Livecycle Management (ALM) is the next evolution of SAP Solution Manager, hosted in the SAP Cloud and available to customers with SAP Rise or S/4HANA On Premise licenses. To activate this solution, log on to the following address with your S-user or Universal ID SAP
Applium relies on the following 3 standard functionalities to support customers on technical and application supervision :
These 3 scenarios cover the following aspects:
- SAP system health status:
- Availability of SAP HANA services,
- CPU/RAM/File Systems consumption,
- Response time, number of logged-in users, certificate validity, number of dumps, work process utilization.
- Job supervision,
- Interface and exception supervision with error logs;
Cloud ALM: Applium’s recommendation
When migrating to SAP Rise, it’s vital to anticipate the post-project phase by monitoring your new SAP landscape with Cloud ALM. The choice of a partner is also crucial to ensure operational continuity.
” This is the case for Maison Johanès Boubée, who entrusted us with all supervision and administration tasks during the migration project, and who renewed their trust in us by signing an Outsourcing contract” testifies Yoan Gross, SAP Rise Outsourcing Offer Manager.
Applium positions itself between you and SAP to cover BC administration tasks not performed by the publisher, as well as the coordination of operations within the framework of a fixed-price (or time and materials) contract.
