Standard Scenario

The customer has their own competence center, which provides support for SAP applications. The customer can set up various support levels, for example, first-level, second-level, and third-level support. The support team then uses SAP Solution Manager for message processing.

If the experts at the customer's cannot resolve an issue with an SAP application, they forward the message to SAP Active Global Support for processing.

IT Service Provider Scenario

The customer has a maintenance contract with an SAP partner, who usually also supplied the SAP solution. The IT service provider is typically responsible for first-level and maybe also second-level customer support.

The customer support reports an incident in their SAP Solution Manager system or reports an incident in the SAP Service Marketplace.

If the IT service provider staff cannot resolve the incident, they can forward it to SAP.

In this scenario, you can configure automatic message forwarding. For example, messages with very high priority that are received outside of the IT service provider's service hours are forwarded automatically to SAP Support, or responses to messages that the IT service provider sent to SAP are automatically sent back to the customer. For more information, see SAP Notes 1318787 and 1247502.

Software Partner Scenario

For various special areas, SAP software partners offer their own products as solution enhancements, which are sold by SAP. Software partners act as third-level support, directly behind SAP Support in the support chain. Alternatively, depending on the product, they can provide all support levels.

The customer support reports their incidents in the SAP Service Marketplace or in IT Service Management in SAP Solution Manager. SAP Support decides how to process the incident depending on its application component. If the incident message is sent because of a problem with a software partner application, the message is either forwarded to the software partner after initial processing or sent to the partner directly.

Software partners can create partner notes in the SAP Service Marketplace.

Customers and partners can also exchange messages directly between their help desks, for example, using IT Service Management in SAP Solution Manager or external help desks.