Efficient Support System Beth McLamb Anurag Saini. MavenWire

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2 Efficient Support System Beth McLamb Anurag Saini MavenWire

3 3 This session will provide guidelines to increase the efficiency of an OTM support organization.

4 What is an efficient support system? Having the ability to meet, or exceed, agreed upon Service Level Agreements between system administrators and customers, while providing ongoing value to the organization. 4

5 Where do we start? Define which components of OTM are supported and release levels (OTM, GTM, FTI) Identify external systems implemented (pcmiler, milemaker, rateware, etc.) Document integration points and responsible groups for each Gather environment documentation server details, operating system information, patches 5

6 Define Components Required Infrastructure Support OTM Technical Support OTM Application Support OTM Application Enhancements 6

7 Infrastructure Support Hardware Network Storage Operating System Infrastructure Support OTM Technical Support OTM Application Support OTM Application Enhancements 7

8 OTM Technical Support Infrastructure Support OTM Technical Support OTM Patches/Upgrades Property settings Database OTM Application Support OTM Application Enhancements 8

9 OTM Application Support Infrastructure Support OTM Technical Support Software issues Software performance OTM Application Support OTM Application Enhancements 9

10 OTM Application Enhancements Infrastructure Support OTM Technical Support OTM Application Support OTM Application Enhancements Software improvements 10

11 There must be harmony Customer Expectations Agreement between OTM Support Groups and OTM End User / Customer Service Level Agreement (SLA) Operating Level Agreement (OLA) Internal agreement between OTM Support Groups 11

12 Example environment refresh Lead time for request Commitment to fulfill request Time required to execute request 12

13 Components of an SLA/OLA Quantitative performance standards Agreed upon severity levels and turnaround Continuous review 13

14 Establish responsibilities Create a RACI Matrix to identify roles and assignment of cross-functional responsibilities RACI represents: R Responsible who is assigned to do the work A Accountable who owns the success of the work C Consulted who can give valuable input I Informed who has to be aware of the work 14

15 15 Sample RACI

16 Support Structure Each organization is different and responsibilities may be assigned differently between groups. Some tasks may be managed by external groups or everything may be internal. End users should have a single point of contact and the assignment of tasks should be decided by the support organization. 16

17 Engaging Support single point of contact Issue or Work Request Environment Refresh Missing Transaction Screen Enhancement 17

18 Defining issues Implement a solid issue reporting/tracking tool Educate those entering the issue to supply adequate detail Identify request type incident, work, enhancement Determine severity and response time Define hours of support and shift handover 18

19 Sample incident response matrix Priority Severity 1 Severity 2 Severity 3 Severity 4 Business Impact Description Response Time Resolution Time System System is inaccessible. 30 minutes 4 hours Down High Impact A condition or issue that has an 1 Hour 8 hours adverse impact on operations until unresolved. Degraded Question concerning product 2 Hours 24 hours Operation performance, or an intermittent low Minimal Impact impact issue. A question concerning general utilization/implementation 24 Hours As agreed upon

20 What makes up a Support Organization? People your most valuable resource! 20

21 Identify the skillset Based on your support definition gather the right people Bring support team in early during your implementation to allow for overlap and knowledge transfer Invest in high quality training Don t allow application support and enhancement teams to work in silos 21

22 Crossover between support and enhancement groups OTM Support OTM Enhancements 22

23 Build your toolset Create meaningful documentation with detailed issue resolution Follow a well documented migration strategy to keep environments in sync Automate mundane tasks to keep the team challenged Reward your team for innovative ideas and adding value to the organization 23

24 OTM is powerful avoid common mistakes Whether a new implementation or one that has been live for years, don t allow these to rob precious time from your support team 24

25 25 Agents power with caution Recommendation: One Event One Agent. Many agents can be triggered by a single lifetime event. These agents work in parallel. Badly configured agents can be a performance hit in the long run. Review frequently as volumes environment changes. Agents run as serial workflow on the application server. One action does not start executing until its predecessor has completed If an error occurs within an agent, database changes are NOT discarded.

26 Recurrent deviations Create a process to handle recurrent deviations. Don t continue to fix the problem. Find a proper way of reporting recurrent issues and fix the root cause Implement a short term solution to keep the business running, but a also have a defined RCA process and plan to resolve the issue permanently 26

27 Modifying public data Do not modify public / default data or objects as they could get overwritten with a patch or upgrade Place objects in a custom folder to remove the dependency on upgrades 27

28 Purging Insufficient (or non-existent) purging of transmissions Insufficient (or non-existent) shipments/orders/invoices 28

29 OTM Logging Unnecessary logging impacts performance perspective and may hinder analysis of the logs when issues do arise Adhoc logs enabled could cause perf issues as all of the logging enabled is logging for the entire domain and not just that user. Change these to user logs. 29

30 Inactivate Rates, users Inactivating expired rate records Expire user accounts that are no longer active 30

31 Modifications to DB Schema The OTM DB Schema is complicated and consists of over 1600 tables. This requires an experienced skillset to manage. Many OTM customers end up adding or deleting indexes to optimize performance. Remember to document them, as they may get re-created when OTM patches are applied. ( Refer to Doc ID ) "It should be noted that these indexes have to be maintained going forward or a request can be submitted to have the indexes added in the OTM Core product in a future release. Indexes will be added only if it is beneficial for the application performance as a whole and not for a specific implementation Never allow modifications of packages or custom packages to go into GLOGOWNER, REPORTOWNER, or any other OTM built-in schemas, create a custom schema for this 31

32 Working with Oracle Support Gather all details for the issue in simple language Gather steps to recreate the issue and what was happening when it occurred Run qdlogs script and attach output to the ticket Run the OTM analyzer script My Oracle Support note For performance issues check My Oracle Support note

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34 34 Thank You - MavenWire