What is SAP MaxAttention ? : An experience with SAP MaxAttention

MaxAttention is one of SAP's premium services which is gaining a lot of popularity in recent days.

More about MaxAttention
This is a generic service given by SAP, where customer's solution is evaluated holistically. That is a generic review is conducted based on SAP's previously collected benchmark statistics.
For example, SAP resource will look into your SAP system, measure database size, use Early watch reports, analyze your sizing strategy and suggest you if you would need to re size your hardware or system landscape.
They can also look at your Payroll Schema and suggest performance improvements. They can also look at your Interface architecture and suggest if they need to be redesigned to eliminate/combine any interfaces.

My Experience
We are one of the biggest SAP HR implementations and were 18 months through going live with SAP. During the peak business timings (December, March) we had performance problems in the system. Our incident inflow was high and remained almost a constant.

Project Management Office new that sizing is an issue but wanted to know it form horse's mouth before investing in hardware. This is how SAP got into the picture.

Our contract was negotiated to be of 150 man days and obviously with a huge price tag.

The work started with three SAP consultants landing at our support center and working with the support team collecting information from each of the technical teams. (Portal, Payroll, Basis, workflow, Interface, Config).

Meanwhile we had prepared a list of technical issues we were facing and tried to get hem solved with these consultants. As I said, these consultants are with generic skills and we found that we cannot expect immediate expert solutions. But they managed to contact their developers and were able to answer some of our issues satisfactorily.

At the end of four days the team had identified issues and classified them into very High, High Medium and Low severity. We did not have any Very high issues but had many high issues. High issues were discussed and solutions were provided. Medium issues were presented to us later in a document.

The recommendations were maintained in solution manager and were followed up till resolution. As I expected most of the recommendation were from Basis area. As I know it is easy to have bench markings here based on database size, sizing and database growth. But when it comes to business processes and custom solutions designed, it will not be possible to recommend in such a small time frame and hence very few recommendation were given in application area.

They also suggested us to go with SAP's other support services focused on DBMS, Interface etc. As one of my colleague put it, SAP MaxAttention is like visiting a general Physician, and then based on his recommendations we need to go to specialist services.

So in summary do not expect MaxAttention to do a magic and solve all your issues. But it it was an interesting exercise and guided us on further areas to look into in our SAP system.