Influence SAP Now – How to Submit a New Improvement Request

When you first go into the Customer engagement website it is pretty busy and while there has been promotions on Twitter and on the SAP Community on how to get involved I have not seen any detailed instructions for how to do this. Additionally, some that follow me may know the tag #FeatureRequestPhil (from twitter) which was a tool I used to submit functionality requests. I will continue to do that for topics that don’t have such a Customer engagement initiative however for areas that are covered I am now committed to logging them in the Customer influence site. As the site name states, this is a prime place where you can influence SAP and functionality that is built into the product. So, thought I would write a nifty little blog. 🙂 It just so happens I have an improvement request to submit as well so the planets have aligned! I also came across this post during the week that talked about influencing the SAP S/4HANA solutions here. When you look through the areas it is very extensive so now instead of complaining of what is not covered in the solution navigate to the Influence site and add a new idea request!

Overview

When you log into the site you will see a lot of helpful information. This has been around for some time but I’ve only stumbled upon this in the last couple of years so hopefully this blog can help spread the word and allow people to easily enter new ideas. This is similar to the SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer Ideas Place whereby users log an idea and it is voted for by the community.

OK, first let’s set the scene. What is needed to get started and what is included in the site.

• You will need an S userid to register and get started.
• You can submit a new request in a topic of choice.
• You can check out other submissions and vote on them if you like the idea.You can also provide some comments.
• You can flag an Opportunity so you are kept up to date with any updates that occur.
• You can see at a glance the number of ideas, views and visitors a particular opportunity has had.

This diagram points out the key areas of information included in the opportunities overview page.

Figure:1 CEI Site Overview

Some of the topics included are always open so whenever you have an idea you can go and check it out to see if it exists already and vote for it. If your idea has not been submitted then submit a new request. We will first check out how to search for opportunities and then we will submit a new idea.

Searching for Opportunities

The best thing to do before logging a new request is to see if it has already been logged by someone else. Simply click on each of the tiles to see the detail on that particular Customer initiative. As there are a large number of tiles to scroll through my first step will be to reduce the opportunities to focus on the topic I am interested in. My request relates to SAP Cloud Platform mobile services.

Use the search option to perform a restriction. I have entered “mobile” in the search options and only the following Opportunities show up.

Figure:2 Search bar to find specific opportunities 

Now I will decide which opportunity I will add my new request to. As stated above, my request relates to the SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services – specifically the Analytics around Notifications. So, even though my request relates to mobile cards it is Mobile services overall that I am looking to improve here.

Mobile services is relatively new so the number of ideas being posted in these areas is quite low so if you have used Mobile services come in here and start adding your idea requests! Due to the low number I am sure your request will be looked at.

Figure:3 SAPCP Mobile Services opportunity

Here is a summary of the topic:

• You can see that only 1 request has been posted for this opportunity.
• 151 people have actually viewed this topic
• There have been 82 distinct visitors

This means there is a lot of scope for any of your ideas to be accepted. 🙂

Submitting a New Request

After browsing the Opportunities in the SAP Cloud Platform – Mobile Services area I find that my request is not covered so I will now enter a new request. My request is to improve the analytics on the Push Statistics. I have recently deployed a mobile card using SAP Mobile services and users have reported mixed results with Push notifications so would be good to know more specific information and this will be even more important as more mobile cards are rolled out. I would like the analytics to be more granular so I can tell which specific application the notification related to.

So let’s start. There are actually multiple ways of starting a new Request. I will cover two options. NOTE: I am using a real example I posted to go through the process. 

1. Click on the tile above to go into the Opportunity. You will then see the landing page for the initiative.Figure:4 Landing page for Customer Initiative Opportunity

   You will see the [Overview] of requests that have been submitted – top left – and you will see the Overall Timeline for the initiative. You will again see the total number of requests submitted, views and visitors. You can scroll through the details to get more informed as to what the particular Customer initiative topic is about. There is more detail on how the process works and the various statuses that the request goes through but will let you navigate to these sections to read this yourself.

   From here you can select the [Submit Improvement] icon.

   
   
   Figure:5 Submit Improvement from landing page

2. Click on the [Submit Improve Request] icon  on the tile back at the main page.
   
   Figure:6 Submit Improvement from tile
   

When either of these options is chosen you will be presented with the following New Request page.

Figure:7 New Improvement Request screen

At this stage you have identified the project your request relates to but you can use the drop down to select another one if you have selected the wrong one. Key information includes:

• Title – a suitable, succinct title should be entered to adequately summarise the improvement request.
• Description – broken up into 3 main sections. This further qualifies and supports your request. You can see masking is included to assist in completion of these items.
  • Detailed description of the improvement request.
  • Opportunity/Problem the request will address
  • Expected Benefit

On the same page, similar improvement requests are displayed – another check that your request has not already been submitted. You can also attach supporting documentation, links or additional tags.

So, on my new improvement submission I have entered the following:

Detailed Description:

This request is about recording each specific application in the Push statistics in the Analytics section of SAP Mobile services. I have recently implemented a mobile card and while I know the notifications relate only to this card over time this detail will be lost – especially if more applications/cards are built and deployed. I will have no idea which notification belongs to which specific mobile card.

At the moment all notifications are recorded under an application called com.sap.mobile.platform.cards even if I view Notifications (By Application ID). When I have multiple mobile cards this is still the case. I would like them split out and more granular so I can tell which notifications were sent out for which specific mobile card. For e.g. if I had 3 mobile cards plus a native/hybrid application I would see the notifications grouped under the following application names.

• Approve Leave Request (mobile card)
• Approve Purchase Order (mobile card)
• Approve Timesheet (mobile card)
• Create Timesheet (native/hybrid)

the higher level – hybris/native versus mobile cards – is already covered so this request covers a more detailed view.

Opportunity:

Supporting notifications can be tricky especially when they are grouped as one big lump. The statistics are only grouped by which notification service is being used so there is a bit of granularity but it needs more detailed options. The application ID option should relate to each specific application not whether it is a Hybrid/Native app or a mobile card. This is too high.

Benefit:

Provides more detail about the notifications and particular helpful in troubleshooting support queries which can be quite time consuming. This will provide additional information thereby allowing key support staff to quickly diagnose issues and to rectify them.

At the same time I include some screenshots in an attachment to support my request. I upload this using the Attachments + icon.

Just before I submit I perform an overall check of the new request. At this point it looks like this.

Figure:8 Improvement Request submission with Attachments

At this point I am ready to submit my request. You will see these options in the footer bar.

You can also use the [Save as Draft] option to wait until you have more information to support your request however I am going to submit straight away.

Figure:9 Submission options

When I hit [Submit] it will just confirm you want to submit – press ok to confirm.

The new improvement request will be submitted successfully. If I now look at the topic overall I should see my improvement included.

Figure:10 Recent Improvement Requests

I have now successfully submitted my new improvement idea. Now I hope a few others start voting for it so I will post this link to Twitter and Linkedin over the coming days to get some support. For my audience, I expect if you read this you will also go and Vote for it – no pressure! 🙂

Here is the link!

https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/226988

Follow Customer Initiatives

One other main activity to perform is to Follow other initiatives. Seeing I have posted a submission in the Mobile Services space I will now follow this initiative. I do this so that I can contribute to ideas that others may raise in the future. To do this I select the [Follow] option in the Overview section of the specific topic.

Figure:11 Follow topics

When this is carried out the Follow will change colour and text as displayed below.

Figure:12 Following acceptance 

This completes this blog of showcasing how to log an Improvement request as part of the SAP Customer Engagement Initiative. From here I will receive notifications via email when my request goes through an update or when SAP want to clarify a few things. I know this as I have submitted others in the past.

Interested in having your ideas inserted into the product? Well, go on and think of some ideas in whatever topics are covered and raise a new Improvement request. Would love others to post their links in the Comments so others (including me) can check them out and vote for them!

Thanks for reading!!