Partner Center of Expertise

Certification Process

Prerequisites

Before registering for the PCOE certification, make sure the following prerequisites are in place:

For each solution area, confirm your support delivery model going forward as VARDelivered.
Setup a Partner COE infrastructure. (e.g. people certification, SAP Solution Manager,
incident management system, remote connectivity setup)
Execute Partner COE Deliverables (e.g. support on-boarding process and materials,
maintenance agreements, support process execution, coordination and monitoring.

Registration and Completion of Check List

Your Partner Services Advisor (PSA) can provide guidance to understand checklist questions with
respect to your support organization, support processes and infrastructure.
The checklist can be downloaded here.
Submit your request for PCOE certification by creating a support incident at
http://service.sap.com/message with the following details:

Component
Short Text
Attachment

: SV-BO-REQ
: Request Partner COE Certification
: PCOE Checklist and supporting documents

Assessment phase

SAP reviews the submitted information, with one of the following results:

Assessment Passed. You receive an email stating that the assessment phase has been

Assessment Failed. You receive an email stating that critical areas for improvement

completed with satisfactory results and are invited to schedule an audit session.

have been identified. An assessment report is provided and a maximum of three (3)
months is given to complete the recommendations before advancing to the audit phase.
Note that failure to return within the maximum time allowed will constitute a forfeiture
of the audit phase, and subsequently, an automatic audit failure.

Audit interview (Channel Partner and SAP)

The audit is performed remotely and is therefore free of charge.

On average, a remote audit is completed within 5-6 hours.
Attendance of a support manager and selected support staff is required.
The SAP auditor discusses and verifies the answers in the checklist with the partner and
requests demonstrations of the support infrastructure and processes in place.
In addition, the auditor may conduct an interview with one of your customers to evaluate
how satisfied they are with your support services.
After the audit a certification report is created and sent for judging.

Judging

The certification report is forwarded to the judging team for review and evaluation. Judging takes
2-3 weeks to complete with one of the following outcomes:

Judging Passed. A Partner Center of Expertise (PCOE) certificate, valid for two (2)

years, is issued to you. In addition you receive a certification report which contains a
review of your execution of PCOE requirements as well as recommendations for
improvement.
Judging Failed. You receive an email notifying you of certification failure. A certification
report containing a review of your execution of PCOE requirements as well as
recommendations for improvement is sent to you.

If you are not successful in your initial certification attempt, you are granted a maximum of six
(6) months to implement the recommendations and register for another audit. Should you fail
the second audit attempt, you will not be authorized to sell VAR delivered support for at least 12
months following the date of the last audit. You may register for another audit thereafter at
current chargeable rates. During this time you may only sell SAP delivered support.