Tools-Production Support

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In the earlier post, we have discussed the problem solving and production support. We have also discussed the various kinds of tickets (Problems). Now in this post we will see how the tickets are tracked? I.e. What tools are used to track the status of the tickets?
You may face this question in the interview, if you say that you have worked for a production support project.
There are many software tools, to manage the problem tickets. Remember this software will not be provided by SAP. It is a different third party software (may be written in any other language like JAVA,).

When ever a problem occurs in the production, end user calls help desk. The help desk will assign a number to the problem. We will call it as problem ticket number. To enter these tickets with description we need a software tool. There are many tools like MANAGE NOW, crm etc.
The following options will be common in any of the tool.
1) You will be provided with user name and password to access the tool
2) You can display the tickets, which are assigned to you, or even you can see the tickets assigned to your colleague by giving his/her user id in the selection input box.
3) You can display all the open tickets, like these there can be many views. You can display the tickets raised in the specified time duration by giving from date and to date.
4) There will be an option to transfer the ticket to other users. Imagine User has raised the ticket, it will be transferred to help desk, then it will go to project manager then he will assign it to the concerned functional consultant. If it is something to do with configuration changes, he himself resolves it. Otherwise if ABAP changes are required, then it may be transferred to tech lead and finally it will be transferred to ABAP consultant from the tech lead. This structure may differ from one company to another.
5) If you open the tool and enter the ticket number, it displays the history of the ticket number. When it was raised, and by whom and the problem description. What is the status? While working on tickets, we should update the status of the ticket in the tool. Some times you need to update the status every 15 minutes if it is severity one problem ticket.