Application Support and Filling Gaps with Flexibility

College gap year, spark plug gaps, offensive line gaps, financial stock gaps… There are many different types of gaps out there, but there is one that not all consumers of SaaS applications recognize. Gaps in application support. Yes, it is true, there are gaps that exist in supporting SaaS applications and the main gap is between the end-users and the standard support provided by the application vendor.

The end-users of applications understand the processes and procedures they need to follow to accomplish their work, but when an issue surfaces such as a transaction that will not process correctly, they do not always know how to resolve it. End-users may have job aids, a knowledgebase to search, or peers with whom they can collaborate. After those resources are exhausted, the end-users have to go somewhere to get issues fixed and that means talking to a resource at the next level or submitting a ticket to a help desk. Organizations of different sizes invest differently in the next level of support. The gap area.

When we jump to the other side of the gap, we land at the standard support typically provided by the application vendor. The standard support typically covers fixing bugs in the applications, applying applications updates and patches, and maintaining the backend performance of the system. The application vendor support team will generally help troubleshoot data issues, but to provide that level of support, the support team will request that various scripts or diagnostics be run which are beyond the skillset of the end users.

The gap area can be filled by directly hiring full time application experts to your staff, but that can be costly and not all organizations need full time employees. Especially when the expensive experts might not be 100% utilized. The solution to solve that gap is by using Managed Services. Through Apps Associates’ Managed Services, you can structure the hours or resources that best fit your needs. An organization gains multiple experts with a breadth of knowledge and expertise that comes from supporting multiple customer environments across multiple verticals. If an issue arises, there is a good chance that our associates have seen and resolved it before. As an extension of your staff, our certified teams support your environment, allowing you to focus on your business.

Filling the gap is important and doing it with some flexibility is like having your cake and eating it too. Using managed services to fill the support gap is key to flexibility.

One thing that many organizations have learned through the COVID-19 pandemic is that flexibility is a key to business success. Environment changes in all forms require flexibility. Flexibility to fit the needs of the business, division, team, or whichever group you are in. There are companies that have had to scale down and others that have had to scale up. Whichever direction the company needs to go, it involves flexibility. The question is, does your company have what is needed to scale IT and Application support services efficiently?

In recent weeks there were two customers that needed to make adjustments to planned application initiatives. Let’s call them Company 1 and Company 2. While Company 1 faced a situation where they needed to scale back in resources due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Company 2 needed to increase resources to address a business need for a strategic feature change impacting changes to business processes. By using Managed Services, the proper resources were able to be shifted from Company 1 to Company 2 resulting in a win for both companies. No layoffs, no hiring overhead. An easy sample of efficient scaling through managed services and flexible staffing of resources.

Apps Associates has been providing a matured managed services model that allows flexibility with support resources covering business applications Oracle and Salesforce along with analytics, integrations, and cloud services. Resources are available as Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) or fractional FTEs. That is an important concept for providing flexibility while scaling resource needs efficiently.

Fill the support gap with flexibility by using Managed Services from Apps Associates.