Fundamentals of
SAP Application
Management Services

The last few decades have witnessed the phenomenal rise of one of the biggest enterprise resource planning software, System Applications Products, or SAP, as widely known by its acronym. From beginning its journey as a financial management software to emerging as a catalyst for global business transformation, SAP's incredible rise has given birth to a holistic business application suite encompassing more than 50 SAP modules. However, the complexity of these modules requires full-length functional support and in-depth business knowledge to run daily operations in an effective manner. At the same time, businesses and IT teams need cost-effective solutions to bring more value to their existing systems. As enterprises and business organizations continue to expand the use of SAP solution, the decision-makers are faced with a challenging task: to hire superior technical expertise to provide functional support in-house or to choose a reliable AMS partner to take the burden off their shoulder. But what comes under AMS services, and who is an AMS partner?

What is SAP Application Management Services (AMS)?

SAP Application Management Services (AMS) is a service offering from SAP that provides customers with ongoing support and maintenance for their SAP applications. The aim of SAP AMS is to help customers maximize the value of their SAP application portfolio by ensuring that their SAP solutions are running smoothly, efficiently, and securely. SAP AMS typically includes a range of services such as: Technical support: SAP AMS provides customers with access to SAP's technical support team, who are experts in SAP application support and can help with issues such as troubleshooting and problem resolution. Maintenance and upgrades: The application management service also helps customers keep their SAP solutions up-to-date with the latest software releases and security patches. Besides SAP upgrades, corrective maintenance is also an integral part of SAP AMS. Monitoring and optimization: Ideally, application management services for SAP include monitoring and optimization services that help customers identify business areas where they can improve the performance of their SAP solutions. Incident management: SAP AMS provides customers with an incident management process that ensures incidents are handled quickly and efficiently, reducing the impact on the business. User support: SAP AMS provides user support services to help customers with their day-to-day use of SAP solutions. Project-based services: SAP AMS can also provide project-based services such as system migrations, upgrades, and implementations, depending on the specific business needs. In short, the key objective of SAP AMS is to help customers ensure that their SAP solutions are running smoothly, efficiently, and securely, freeing up time and resources for them to focus on other areas of their business. With SAP AMS, customers can have confidence that their SAP solutions are being supported by SAP experts and are receiving the highest level of care and attention.

Why do you need application management?

1. To ensure the system stability and reliability of their application portfolio: Application management helps to ensure that applications are functioning correctly, are available when needed, and are performing optimally. This helps to reduce downtime and minimize the impact of application failures on the business.
2. To keep applications up-to-date: Applications change and evolve over time and their effective management helps enterprises to keep their applications up-to-date with the latest software releases and security patches. This helps to ensure that applications are secure, efficient, and effective.
3. To improve application performance: It also helps enterprises to identify areas where they can improve the performance of their applications. This can include optimizing the configuration, tuning the performance, and resolving performance bottlenecks.
4. To manage the cost of ownership: Furthermore, application management can help enterprises to manage the cost of ownership of their applications through a shared support model. This includes identifying business areas where cost savings can be made, optimizing the use of resources, and reducing the need for expensive hardware upgrades.
5. To support business growth and change: Application management helps enterprises to support business growth and change by ensuring that their applications are flexible, scalable, and capable of supporting new business processes and requirements.
6. To ensure compliance: Application management helps enterprises to ensure that their applications comply with industry regulations and standards. This includes ensuring that applications are secure, that data is protected, and that applications are auditable.

Irrespective of the nature and size of the business, an organization, especially an SAP user, does require time-to-time support to ensure seamless application maintenance, change management, process redesign, and unhindered delivery of innovative solutions in order to stay aligned with its business needs and strategic goals. That becomes possible only when you have a single point of contact for all your SAP applications-related issues unless you aim to incur massive amounts of personnel costs who will be positioned across time zones to provide 24x7x365 support. And we all know the high demand for SAP skill sets in the market.

That's where SAP support services in terms of application management come into the picture. The AMS services provided by the extended teams not only save time and are cost-effective but also support functionality developments and drive real business value. Let's take a quick look at all the benefits of partnering with an AMS provider.

Benefits of an SAP application management services provider

Partnering with an SAP Application Managed Services (AMS) provider can bring several benefits to an enterprise, including:

1. Improved efficiency and performance: An AMS partner has expertise in managing and optimizing SAP solutions, which can help to improve the efficiency and performance of an enterprise's SAP landscape. This can result in faster processing times, improved system uptime, and enhanced user productivity.
2. Cost savings: By partnering with an SAP AMS provider, an enterprise can reduce its internal IT costs, such as hardware and application maintenance, upgrades, user training, and other on-demand SAP support. The provider can also help to reduce the costs of ongoing support and management of the SAP solutions.
3. Access to expertise: An SAP service provider has a team of experts who have experience managing SAP solutions for a variety of industries and business requirements. This superior technical expertise can be leveraged to help the enterprise to optimize its SAP landscape, derive maximum value from its SAP investment, and achieve specific business goals.
4. Improved security: An experienced partner can help to ensure that the enterprise's SAP landscape is secure and compliant with industry standards and regulations. This includes implementing best practices for security, such as data encryption and access control, and providing regular security updates and patches.
5. Better alignment with business goals: A good AMS provider can also help the enterprise to align their SAP applications with their business goals and objectives. This includes providing tailored AMS solutions or guidance on how to optimize their SAP modules to support the enterprise's growth and success.
6. Reduced risk: By partnering with SAP AMS providers, the enterprise can reduce the risk of unexpected downtime or application failures. The service provider can help to ensure that the enterprise's SAP landscape is running smoothly and efficiently, which can reduce the risk of business disruption.

Cloud4C’s SAP AMS is designed to help your organization use smart, efficient ways to optimize and generate more value from application portfolios. The services can range from on-demand SAP support through full application outsourcing and managed infrastructure (on-premise and/or cloud).

As part of SAP Application Management Services (SAP AMS), our in-house and global gamut of the delivery network enables our clients to have unhindered access to the correct resources and skill sets, along with proven industry experience, to resolve our customer's strategic application management objectives.

You can find more information on Cloud4C SAP AMS here.