Solution Database
Purpose
The Solution Database (SDB) offers organizations a knowledge base component with a highly flexible structure to acquire and preserve enterprise knowledge. The SDB supports an environment for knowledge engineers to manage knowledge bases, and a basic interface for agents, field engineers, or other users to search the knowledge bases. The SDB contains problems (called symptoms) and solutions, and the associated data used to define them.
Implementation Considerations
The SDB requires communication with a general-purpose search engine based on a pre-compiled "corpus". The corpus is created by lexicons pre-compiled for text-indexing. Since the corpus resides in memory, the search speed is significantly improved compared to conventional database searches. The corpus is not automatically updated. Therefore, you must compile the corpus after you update the SDB in order for the changes to be available to search. You can find more information about how to do this in
Solution Database Search.You can customize the attributes (code groups and codes) in a catalog. You must also customize the authorization to display different business objects.
Integration
You can use the SDB in any area or your organization where you want to preserve expertise. For example, in the Customer Interaction Center (CIC) agents access the SDB to answer customer questions. In R/3 Service Management, a notification submits queries to the SDB so that the correct solutions with task lists are delivered to the field engineers to resolve the problem. The SDB creates a knowledge framework to support various business processes throughout an organization.
Features
You can define symptoms and solutions using various formats, such as free-text descriptions, code groups and codes from customized catalogs, business objects, file attachments, and internet or intranet addresses. For more information, see
You can choose whether to use a hierarchy structure to define symptoms with problem locations, problem damages, and problem causes. You can also structure multiple relationships between symptoms and solutions and navigate easily between them. For more information, see
SDB compares the "fuzzy" search similarities from one symptom or solution to another, and matches the attributes for codes, business objects, internet or intranet addresses, for an exact search. Because the search is based on the pre-compiled text-indexing, the search speed is greatly improved. For more information, see
Knowledge engineers can maintain entries for different languages in the same transaction. For more information, see
You can display different business objects linked to a symptom.
Constraints
This application offers basic administration and search functions for a knowledge base. It does not include archiving, reports, authority checks, complete business object methods, direct web-access, optimization, or adaptive learning.
See also:
Symptom Solution User Settings