The Most Expensive “Routine” Ticket I've Ever Seen

Years ago I was consulting for a global hi-tech manufacturer. Their entire order cycle ran on IDocs. Purchase orders, confirmations, invoices. Most days, nobody thought about them.

Then one PO confirmation IDoc failed.

It was a routine ticket. It went into the queue like every other routine ticket. The SAP support team was buried in production issues that week. Nobody was careless. They were just busy. So the ticket waited. And waited. Eventually the team got to it, fixed the IDoc error and closed the ticket.

By then it was too late.

That PO confirmation was tied to a sales order from their largest customer. A global account. A very large order. They couldn't confirm the order to the customer until every supplier PO behind it was confirmed. One of those confirmations was stuck in an IDoc nobody was looking at.

The customer pulled the order.

It went all the way to the CEO. The order was lost. Worse, the company took a hit with the customer that mattered most. All because of a simple IDoc error on a PO confirmation.

Here's the part that still bothers me. No one on the support team knew that ticket was critical. Nothing about it looked different. “Routine” described the ticket. It said nothing about what was riding on it.

The 99% Problem

Most routine tickets get handled on time. I'd say 99% of them. That's why nobody worries about routine tickets.

But it's the 1% that hurts. And nobody can tell you in advance which ticket is the 1%. It looks exactly like the other 99.

You can't staff your way out of that. You can add people. You can tighten SLAs. A routine ticket is still a routine ticket. When the team is underwater on a given day, it waits.

Why the 1% Keeps Happening

In my experience it comes down to bandwidth. And bandwidth comes down to two things.

First, load. On any given day the team might be fighting a production fire. Routine work slides. That's normal triage. It's also exactly when the 1% slips through.

Second, churn. This one is bigger than most people admit. Every AMS operation deals with it, outsourced or in-house.

SAP is complex. Not everything can be documented. A lot of what makes a support person good lives in their head. When someone leaves, there's a knowledge transfer on open tickets and maybe the recent past. But a ticket type that was solved long ago and suddenly comes back? The new person has never seen it.

And most resolution notes never make it into the ticketing system. They're in emails. In phone calls. In people's heads. That tribal knowledge walks out the door with the person.

There's one more thing nobody says out loud. Senior people don't want to stay in support. The moment someone gets really good at it, they're looking for a way into an S/4 project or something new. I don't blame them. That's where the exciting work is. And with ECC mainstream maintenance ending in 2027, those projects are pulling SAP talent harder than ever.

So support keeps losing its memory. Not because people do a bad job. Because the best ones move on, and they should.

The Real Question

I don't think the answer is to work people harder or write better documentation.

The real question is simpler. What if a routine ticket never had to wait in a queue at all?

Every SAP person I know has one of these stories. A failed IDoc. A stuck batch job. A blocked delivery that turned into an escalation.

After all these years, I've come to believe one thing.

There's no such thing as a routine ticket.