Note: This blog is related to our webinar session “SAP for Me – Overview” (Recording | PDF) as part of our SAP for Me webinar series – season 1.
Almost every company these days has a digital channel that serves as what might be termed its digital front door. SAP is no exception here, as evidenced by SAP.com. Many companies also allow customers and other interested parties to exchange ideas on a social platform. At SAP, this is the SAP Community.
Something you might also have encountered at other companies is a customer center or customer portal that picks up existing customers, knows their environment and provides context-specific information and services perfectly tailored to their particular needs. This in a nutshell is what SAP for Me is. It is SAP's customer portal.
Quite simple: because of feedback from our customers. Many of them told us that SAP has too many separate portals and tools, which are used for different types of information that often overlap. This makes information gathering a burdensome and time-consuming task for customers, with the additional risk of missing out on important and valuable information.
Another key piece of feedback our customers provided was the wish for greater transparency in the form of an overarching picture across a purchased SAP product portfolio, provided in one single location. Building on this transparency, many customers also asked for digital self-services in order to turn insights into immediate actions.
Finally, another aspect that was often aired during talks with customers was the need for our tools to know them better and to go one step further than transparency by providing guidance based on knowledge of the customer's environment as well as the context and interests of the individual using the tool.
With SAP for Me we propose to act on this feedback by providing a digital companion that will continuously grow and improve.
Semantics isn’t really a brand-new topic, although this doesn’t take anything away from its beauty. I’m a strong supporter of semantic thinking, as it forces us to think how different pieces of information relate to one another. What is the relationship between my product and the systems, relevant learning content, licenses, orders or invoices? SAP for Me can answer these questions.
SAP for Me is therefore your customer portal. It recognizes your purchased SAP product portfolio and centralizes related information in one place. It provides transparency across these information types, together with relevant self-services and links to more detailed information right when you need it.
This however is just the start of a broader vision to become “A customer portal that serves as a digital companion.”
With our semantic approach, it becomes increasingly easy for us to provide completely new insights. Think of a digital companion that can articulate the returns on your SAP software investments in terms of license consumption or functional usage of a product. Or think of this companion reminding you to perform important actions. Imagine a companion recommending a certain learning element, a specific software trial or even providing guidance on how to improve your existing setup. This is what we want to achieve over time with SAP for Me.
We are going to continuously improve and expand SAP for Me, not only over the next weeks and months but far beyond. We expect to completely achieve our vision by 2023. After starting SAP for Me as a kind of pilot in 2019, we are currently focusing on providing an ecosystem for our teams here at SAP so that they can easily integrate their content and self-services into SAP for Me. For us this is the key enabler to accelerate the transformation of reducing the information portals and tools at SAP. Nevertheless, replacing tools and portal might not always result in migration to SAP for Me. Depending on the type of information in question, it might also end up in SAP.com or SAP Community. While we are currently taking the first steps towards introducing smart recommendations, we expect this to become our focus in 2022.
We now know the "why?" and the "how?", so let's continue with the "what?". SAP for Me currently provides seven different capability areas. We might introduce one or two additional areas over time. But for the moment I feel confident that the existing ones will allow us to provide a wealth of great capabilities.
Allow me to briefly outline the various capability areas. As a side note, please bear in mind that this blog accompanies the overview session of our SAP for Me webinar series – season 1. If you are interested in more details about the individual capability areas, you might like to watch a recording of a specific session.
As I said right at the start, SAP for Me has already taken the first few steps along the journey towards providing you with a smart digital companion. While it can already provide significant value, the scope and value of SAP for Me will grow over the coming months and years.
At the current point in time, we are focused on providing capabilities that are not covered yet elsewhere or are not in the portfolio context. Over the coming months, our highest priority will be the areas of systems and provisioning, and finance & legal, as these areas are where we currently see the greatest demand.
A frequent question raised is that of what or who SAP for Me's target group is. And I’m more than willing to say that the target group is ultimately made up of absolutely everyone who has any connection whatever with SAP. And I truly believe that this will become reality over the next few years, because even business end-users might have a relationship with SAP as they attend SAP training courses for example or acquire SAP learning certificates.
Right now of course, SAP for Me provides the greatest value for people in companies with a connection to SAP and who drive decisions. Enterprise architects for instance, who need a holistic view across the complete purchased product portfolio and all of its aspects, can benefit significantly from SAP for Me. The same is the case for CIOs, business leads, purchasers, controllers, system managers and learning managers.
In my opinion however, it’s not so much about roles as about interests. At the end of the day, I want people to use SAP for Me to get what they need, regardless of what role we perceive them to be in. Of course, under consideration of their available authorizations, I envisage SAP for Me allowing users to select various options to tailor the information that SAP for Me provides in accordance with their specific interests.
Note: Here are the webinar sessions mentioned in the picture "Satisfied Interests & Roles"
The main question now is when will the new capabilities be implemented. Our roadmap is aligned with the capability areas mentioned above, and so it should be quite easy to find the aspects most relevant for your particular interests.
As I pointed out earlier, we are currently spending most of our energy on systems & provisioning and finance & legal. In both of these areas, our goal is to close gaps where things that customers have been asking for were not yet (fully) available. At the same time, we also plan to improve the other areas to bring them into context semantically as mentioned before.
Another aspect I would like to highlight is that we also provide SAP for Me for SAP partners. This is reflected by an addition to our customer roadmap. Soon though we will provide a specific roadmap exclusively covering the scope of partners in more detail. Incidentally, we are planning a dedicated webinar session and accompanying blog focusing on partner capabilities.
Thank you for reading this blog, and allow me to briefly reiterate my core message.
SAP for Me is your customer portal. It connects you seamlessly with all of the information most relevant for you on the basis of your specific SAP portfolio, interests, preferences and context.
It encompasses various capabilities in order to serve the interests of a diverse range of people in your company.
SAP for Me is here to stay and is set to grow. Over time, it will be the enabler for SAP to reduce and streamline its digital information tools and portals.
If you want to learn more about SAP for Me and about the various capability areas in particular, please take a closer look at our webinar series (see important links below).
If you would like to learn more, please feel free to browse through the links provided here.
I hope you enjoyed this blog. If you have any questions at all, please use the comment function or just get in touch with me directly. I’m also keen to hear any ideas or expectations you might have for further blogs.
See you again in the next SAP for Me blog.
Stay safe and healthy,
JJ
Chief Product Owner of SAP for Me
Twitter: @JJComment
SAP for Me is SAP's customer portal
Almost every company these days has a digital channel that serves as what might be termed its digital front door. SAP is no exception here, as evidenced by SAP.com. Many companies also allow customers and other interested parties to exchange ideas on a social platform. At SAP, this is the SAP Community.
Something you might also have encountered at other companies is a customer center or customer portal that picks up existing customers, knows their environment and provides context-specific information and services perfectly tailored to their particular needs. This in a nutshell is what SAP for Me is. It is SAP's customer portal.
Why SAP for Me?
Quite simple: because of feedback from our customers. Many of them told us that SAP has too many separate portals and tools, which are used for different types of information that often overlap. This makes information gathering a burdensome and time-consuming task for customers, with the additional risk of missing out on important and valuable information.
Another key piece of feedback our customers provided was the wish for greater transparency in the form of an overarching picture across a purchased SAP product portfolio, provided in one single location. Building on this transparency, many customers also asked for digital self-services in order to turn insights into immediate actions.
Finally, another aspect that was often aired during talks with customers was the need for our tools to know them better and to go one step further than transparency by providing guidance based on knowledge of the customer's environment as well as the context and interests of the individual using the tool.
With SAP for Me we propose to act on this feedback by providing a digital companion that will continuously grow and improve.
SAP for Me takes advantage of semantics
Semantics isn’t really a brand-new topic, although this doesn’t take anything away from its beauty. I’m a strong supporter of semantic thinking, as it forces us to think how different pieces of information relate to one another. What is the relationship between my product and the systems, relevant learning content, licenses, orders or invoices? SAP for Me can answer these questions.
SAP is YOUR customer portal and will become much more
SAP for Me is therefore your customer portal. It recognizes your purchased SAP product portfolio and centralizes related information in one place. It provides transparency across these information types, together with relevant self-services and links to more detailed information right when you need it.
This however is just the start of a broader vision to become “A customer portal that serves as a digital companion.”
With our semantic approach, it becomes increasingly easy for us to provide completely new insights. Think of a digital companion that can articulate the returns on your SAP software investments in terms of license consumption or functional usage of a product. Or think of this companion reminding you to perform important actions. Imagine a companion recommending a certain learning element, a specific software trial or even providing guidance on how to improve your existing setup. This is what we want to achieve over time with SAP for Me.
We will continuously expand the scope
We are going to continuously improve and expand SAP for Me, not only over the next weeks and months but far beyond. We expect to completely achieve our vision by 2023. After starting SAP for Me as a kind of pilot in 2019, we are currently focusing on providing an ecosystem for our teams here at SAP so that they can easily integrate their content and self-services into SAP for Me. For us this is the key enabler to accelerate the transformation of reducing the information portals and tools at SAP. Nevertheless, replacing tools and portal might not always result in migration to SAP for Me. Depending on the type of information in question, it might also end up in SAP.com or SAP Community. While we are currently taking the first steps towards introducing smart recommendations, we expect this to become our focus in 2022.
The capability areas of SAP for Me
We now know the "why?" and the "how?", so let's continue with the "what?". SAP for Me currently provides seven different capability areas. We might introduce one or two additional areas over time. But for the moment I feel confident that the existing ones will allow us to provide a wealth of great capabilities.
Allow me to briefly outline the various capability areas. As a side note, please bear in mind that this blog accompanies the overview session of our SAP for Me webinar series – season 1. If you are interested in more details about the individual capability areas, you might like to watch a recording of a specific session.
Portfolio & Products
The focus of this area is your purchased SAP portfolio and its related products. SAP for Me users can easily acquire an overview of the constituent parts of the portfolio they have purchased, and can personalize this view for example to display their favorite products. This serves as the perfect starting point for explorations in SAP for Me.
Systems & Provisioning
This area investigates the dimension of systems that are related to an individual product. SAP for Me can be used to locate both cloud-based and on premise systems. While dyed in the wool administrators might choose to stay faithful to their power tools (SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit say), many SAP for Me users will benefit from the fact that they can get a quick and simple overview of what’s going on at system level.
Knowledge & Learning
Knowledge gathering and continuous learning is an essential part of our lives. And it doesn’t stop at the products your company has purchased. Do you want to understand what SAP learnings you are assigned to? Do you want an overview of your earned certificates? Or are you looking for new content in the context of your favorite SAP product? You might be responsible for providing others in your company with learning content, in which case SAP for Me can help you with these tasks too.
Finance & Legal
This is of particular interest for purchasers, controllers or similar roles, as it provides multiple ways of reviewing your product portfolio from a financial angle. You can review your SAP orders, the licensed materials behind these orders, the connection to the individual product or the consumption of your license.
Maintenance & Support
You can review maintenance and support incidents across your company, and you can also quickly find out information like when the next maintenance event will occur in one of your cloud products. Of course, we will enrich this area too over time. We plan for example to introduce comprehensive incident handling across your complete SAP product portfolio.
Users & Contacts
Do you know the contacts provided by SAP for your company? SAP for Me can provide you with this information. It also has the contacts SAP knows in your company. This is of particular interest when it comes to changes in roles and names that you want to communicate to SAP. Instead of this being a cumbersome manual process, you can use SAP for Me and thus make sure that SAP will communicate with the right people on your side going forward.
Another dimension of this capability area is the users who can access SAP for Me. Currently, SAP for Me supports S-Users and SAP Universal ID (UID) users. By the end of this year, SAP for Me will also support P-Users and even anonymous access for certain scenarios. We also plan to provide management for your UID users. As such, there is a lot in the pipeline for this area.
Cross Capabilities
SAP for Me provides a lot of cross capabilities that all other areas can benefit from. For instance, we just made a first version of the central communication center available. This will centralize the communication between SAP and its customers and enable much more user-friendly and context-driven communication.
Another example is the central calendar which we plan to roll out in just a few months. This feature will allow central exploration of important events, such as (maintenance and license events.
And there is even more to come, such as the mobile application for smart phones or the card catalog, which will enable you to customize SAP for Me to your needs.
As I said right at the start, SAP for Me has already taken the first few steps along the journey towards providing you with a smart digital companion. While it can already provide significant value, the scope and value of SAP for Me will grow over the coming months and years.
At the current point in time, we are focused on providing capabilities that are not covered yet elsewhere or are not in the portfolio context. Over the coming months, our highest priority will be the areas of systems and provisioning, and finance & legal, as these areas are where we currently see the greatest demand.
Satisfying various interests - something for everybody
A frequent question raised is that of what or who SAP for Me's target group is. And I’m more than willing to say that the target group is ultimately made up of absolutely everyone who has any connection whatever with SAP. And I truly believe that this will become reality over the next few years, because even business end-users might have a relationship with SAP as they attend SAP training courses for example or acquire SAP learning certificates.
Right now of course, SAP for Me provides the greatest value for people in companies with a connection to SAP and who drive decisions. Enterprise architects for instance, who need a holistic view across the complete purchased product portfolio and all of its aspects, can benefit significantly from SAP for Me. The same is the case for CIOs, business leads, purchasers, controllers, system managers and learning managers.
In my opinion however, it’s not so much about roles as about interests. At the end of the day, I want people to use SAP for Me to get what they need, regardless of what role we perceive them to be in. Of course, under consideration of their available authorizations, I envisage SAP for Me allowing users to select various options to tailor the information that SAP for Me provides in accordance with their specific interests.
Note: Here are the webinar sessions mentioned in the picture "Satisfied Interests & Roles"
Our current roadmap
The main question now is when will the new capabilities be implemented. Our roadmap is aligned with the capability areas mentioned above, and so it should be quite easy to find the aspects most relevant for your particular interests.
As I pointed out earlier, we are currently spending most of our energy on systems & provisioning and finance & legal. In both of these areas, our goal is to close gaps where things that customers have been asking for were not yet (fully) available. At the same time, we also plan to improve the other areas to bring them into context semantically as mentioned before.
Another aspect I would like to highlight is that we also provide SAP for Me for SAP partners. This is reflected by an addition to our customer roadmap. Soon though we will provide a specific roadmap exclusively covering the scope of partners in more detail. Incidentally, we are planning a dedicated webinar session and accompanying blog focusing on partner capabilities.
Summary
Thank you for reading this blog, and allow me to briefly reiterate my core message.
SAP for Me is your customer portal. It connects you seamlessly with all of the information most relevant for you on the basis of your specific SAP portfolio, interests, preferences and context.
It encompasses various capabilities in order to serve the interests of a diverse range of people in your company.
SAP for Me is here to stay and is set to grow. Over time, it will be the enabler for SAP to reduce and streamline its digital information tools and portals.
If you want to learn more about SAP for Me and about the various capability areas in particular, please take a closer look at our webinar series (see important links below).
Important links
If you would like to learn more, please feel free to browse through the links provided here.
Access SAP for Me
https://me.sap.com
SAP for Me on SAP.com
https://www.sap.com/services/for-me.html
SAP for Me on SAP Community
https://community.sap.com/topics/sap-for-me
Our SAP for Me Webinar series
https://blogs.sap.com/2020/04/09/sap-for-me-webinar-series-season-1/
I hope you enjoyed this blog. If you have any questions at all, please use the comment function or just get in touch with me directly. I’m also keen to hear any ideas or expectations you might have for further blogs.
See you again in the next SAP for Me blog.
Stay safe and healthy,
JJ
Chief Product Owner of SAP for Me
Twitter: @JJComment
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