Operate and innovate better with SAP Application Management Services

SAP has been reinventing how businesses run, and has enabled them to adapt quickly to the ever-changing business landscape. If you have already implemented SAP for your business, you know how well it redefined your business processes. While deploying SAP in your organization is the right step towards innovation and sustainability of your business, the journey doesn’t end there. It is merely a start in the right direction, and the actual work happens after introducing SAP into your company.

After investing heavily in SAP applications, many companies fail to meet their business goals. The SAP applications ease your business processes but are complex in nature. With so much of the business riding on SAP after implementation, the stakes are high, and businesses find it hard to cope with the rising challenges. Rising service costs, lack of IT expertise, and constantly enhancing SAP application lifecycles demand deep domain expertise and robust governance. If the internal IT resources are always focused on resolving issues in the system, the business goals veer off track. To improve productivity, reduce costs and free up key IT resources — companies require a dedicated support system.

Companies investing in SAP need clear value drivers to ensure SAP applications are running smoothly without any business disruptions. This is where the importance of a support system like Application Management Services (AMS) comes into the picture. An AMS aids you in taking full advantage of your SAP estate by running your SAP applications efficiently. SAP AMS support reduces risk, accelerates innovation, and addresses application lifecycle management — ensuring optimum ROI on your SAP investment through consistent support. That means, investing in AMS support is ideal to meet business expectations and enhance the quality of your SAP applications.

The global Application Management Services market size was valued at $17,120 million in 2020 and is predicted to reach $94,786 million by 2030, registering a CAGR of 19.1% from 2021 to 2030 - Allied Market Research [1]

What is SAP Application Management Services (AMS)?

SAP AMS is an outsourcing option where you delegate the ongoing support of your applications to an SAP partner. The AMS support providers have vast IT experience and are proficient in maintaining SAP applications. They monitor your SAP system round the clock and release patches, fix bugs, and do everything possible to help your business run smoothly with minimal disruptions. While your AMS partner takes care of the day-to-day tasks, your internal IT team can focus on more strategic initiatives.

Key benefits of choosing SAP AMS

• Proactive monitoring and diagnosis: Along with ensuring the right functioning of the applications, the AMS partner proactively monitors and diagnoses your SAP solution to prevent critical situations from arising. AMS looks at various aspects of your IT landscape including your business processes to identify early indications of potential issues and resolve them at the earliest. This actively mitigates your risk of facing critical issues.
• User operations and system efficiency: The users must be educated and trained professionally to meet expectations and improve business interactions. AMS experts closely work with the in-house IT team and prepare them for the new functional changes in the system. When the users have a deeper understanding of the new environment, it enhances the quality of operations.
• Evolving business requirements: The business environment is volatile in nature and requires constant modifications to stay ahead of the competition. The inputs and recommendations from the AMS partner to constantly improve SAP applications will help your business adapt quickly to changes. Your AMS partner, with their experience with similar businesses, can provide tailor-made recommendations on SAP solutions to help you achieve your business objectives and goals.
• Free up your internal IT resources: Having a dedicated team for SAP support will free up your internal IT resources for strategic initiatives and enables the business to do more. A well-designed application management process supports optimum development and testing. As a result, it reduces the time committed by the in-house team on tedious tasks and channels their focus on the core business agenda.
• Cost-effective solutions: Outsourcing application management services is a cost-effective way to manage your SAP applications. The global delivery models of your AMS partner offer an advantage of cost arbitrage due to lower overhead costs. The flexibility to ramp up or down resources and access to multiple technologies across all time zones increases productivity to a large extent.
• Automation for repetitive activities: Automation minimizes the amount of human interference in the workflows, analysis, and solutions. It reduces IT labor costs and improves the efficiency of the applications. Based on the requirement and landscape of the company, AMS will help decide and develop your automation roadmap and also deploy it.
• Continuous improvement: AMS support removes the complexity and provides configuration recommendations to get the most out of the existing architecture. AMS accelerates the adoption of innovations with a wide range of SAP tools and services to meet your business requirements for continuous growth and increased competitive advantage.
• Application malfunction and unforeseen events: Be it an application malfunction or a sudden hardware failure, AMS makes sure all the issues are sorted and provides future-ready solutions. SAP AMS provides all tools necessary to manage your applications and also ensure the timely release of updates without disturbing business operations.

Support offered by your AMS partner

AMS for SAP offers a complete range of industry-leading support, including managed services advisory, enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, systems integration, and digital and managed services. The Application Management Services specialists offer several technical and functional support services you need to effectively leverage the SAP system.

Technical Support:

• Add-on functionality developments and enhancements
• Application integration
• Development services using standard ABAP, HANA, UI5, FIORI, WebDynpro, FPM, Workflow, Adobe Forms, IDOC/ EDI, PI/PO, SCI, BI/BW
• Development services using non-SAP technologies such as Angular, Node, Postgres etc. to help extend your core ERP application
• Support for SAP upgrades and migration to S/4 HANA
• Data migration

Functional Support:

• Configuration of SAP modules and sub modules
• Business unit rollouts to different geographical locations
• Changes to business processes having cross-module impacts
• Month-end and year-end activities
• User training
• Functional support for SAP upgrades and migration to S/4 HANA

System Administrative Services

• Proactive monitoring
• Patch updating
• Problem resolution
• Routine administrative activities

What should you look for in an AMS partner?

The central focus of an AMS SAP partner is to reduce operational risks and help you drive sustainable practices in the organization. To drive down costs and ensure value for money, your SAP Partner needs to do more than purchase new licenses and fix bugs in the system. Some SAP Partners may fail to assess improvements and costs of the existing system, which affects the business operations in a big way. Demanding honest assessment and asking for more is the right way to achieve the full advantage of your support system. Ensuring your SAP solution is fully optimized and running industry best standards is critical for your business.

• Scalability and flexibility: Your company's ability to adapt to change determines how effectively it grows, and the right AMS partner prepares you for the future. With the guidance of your AMS partner, you should be able to adopt a flexible staffing approach that enables you to modify your resources and skill sets according to the business demand.
• Transparency in support cost: A value-based AMS model offers demand-driven consumption and flexible deployment. A flat monthly payment or the choice to carry over unused capacity throughout your AMS contract gives you more value for money. There is more transparency in the support cost, and no unforeseen expenses knock on your door.
• Value-added services:  To assist you in staying ahead of the technology curve, your AMS partner should provide recommendations and upgrades suited to your business requirements. An AMS should continuously monitor your system and make sure all the applications are functioning perfectly.
• Align with business goals:  AMS providers should know your business inside out and be in a position to recommend process improvements based on your business objectives. With AMS support in place, you never derail from your core business agenda. Application management can measure performance and keep the goals in check.
• Industry Expertise:  When introducing new technology to your ecosystem, you need expert hands to oversee the proceedings. While deciding the AMS support, you need to go for a competent workforce with strong SAP experience and sector expertise which adds value to your company.

Conclusion

The ever-advancing SAP landscape is complex in nature, and your in-house IT department might lack the necessary experience or knowledge to solve them. With AMS providers, you have access to better skills and expertise honed over the years. Moreover, the AMS partner works like an extension of your in-house team, available 24x7.

Applexus proven methodology for AMS “xCare” is designed to enhance application stability, ensure continuous improvements, and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). Applexus comes with extensive experience in SAP application management and has helped customers globally generate more value from their SAP ecosystem. To reduce IT complexity and optimize all business-related processes that increase ROI following an SAP implementation, our team has devised an all-inclusive solution that provides technical support, functional support, and administration services.

Our recent AMS engagement with a leading beverage retailer helped them realize significant benefits such as:

• Improved Incident SLA from 80% to 97%
• Achieved a 15% reduction in ticket volume through service improvement initiatives
• Reduced HANA memory usage by 40% through continuous improvement

To address evolving needs, fuel sustainable growth, and help you face unprecedented challenges, having an AMS partner who can extract the true value of SAP is a pressing priority. When your AMS partner is well-equipped to enable you to keep up with every twist and turn of operational performance and market demands with precision, agility, and added value processes, it delivers sustainable growth in your business.

Contact us to learn more about how you can get the best out of your SAP investment with Applexus.