Whether you want to expand your personal curriculum or your goal is to become a consultant for your company’s Support Center for SAP BusinessObjects, taking the Incident Managent with SAP BusinessObjects exam (booking code C_BOSUP_90) is a key step that you must take in order to become a certified consultant in this area.
If you have ever tried to obtain a SAP certification before, you will probably be familiar with the feeling of not knowing where to start or which strategy to take in order to study for the exam as efficiently as possible. It becomes a challenge to learn how to combine your study time with the normal day-to-day tasks from work. Therefore, what I will try to share here is a suggested path of study, based on my own experience, to face the Incident Managent with SAP BusinessObjects exam, required to become a certified SAP BusinessObjects Support Consultant.
What you must do before presenting the exam
In order to become a certified SAP BusinessObjects Support Consultant, you must first approve the Web Assessment Tests for several of BusinessObjects’ key areas, such as WebIntelligence, Universe Designer, BI Root Cause Analysis, among others. The materials for these tests are listed as Required in the Learning Plans that can be found in SAP Channel Partner Portal / Education / SAP BusinessObjects / Role-Based Training / Support Consultants. They are free of charge and relatively easy to undertake.
What is this exam about?
So, first of all we need to know the details and structure of the exam (that can also be found in the following link of SAP Training Site: C_BOSUP_90 Booking Details). Basically, it consists of 80 questions to be answered in 180 minutes. The questions are focused in proving that “the candidate has a good overall understanding within this support consultant profile, and can apply this knowledge practically in the handling of client messages under guidance of an experienced support consultant”.
Also, you must be aware that this test is closely related with the SAP Solution Manager tool, so it is very advisable to have this product installed in your company, or at least find a way to gain some hands-on knowledge with it.
In what areas should you focus?
As in all exams, the best suggestion is to read all the learning material required at least once. Therefore, I find more useful at this point to highlight the topics contained in most of the documents where you should focus in more depth.
- Message Solving, Problem Analysis and Providing Solutions to Customer:
- One of the key documents that you will find in the learning material is the L1220 – Message Solving. Here you should pay attention to the technical terms and SAP definitions explained since several questions are based on this part.
- Even more important is the L1225 – Efficient Message Solving document, you must carefully read each Typical Situation given and the type of answers, information gathered and interactions that are recommended to have with a customer in each situation.
- Message Processing: This section should not be confused with the Message Solving topic as they refer to different parts of the Support process.
- The L1260 – Message Processing document contains several exam questions, so be sure to understand the different workflows in and out of Partner working hours, the different message statuses and how to access SAP Notes. Also, you will have some questions covered if you memorize the different SAP transactions that are explained and learn how to gather customer information before sending it to SAP Support Backbone when necessary.
- On the other hand, the L1270 – Message Processing via Work Center and the L1275 – How to create a message documents contain a lot of information regarding the basic workflows of SAP Solution Manager and its Work Center. It is advisable to have a correct understanding of all of them since some questions are related to this.
- VAR Service Desk:
- In the L0120 – VAR Support enablement program document you should understand the key vocabulary explained as well as the tasks and responsibilities of employees in a VAR Support Team.
- Also, the L0125 – Incident Management is a very important document where understanding the three task levels, the message flow and how High Priority messages are attended is absolutely key.
- Finally, in L0155 – Mission Critical special attention must be given to the Service Level Agreements (SLA) in order to domain under which terms with SAP you will be operating as a Support Consultant.
- Using SAP Enterprise Support: In the Providing Solutions section of the exam’s learning plan you will find a document that comes without a code, called SAP Service and Support. It refers basically of how partners benefit from SAP Service and Support, so at least you should give it a good read to ensure two or three questions from the exam.
- Basic Understanding of SAP Solution Manager: This section is a complement of Message Processing.
- The L2220 – EarlyWatch, Service Level and Solution Reporting is practically summarized in the document that I will explain next. However, give attention to understand definitions and transactions as well as understanding EarlyWatch Alert general purpose and type of alerts.
- The last document with key information that you will encounter is the L2225 – Early Watch Alert, Overview. Several exam questions are related to its content, so understand the differences between EarlyWatch Alert and EarlyWatch Check, the frequency of both of them, how the checks are performed and finally, how the checks are included in the support agreement.
Final Thoughts
As always, it is recommended to see a set of sample questions to have a more practical idea of what is coming up. You can find some examples in the following link of SAP Education: C_BOSUP_90 Samples Questions
In my personal experience, I would say that this is not the most difficult certification exam that SAP offers, so I would really like to encourage you to read all the content at least once and then focus on the key topics mentioned above and that would leave you very well positioned to obtain a successful result.
I hope this article proves to be useful to get an overall understanding on how to approach this exam, and hopefully will help you to become a brand new SAP BusinessObjects Support Consultant! Good luck!
If you have any questions or anything to add in order to help improve this post, please feel free to leave your comments and share it with someone else if you found it helpful. Also, you can contact me via Twitter @IsaacGil_BI