CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
14 September 2004
Company News
SAP Launches Global Support Center in China
SAP AG announced the opening of its new SAP Global Support Center (GSC) in Dalian, China, expanding the reach of SAP's worldwide support network. The GSC China will become the primary hub for delivering services and support to SAP customers in Asia Pacific countries including China, Japan and Korea. More than 4,200 SAP customers throughout the Asia Pacific region will benefit from a highly skilled workforce providing support in the customers' native language. Complementing existing GSCs in Ireland, Spain, Austria and India, the GSC China will also serve SAP customers worldwide as part of SAP's 24/7 service and support network, SAP® Active Global Support.
The new support center in Dalian, a major industrial center and trading gateway in northeastern China, will be staffed initially with more than 130 native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English. At an investment of around EUR 10 million, the facility has been built with capacity for workforce expansion as the number of serviced customers increases. The multinational support team, comprised of existing SAP employees and new hires, will provide proactive services and support such as online monitoring, problem resolution, remote maintenance and knowledge transfer throughout the software life cycle-including planning, implementation, operations, upgrades and ongoing maintenance-to help ensure the optimum performance of SAP® solutions.
The GSC China underlines SAP's continuing global outreach and commitment to China, one of SAP's key markets in the Asia Pacific region. SAP has been conducting business here for more than 11 years and has built a strong team of 490 employees to drive development and localization of SAP software for this major market. Just last year, SAP established SAP Labs China in Shanghai. The research and development facility is already creating new products for SAP's worldwide customer base and taking on strategic development projects assigned by SAP's executive board.
SAP chose to set up its new support center in Dalian due to a number of factors, including the city's excellent infrastructure, competitive costs and an international environment that will make it easier to recruit employees fluent in Japanese or Korean. Dalian is also home to a number of educational institutions as well as the Dalian Software Park, created with the help of government initiatives to establish the city as an IT and logistics hub.
"In addition to the 350 plus software development firms that have already set up business in Dalian, including 18 of the world's top 500 firms, such as GE, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Nokia and Accenture, we are very pleased to welcome SAP as another global technology leader to join the Dalian Software Park initiative," said Dalian Mayor Xia Deren. "The city of Dalian is pleased to offer our advanced infrastructure and support to enable SAP to continue to provide localized services to its customers in China, Japan, Korea and the rest of Asia Pacific from this single site."
"SAP has more than 2,500 software installations and more than 800 customers in Greater China, including some of the most prominent businesses such as Lenovo, Haier, Sinopec, Cosco, China Telecom and Shanghai Power," said Hans-Peter Klaey, president and CEO, SAP Asia Pacific. "SAP customers will gain dedicated local support as SAP continues to benefit from China's well-educated workforce, an excellent business culture and sense of entrepreneurship. Expanding operations in China not only reflects our continued success globally, but also our interest in boosting investments and activities in the dynamic Asia Pacific market."
SAP Active Global Support is a global organization with more than 3,000 employees in more than 40 countries. It supports more than 23,400 customers running more than 79,800 installations. In addition, SAP Active Global Support also develops methods, infrastructure and services to proactively manage customer solutions, audit the start-up and to continually optimizing their operations with the aim of reducing their total cost of operations. It performs more than 34,000 remote service sessions yearly to proactively safeguard the Go-Live of new installations and provides more than 1,500 onsite services.
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