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JairJr
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Hello there,

Establishing a Digital Transformation plan is not only challenging when thinking of the fundamental changes that your organization needs to go through. People and new approaches for managing your workforce, new business models, dynamic and autonomous processes, lots of promising shiny technologies emerging day in day out, while others fade away at unprecedented speed, business networks leveraging collaboration for some and accelerating disruption for others and the list goes on and on as you dive in an ocean of whitepapers, studies, reports and digital evangelists trying to (somehow) describe what an unpredictable future is going to look like.

Digesting all of those can be quite challenge and hopefully you can count on a prolific team with tight connection and collaboration between business and IT for structuring a transformation plan which deals with these present challenges and can believe, share and live your organization future vision in every step taken. Moreover, funding those projects require transparency, structure and a tight financial control.

Several times you as a customer still must deal with sales representatives which eventually start interacting with your team discussing the HOW aspects of your journey in a siloed approach while business value and ROI associated with your initiatives still need to be explored and matured.

Thinking of those challenges I decided to write this post where I picked my top 10 favorite (and in my opinion some of the most useful) SAP self-service tools & reports to help you establishing your flight plan towards the digital economy. They help you finding opportunities to improve business process and increase efficiency in a comprehensive integrated technical and business approach, always focusing on business outcomes. All of them follow a DIY format with lots of blogs and official SAP documentations to get you deeper in the ones you like most.

Each solution chapter is divided in 4 simple but key questions to be answered:

  • Why using it?

  • How to start?

  • When should you be using it?

  • Who is the primary target audience for each?


The selected tools are (click on subjected link to go to its chapter):

  1. SAP Innovation and Optimization Pathfinder for SAP ERP: Get tailor-made recommendations on areas of relevant SAP innovations, business process improvements and IT optimization potentials for your core SAP ERP system

  2. Business Scenarios Recommendations for SAP S/4HANA: This report focus exclusively on a S/4HANA transition, pointing out exactly what Business Processes can benefit most from this conversion based on your system-specific usage data. While the Pathfinder-report contains a summary, the report contains all detailed recommendations for S/4HANA transitions

  3. SAP S/4HANA Readiness Check: Supports customers who plan to convert existing SAP ERP 6.x systems to SAP S/4HANA. It checks both your production systems and your development systems for SAP S/4HANA conversion compatibility and necessary conversion preparation steps. The results are consolidated in an interactive dashboard for internal or for SAP communication.

  4. SAP Transformation Navigator: A self-service tool to give SAP customers in all industries and across all lines of business clear guidance to the SAP S/4HANA-centric world. It recommends products for the digital future, integration between SAP S/4HANA and SAP cloud solutions, guidance for business value, overview of services, and impact on license agreements.

  5. SAP Value Lifecycle Manager: VLM helps you develop and manage sustainable SAP investments increasing your chances of delivering your project on-time, on-value and on-budget. It supports activities to help achieve expected value from you SAP investments.

  6. SAP Solution Explorer: This tool helps users find the business management software solutions they need from SAP. Content includes value maps and executive summaries for all SAP-supported lines of businesses, industries, technology, and selected topics.

  7. SAP EA Explorer: focuses on specific IT areas such as user experience, landscape architecture or Internet of Things (IoT) and provides valuable insights for enterprise architects and others interested in driving IT decisions and improving their enterprise.

  8. SAP Innovation Discovery:  simplifies your search for new functionality delivered by SAP or to be delivered in the near future. It allows you to easily evaluate and discuss innovations and features with having both business and technical information at a glance.

  9. SAP Road Maps: Tool for you to align your future strategy and architecture transition plans to SAP future product capabilities. Product Road Maps focus on how features and function capabilities for a given SAP Product or technology are planned to progress over time, while Solution Road Maps focus on innovations related to business solutions and process.

  10. SAP Help Portal: one of the top resources for customers for many years has been gone through a complete redesign. SAP Help Portal still is one of the most essential source of information for SAP customers, partners and the overall community.


I hope you enjoy the reading and the tools above help you to accelerate and establish a successful digital journey plan. Let me know your thoughts: what are your favorite tools, which are missing in my list...