With the launch of success plans on March 3, this year, we are entering a new exciting era in how we support customers. Each success plan provides a different level of engagement, ranging from self-guided resources to a highly personalized partnership.

This blog aims to explain the three different support layers in my own words, simple and easy to understand.

Let's start with the most important questions most customers will have: how do I find out which success plan my company has signed up for?

Go to: me.sap.com –> Reporting –> tab “Support Entitlements”:

Now if you found out that your company has signed up for a Max Success Plan, do not skip the first two sections of this blog (Foundational and Advanced Success Plan)! The reason is that the Max Success Plan is inclusive of the Foundational and Advanced Success Plan, so you can avail of all of three success plans!

And important to note: For the Max Success Plan services, you will have a contingent and days will be deducted from it for every service. So by using services from the advanced and foundational layer, which you can consume unlimited, you can save days from your contingent for the real tricky stuff.

Now let's get into the details of the three success plan layers:

SAP Services and Support Portfolio Evolution
The new SAP Services and Support portfolio now includes three layers, called success plans: Max Success Plan, Advanced Success Plan and Foundational Success Plan.

Now with each SAP cloud solution that a customer purchases, they need to also choose which success plan they want attached to it.

Part of every cloud subscription by default is the Foundational Success Plan. You can choose on top either the Advanced Success Plan or Max Success Plan.

At SAP we like to refer to it as the Russian doll principle as the three success plans built upon each other and include the content of the layers underneath, like you see in this picture:

The Foundational Success Plan

The Foundational Success Plan comes with every cloud subscription (including SAP Cloud ERP Private aka RISE) by default and at no extra costs. 

This plan is centered around, and expands upon, our well-known SAP Enterprise Support offering.

It contains self-guided resources via the SAP Enterprise Support Academy and the services herein are delivered remotely, 1:many and with a fixed agenda and scope. 

Available to you are a number of remote workshops where you learn about a specific topic in the morning and have time to implement the learned steps in your own system during the afternoon (called Expert Guided Implementations or EGI).

As part of this success plan you can also request remote system checks (called continuous quality checks or CQC) like the CQC deployment readiness or CQC financial data quality.

Other items are the onboarding sessions, who help customers move from signing the contract to seeing their first benefits and clean core assessments.

To find what is available to you under this success plan, see the following page: https://www.sap.com/services-support/foundational-success-plan.html. 

The Advanced Success Plan
If you need a more in-depth, personal engagement for one or more of your cloud solutions, then you can purchase the Advanced Success Plan on top.

Remember the Advanced Success Plan is inclusive of the Foundational Success Plan:

Are you familiar with the elements of the Advanced Success Plan show in the table above?
You likely are, as the Advanced Success Plan replaces SAP Preferred Success.

Also note that the services in the Advanced Success Plan are solution-specific and can only be used towards the cloud solution which you have purchased this success plan with.

The scope of the services is also fixed, but the main difference to the Foundational Success Plan is that all services are delivered 1:1 and there can be a more personal follow-up where specific questions can be addressed. Service sessions usually have a duration of 1-2 hours and customers can use as many as they want.

On top of this, the Advanced Success Plan also offers sessions where a standard feature is switched on in the customer's development system or a configuration of a standard feature is checked.

Since there are several hundred services in this success plan, you have two people making sure you use the right service at the right time for you: A success expert and a customer success manager (or enterprise adoption expert for SAP Cloud ERP Private – you do not need to remember those titles, just remember you will not be left alone).

And finally, SAP provides improved support SLAs with faster initial response and corrective action targets for support cases.

As an example, if you have signed up for an Advanced Success Plan, you can first use a service to get an overall functionality explained to you and when you then say, “Okay, I would like to use this part and that part,” then you can book an activation sessions for the specific functionalities and have them switched on by an expert from SAP in order to use them.

If you are interested in what is included in an Advanced Success Plan, you can look here: https://www.sap.com/services-support/advanced-success-plan.html. 

Now let's move on to the top layer of the success plans: 

The Max Success Plan
The Max Success Plan builds upon the Foundational and Advanced Success Plans, which means it gives you unlimited access to the services from the other two layers explained above. 

Now why is Max Max?
Max Success Plan entails our premium engagement services. The key difference to the services from our Advanced Success Plan is that they are delivered 1:1 remote or on-site and that those services are being scoped before they are being delivered. So the scope of premium services is flexible and adjusted to the customers' needs and the duration can be easily a week or even longer. They are mainly used for situations that are outside of “standard” and are very complex.

For example for customers with complex business processes that touch multiple systems. We support customers and lead entire proof of concepts and prototyping projects (which are fundamental to implement any AI use case).

Similar to the Advanced Success Plan, you will get a named contact (success plan manager, formerly known as TQM or technical quality manager) who orchestrates the premium engagement services, so will tell you which services you should use and when. He will be holistically responsible for your whole Max Success Plan engagement and stays with you for as long as the contract runs. 

Another important difference to the two other success plan layers is that customers receive days as part of their Max Success Plan and each usage of a premium service consumes this pool of days. Premium services are solution-agnostic and unlike the Advanced layer, premium services can also be used for other cloud solutions, not only the one that the Max Success Plan has been purchased for.

So, as an existing SAP MaxAttention customer you may ask: “With my SAP MaxAttention contract, I can use that contract for all the solutions I have in my landscape. But now, if the Max Success Plan contract is tied to the software subscription, will this still be the case?”

And the answer is yes, it will still be the case because we have this T-shaped set up:

In this example, the customer has different SAP solutions. They only have a Foundational Success Plan contract for SAP IBP and an Advanced Success Plan contract for SAP BTP. For the SAP Cloud ERP Private solution, they decided to subscribe to a Max Success Plan contract, which means they have access to all the Max Success Plan premium services for all their other cloud solutions, too. However, they have only access to the services from the Advanced layer for their products SAP Cloud ERP Private, SAP BTP and SAP SuccessFactors.

Learn more about the Max Success Plan services here: https://www.sap.com/services-support/max-success-plan.html. 

Here is the table showing the elements of the success plans and which success plan a customer must have to receive each element:

Now if a customer has Max Success Plan, what is the best way to consume the services from all three layers?
One example would be that let's say you are planning to convert your current SAP ECC system to SAP S/4HANA private cloud edition with a brownfield project.
So you could first use the EGI workshops “Plan your conversion” and “SAP S/4HANA Readiness Check” from the foundational layer. In these workshops you would learn 1:many the best practices for a system conversion as well as the high level tasks that must be executed as part of the project. In the second session you would learn why you need the SAP Readiness Check and would learn how to run it and even run it as part of the session.
Next you could use the “S/4HANA Readiness Check” session from the advanced layer, where an expert would meet you remotely 1:1 to look at your readiness check results, explain these to you and recommend next steps.
Finally, you could use the migration planning workshop premium service for a comprehensive planning of the conversion project, receiving a tailored high-level milestone plan, including custom code management and mandatory application and landscape changes. 

Another example could be that you want to establish a customer center of expertise (COE) in your company. We offer a two-hour session from Advanced, that explains to you what a customer COE is. After that, if you have the Max success plan, you can go for a premium service that helps you to really build a dedicated strategy on how to install and evolve a Customer COE.

What is changing for existing MaxAttention customers?
You may ask yourself, when the Max Success Plans went live in early March, what happened to my existing SAP MaxAttention contract? The answer is nothing, which means that existing SAP MaxAttention contracts continue as normal.

When you as a MaxAttention customer need to renew, the only choice then is to switch to a success plan contract for your cloud solutions and systems in transition. For on-premise customers with no path to the cloud, you will be able to purchase Premium Engagements for On-Premises Solutions.

New Integrated Business Scenarios
There are roughly 100 service components in the Max Success Plan and several hundred more services in the Advanced Success Plan. For success plan managers (SPM) and customers to manage these in a meaningful way, we created new integrated success plan business scenarios.

You might already be familiar with premium engagement (PE) business scenarios, which are predefined service plans that address a specific customer situation. We have now taken the PE business scenarios and enriched them with services from the Advanced Success Plan and services from the Foundational Success Plan.

A new blog dedicated to the new integrated business scenarios will be published soon and linked here.

Now when a customer says they want to move to SAP ERP Cloud Private with a greenfield approach, their SPM can pull out the Max Success Plan business scenario and find Foundational services, Advanced services and Max services in a service plan template that they can adjust based on the customer needs:

These service plans can also be supplemented with professional services or with services from AMS partners, for example from cloud application services.

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave any questions below!

Max Success Plan portfolio team