A Strong Basis Support Team is Essential for Project Success
Basis, the engine powering SAP’s R/3 and ECC solutions, provides system administrators the tools to keep the SAP environment alive and healthy. And like a preeminent automotive service center, our Basis mechanics are adept at finely tuning the engine to maximize your benefit output. Our skills include transport management, system monitoring, backup and recovery, hot/support pack upgrades, kernel upgrades, system refreshes/copies, user/role administration, and disaster recovery services. With the introduction of NetWeaver as the glue to hold multiple SAP technology stacks together, our consultants extend their capabilities to support the interoperability of these systems.
What Makes a Strong Basis Consultant?
Every SAP system needs infrastructure administration. And whether it’s R/3 or ECC, SAP calls that “Basis”. With the proliferation of offshore Basis services and the introduction of NetWeaver, it’s easy to get confused as to what a Basis Consultant really does.
At DataXstream we like to keep it simple. Our Basis Consultants do everything you need to keep the SAP engine running smoothly. This includes:
- “Tier 1” support services: The most straightforward and commoditized services, this includes monitoring the system and insuring that all programs are running. If something gets stuck in a processing queue, it’s up to the consultant to clear the blockage. A “Tier 1″ Basis consultant (often associated with offshore resources) can perform backups, assign roles or passwords for new employees, and assist in patching a problem.
- “Tier 2” support services: When a problem occurs, its one thing to fix the symptom (i.e. unblock the queue), however, it requires additional expertise to reconcile why it went wrong and fix the real cause. In other words, “Tier 1” administrators turn to “Tier 2” consultants to perform root cause analysis. Tier 2 experts understand what each part of the system does and how these parts interconnect. They can both trace a problem in one part to the cause in another, and they tune each part to make your system run smoother.
- “Tier 3” support services: Whether fixing a problem or improving the system, when it’s time to dig into the underlying ABAP code that drives SAP, this requires Tier 3 services. While not necessarily programmers themselves, these experts have dealt with enough code to know what should happen and then identify and fix what is happening. As a result of their prowess, these consultants affect technical upgrades, assist in new installations, and are the ultimate problem solvers in the case of disaster recovery.
- NetWeaver services: With the introduction of NetWeaver as the platform that standardizes interoperability between SAP solution stacks, the Basis administrator becomes responsible for administering more functionality than just ECC. Including CRM, PLM, APO, SRM, BW, and Solution Manager, each solution stack includes a set of unique parameters. NetWeaver consultants understand these differences and extend their support capacity to these other applications.
