Customer Center of Expertise (Customer COE)
A Customer COE is an expert team across business units that maximizes the return on a customer's SAP investment by communicating change, optimizing business processes, IT applications, resources, and continuously applying innovations and improvements.
Most customers have more than one SAP cloud or on premise solution, and several other non-SAP cloud or on premise solutions. While on premise solutions tend to have fewer enhancements that change functionality, your cloud solutions are constantly evolving on different release schedules.
It's not possible to apply the old mindsets that may have worked for managing on premise solutions to the cloud. This is why SAP strongly recommends all customers, regardless of their landscape complexity institute a Customer Center of Expertise, or Customer COE.
The Customer COE is a team that works across all other business units to facilitate communication and get decisions made, then manage the rollout of communication and training to employees who are impacted by system changes.
The goal is to not only keep up with the pace of change across your different cloud solutions that have their own upgrade cycles, but to also identify new features in a release that you could activate, such as automating repetitive processes, that could have a larger impact on a line of business or organizational area.
Select each of the options for further information on the Customer Center of Expertise (CCOE).
NoteCustomer Center of Expertise Certification
The Customer COE is a central point of contact for interacting with SAP, and can enhance their capabilities, knowledge, and effectiveness by completing the Customer COE Certification Program. There are two certification levels:
- Primary Customer COE: Validates an organization fulfills the minimum requirements needed to provide a solid foundational infrastructure for interaction with SAP
- Advanced Customer COE: Covers the full spectrum of required Customer COE functions to ensure the successful implementation of SAP's best practices. This certification provides the Customer COE
Certification Process
First, customers establish and fulfill the Customer COE functions to meet the certification guidelines (approximately 6 months). Next, the Customer COE submits their results to SAP for an audit (approximately 4 weeks). If the audit is successful, the Customer COE is certified. Certification is valid for 2 years, then re-certification follows the same process.
Customer COE Incident Quality Evaluation
One of the most important areas of the Customer COE responsibility within support operations is SAP Incident Management, because effective management of incidents enables the business to quickly return to work. It is essential that submitted customer incidents already have all necessary information ready in order to prevent further delays. With the Customer COE Incident Quality Evaluation, customers will get insights on the overall SAP Incident Processing of the organization. While incident management is one of multiple criteria to determine the maturity and effectiveness of a Customer COE, it is a very important component of the overall certification assessment.
Benefits of Certification
Certified Customer COEs have exclusive access to the following benefits:
- Access to benchmarks within their peer group.
- Faster incident processing with special SAP incident flagging for a Certified COE.
- Free access to SAP Learning Hub.
- Special Customer COE knowledge transfer sessions with SAP experts in various topics.
- Accelerators for value development provided by Certified COE customers (customers sharing success stories).
- Access to the SAP Customer COE Community Suite group.
- Customer Center of Expertise Role and Incident Quality Dashboard in SAP for Me.
Customer Center of Expertise Roles
A Customer COE consists of the following roles (roles do not map to job positions; several roles can be combined into a single position):
Select each of the options in the three boxes below for further information.
