Service Level Agreement

1 Introduction

The following document provides an overview of the structure and processes of the glueckkanja-gab Service Operation Center. Furthermore, the available service levels and extensions are described.

The Service Level Agreement is valid for all glueckkanja-gab AG Services.

1.1 Glossary

1. Acknowledgement is defined as the duration between reporting the fault and the start of fault or problem handling by support. This is to be calculated within the working time.
2. Qualified Response Time is defined as the duration between the confirmation of the incident and the initial analysis and evaluation by the support engineer. This is to be calculated within the working time.
3. Eligible people are, the Users designated and assigned by the Customer Service Manager, who interact and communicate with the Contractor's Service Team in relation to the Services agreed between the Parties.
4. Status Update is any communication from Contractor's Service Team to Customer communicating the status and/or action plan for the Incident Request. The purpose of these updates is to inform the Customer of the progress in resolving the issue reported through the Contractor's Incident Channels, to gather additional details for support or troubleshooting, and/or to communicate a resolution to the issue.
5. Service time is the time during which the service systems of glueckkanja-gab are available, and requests and incidents can be processed. In the case of automated processes for responding to requests and incidents, these can be processed within the service time.
6. The maintenance window is the agreed time for performing scheduled work (Changes) on the service. gkgab will schedule all scheduled maintenance work (Changes) within this time window.
7. Working days are the normal days when the GKGAB support team performs its work. These days include Monday to Friday. Excluded are holidays of the federal state of Bavaria.
8. Working time is the time in which the gkgab Service Operation Team performs its work. The time zone is Central European Time (CET) / Central European Summer Time (CEST).
9. Support time is the time in which the gkgab On-call duty team performs its work. The time zone is Central European Time (CET) / Central European Summer Time (CEST).

2 Service Delivery Management

2.1 Description

All communications with glueckkanja-gab are managed by our Service Delivery Team. They provide the customer with a clear escalation path, technical knowledge, and an understanding of the customer’s environment. The Service Delivery Team ensures that the glueckkanja-gab IT-Service and Managed Services are provided as agreed and advocates the interests of the customer, managing continuous service delivery within the agreed service scope.

2.2 Standard services and Tasks

• Coordination of Onboarding, RampUp, and Transition
• Review Management
• Single point of contact for service escalation
• Managed services reporting
• Service request delivery assurance
• Service Documentation

2.2.1 Service escalation single point of contact

Acting as a single point of contact for all communications with glueckkanja-gab’s Services and Customer Portal.

2.2.2 Service request delivery assurance

Service Delivery Team ensures the successful and timely response and delivery of the glueckkanja-gab Services and their most optimal resourcing at all times for maximum service quality and fast throughput times.

2.2.3 Service Reporting

glueckkanja-gab offers a monthly service review meeting with the customer. In this meeting, the Service Delivery Team is presenting the findings report from the past month and makes suggestions for optimization, if necessary. The report is afterward sent to the customer. Every 6 months, the service provider is offering a half-day workshop with the customer in order to discuss the past 6 months and talk about optimization possibilities. The reporting details we measure are ‘evergreen’. We continuously revise them (adjust or remove if needed, add new if it makes sense).

Additional customer-specific metrics can be discussed in service review meetings and added as appropriate. However, the service delivery team is always encouraged to consider the possibility of automation.

2.2.4 Review Management

The Service Delivery Team provides a monthly or quarterly service review to its customer. The meeting schedule is determined by the Service Delivery Team and communicated to the customer during onboarding. A change in rotation can be requested at the service review meeting and discussed with the service delivery team.

The content of the Service Review Meeting can be further developed and changed by the Service Delivery Team at any time. The goal is to adapt to the constant changes in the Microsoft Cloud and Managed Services and to provide the customer with the most important information. However, among other things, the following information should be included:

• Usage of the on-demand quota or hours
• Time to acknowledge
• Time to resolution
• Count of requests (incidents, changes, etc.)

2.2.5 Service Documentation

Our Service Delivery Team ensures that the following documents are available and updated:

• Escalation contacts
• Runbooks and Standard Operation Procedures (internal usage)
• FAQs and troubleshooting guides for the service

2.3 Communications of requests

The Customer 1st Level Support submits all requests via defined interfaces to the GKGAB ITSM or RealmJoin system. For incidents that need to be categorized in a higher category, the Customer will additionally call the Service Delivery Team by phone, to escalate the request.

For the communication with the Service Delivery Team the following communication options are available to the Customer:

• ITSM- / Self-Service-Portal
• Support E-Mail address
• IT Service Hotline (for escalation)

2.4 Customer Service Manager

With the start of the service, the customer appoints at minimum one person that is responsible for the contract (Customer Service Manager, CSM).

The CSM names all employees that are eligible to transfer requests to the Service Delivery Team. Adding or removing eligible people from this list will be done by the CSM (see above) by creating a change request.

3 Support Levels

3.1 Dispatching Level

The Dispatching Level takes care of the registration, classification, and prioritization of incoming requests. Incidents and change requests are forwarded to a group of system engineers in 2nd level support.

The transfer of a request to GKGAB must be carried out by qualified named IT personnel on the side of the Customer. Our Dispatching does not include 1st level and end-user support and training.

3.2 2nd Level Support

The 2nd level support agent takes over the incident report or change request from the Dispatching Level if the request cannot be resolved on that level. For incident reports, if necessary, he will request support from manufacturers and experts (3rd Level Support). The aim is to restore the defined operating status of a service as quickly as possible. If the cause of the issue cannot be eliminated, the service engineer will transfer the incident to Problem Management for further processing.

3.3 3rd Level Support

The 3rd level support staff have very deep expert knowledge and may be located at the manufacturer of hardware or software products; they are engaged by the 2nd level support if this is necessary to resolve the incident.

4 Request Priority

4.1 Service and Change Requests

Service and Change requests are processed within the scope of the service level without priority and implemented within a maximum of 5 working days (SLA). This processing time for Service and Change requests applies to all Service Levels.

In some cases, Change requests may need to be submitted to our Consulting Services. After handing over the Change request to the consulting, the request is closed and the consulting treats the change as a (small) project. The processing time does not apply to Consulting projects.

4.2 Incident Severity Levels

By default, severity level C is assigned without an asterisk in the ticket when a request is received. It is the responsibility of the Service Delivery Team to accept the ticket for processing to estimate the priority and, if necessary, to classify it according to the above table. A Customer can request a change in severity level during the term of an incident should the business impact require a change.

Processing times for the individual severity levels are described in the respective service level.

5 Service Levels

5.1 Standard Service Level

All request types are processed as described in the following table, processing times are measured within working time and working hours.

At our standard service level, the following processing times apply to incoming incidents:

6 On-Call Duty Packages

To extend the service levels, we offer various on-call duty packages. These are not available as standard for our IT services and managed services and must be ordered separately by the customer.

Our On-Call Duty packages are only available for the content described in the IT-Service or respective Managed Service. Exceptions may be defined in the respective service descriptions.

The effective working time for each incident will be charged through the On-Demand Services.\ Every incident that is reported to an on-call duty will be charged with a minimum of 2 hours. Working-time that exceeds 2 hours will be charged in 15 min intervals.

6.1 On-call Duty - 16x7

With this level, the Customer gets access to the 16x7 on-call duty team. The On-call duty team supports incidents with severity level A1 only.

The requests processed as described in the following table, processing times are measured within support time and hours.

During the described support time and hours, the following processing times apply to incoming incidents:

6.2 On-call Duty - 24x7

With this level, the Customer gets access to the 24x7 on-call duty team. The on-call duty team supports incidents with severity level A1 only.

The requests processed as described in the following table, processing times are measured within support time and hours.

During the described support time and hours, the following processing times apply to incoming incidents:

7 Customer related support issues

The Customer is responsible for the content and availability of its own Business Applications and Business Application interfaces, this includes also the Customer ITSM- / Self-Service-Portal and the corresponding APIs.

8 Out-of-scope

For clarity, this Service Level Agreement and all applicable Service Levels do not apply to performance or availability issues:

• caused by services, hardware, or software provided by the Customer or third parties,
• caused by Customer’s use of a Service after the glueckkanja-gab has instructed the Customer to change its use of a Service and the Customer has not changed its use as instructed,
• during Pre-release, Beta and Trial Services (as determined by glueckkanja-gab), caused by Customer’s unauthorized act or omission or that of Customer’s employees, agents, contractors or suppliers, or by anyone else who has gained access to Contractor’s network using Customer’s passwords or devices; or
• which are caused by the Customer’s failure to meet required configurations, use supported platforms, and follow acceptable use policies; or
• for licenses that were reserved but not paid for at the time of the incident.