Where Can I Find Information on SAP Innovations?
Admittingly, it is not always easy to find out what SAP is developing and if it is worth doing an upgrade or not!
Or you, as an SAP customer and partner, might just want to be informed about what new functionality was delivered with a certain release or enhancement package.
With our new Innovation Discovery tool – part of the SAP Service Marketplace – we would like to make your life a lot easier.
(SAP Service Marketplace is just for customers and partners: read what it is and how you can get access SAP Service Marketplace Overview and FAQ)
By the way, a nice feature is the fact that you can download or share these innovations with colleagues (see end of blog).
By showing you two examples from the Utilities Industry, I would like to illustrate how best to search:
Access the Innovation Discovery tool:
Either directly: http://service.sap.com/innovation-discovery
Or:
- Go to the SAP Service Marketplace.
- At the top of the page, choose Improvements & Innovation.
- Choose Log in here.
- On the left-hand side, choose Innovation Discovery for SAP Products.
- On the right-hand side, under Access, choose Start Application.
You can see that there are … innovations. - Now you can choose:
- for Utilities innovations, Industries –> Utilities and then close the window again.
You will see 433 innovations (in the orange box) on the right top part of the screen. - for other innovations, choose the industry or areas of responsibility you wish to search for.
- for Utilities innovations, Industries –> Utilities and then close the window again.
Example 1 – How to find CRM – Multichannel Foundation innovations.
- In the Search for all innovations field at the top left, enter multichannel.
Click to enlarge the graphic.
- Then choose Search by Selection at the top right.
This takes you to the list of the already delivered two Utilities Multichannel innovations.
- For more details, you can then click on the tiltles of each innovation and select the individual Product Features.
- You can also filter by product versions and Enhancement Package.
- Go back to the entry page, by choosing the Home button.
Example 2 – How to find EAM usabilty innovations.
- In the Search for all innovations field at the top left, enter eam usability.
A list of 17 innovations appears.
- Click on the first title (Usability improvements in the SAP Enterprise Asset Management Solution).
Here you can see, for example, if this innovation requires additional licenses, in this case it does not.
- For further details, such as more screenshots, demos and presentations, click on the third product feature (Enhancements for Maintenance Orders).
- You can download the contents or share this link by choosing one of the following options on the top right side of the page.
Have fun discovering our innovations! 🙂
Susanne, thank you for sharing! There is also a shortcut link that goes right into the step 5 ('Innovation Discovery...' page). Not sure though who thought that labeling the button 'Start Application' and filing it under 'Access' would be a good user-friendly solution (why not just have a big button 'Discover SAP Innovations' and also not bury it 2 levels deep?).
In Firefox 'Start Application' opens a page but it doesn't show anything other than the hypnotic spinning wheel. I got it to work in IE though and proceeded to clicking on 'do not require additional licenses' and then chose ERP 6.0 up to EHP6. That narrowed the list down to 164 results and, unfortunately, there are no further filter possibilities.
There is a convenient 'Download' option that allows to get the whole list in an Excel format, but due to lack of filters I had to spend about 30 minutes more to "file it down" to the items that are actually relevant to us (about 40% of the list were country-specific localizations, HCM, industry-specific functionality, irrelevant interfaces, etc.). By the way, in the downloaded list all the innovation names came across as the links but they don't work actually.
OK, no biggie, I can just use search to find specific items. For instance, 'EDI Monitor' seemed interesting, so I ran search for 'EDI'. Much to my surprise, it found 22 hits but... 21 of them didn't even have EDI in the description and the one I was looking for was number 7 from the top. Hm...
I'll give it another try later, but it's really taking much more time than I'd be willing (or available) to spend to search for [likely] just a few enhancement that would make a difference for our business. On a bright side, at least now I have a reduced spreadsheet to share with the team, but if every customer has to go through the same steps it's just not very efficient.
Thank you.
Hi Jelena,
First of all, I am so sorry, that you had so much hassle. I also have to admit here, that there is definitely room for improvement and it is not exactly easy to use,yet.
Thank you so much for your experience and feedback. This is very valuable.
I will forward it to the group developing this tool and we can hope for quick turnaround.
Thanks again!
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
thank you for blogging about this feature. Searching is a very important topic and I felt that it wasn't that good. I will give it a try tomorrow and hoping for some good results (I've got some I can retry)
~Florian
Hi Florian,
Thanks to you as well for your feedback. I very much agree with you, searching is important. The narrower your search, the better the results, but how do you know what to search for? Content tagging could be optimized here.
There is also further documentation at the top right part of the screen, under Help.
My answer to Jelena also goes for you.
Thanks and best,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
thanks for pointing me there 🙂
~Florian