{"id":10578,"date":"2018-05-31T16:27:23","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T23:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10578"},"modified":"2023-06-15T14:54:43","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T21:54:43","slug":"applying-the-power-of-azure-machine-learning-to-improve-sap-incident-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/applying-the-power-of-azure-machine-learning-to-improve-sap-incident-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Applying the power of Azure Machine Learning to improve SAP incident management"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

One important aspect of digital transformation is embracing modern technologies and processes that can improve the customer experience. Microsoft found a perfect opportunity to do this\u2014we used Azure Machine Learning and AI to automate the triage component of our SAP incident management process. Our solution reduced the mean time to resolve SAP user issues, increased incident routing accuracy to 99 percent, and freed staff to focus on more strategic aspects of their roles.<\/p>\n

As enterprises continue to move into the digital world, an ever-increasing portion of their operations can benefit from leveraging the cloud, thus helping to improve scalability, enable a mobile workforce, and reduce data storage costs. But what about the human factor? As a technical decision maker, have you considered how going digital can also drive better customer service?<\/p>\n

At Microsoft, we\u2019re continuing our digital transformation journey, where our IT and product teams regularly collaborate to identify and solve challenges that exist within the enterprise. One example is the recent joint initiative of Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) and the Azure product team: we incorporated AI and machine learning (ML) technologies into our SAP incident management process to improve support ticket routing accuracy and significantly reduce incident resolution time.<\/p>\n

Drive to improve SAP incident management<\/h2>\n

Our Operations organization at Microsoft continuously searches for ways to make processes more efficient and to improve the user experience by providing self-service solutions or implementing self-correcting routines that prevent emerging issues before they occur. We\u2019ve learned that the more complex the process, the bigger the challenge\u2014and, when we build a successful solution, the greater the reward.<\/p>\n

SAP incident management is one such example of a process we identified for improvement. Supporting our SAP users requires a wide variety of domain-specific knowledge. Our SAP Support personnel are divided among several teams, each specializing in a particular functional or technical area. The sheer scale of our company\u2014Microsoft has more than 125,000 employees, plus customers, vendors, and partners who all touch an SAP system at some point in the course of doing business\u2014means that our SAP Support teams handle thousands of incidents each month.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, a user\u2019s SAP incident would be first triaged by a support staff member to determine to which of five different SAP support groups the incident should be routed: SAP Technical, SAP Human Capital Management, SAP Supply Chain Management, SAP Business Intelligence, or SAP Finance & Master Data Governance. The incident would then be placed in that support team\u2019s queue to be resolved. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve SAP processes, when we reviewed incident management processes and operations with the SAP Support staff, we discovered an inefficiency in this incident-routing process. As illustrated in Figure 1, for email requests sent to SAP Support, our analysis revealed an average 30-minute delay between the time a new incident first landed in the assignment group queue and when a staff member assigned it to the appropriate SAP Support team\u2019s queue.<\/p>\n

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Figure 1. In our previous system, an incoming request for SAP Support would sit in a holding queue for an average of 30 minutes before a person reviewed its details and routed the incident to the appropriate SAP Support group.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

This delay impacted our mean time to resolve (MTTR) values and was affecting our internal customers\u2019 user experience. One potential approach to address this issue could have been to provide additional personnel training that emphasized the importance of becoming more efficient at triage. However, we saw this issue as an excellent opportunity to automate the triage component by using AI and Azure Machine Learning.<\/p>\n

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The opportunity: automate via Azure Machine Learning<\/h2>\n

Machine learning is particularly good at prediction, classification, and anomaly detection, and incident routing is all about classification. Therefore, incorporating Azure Machine Learning into our SAP incident routing was a natural fit\u2014especially when considering these criteria:<\/p>\n