Introducing the SAP BTP Onboarding Blog Series

Hello community friends! It’s been quite some time since I’ve actively engaged in the community and I have to say I am absolutely thrilled to be back at it! For the past few years, I’ve taken a break from broader education and evangelism to work with customers one on one as a customer engagement executive for SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). In that role, I had the pleasure of focusing full time on ensuring customers were successful with their purchases and gaining the most value possible. While that role was fun and taught me a lot, I’ve recently decided to take on a new role at SAP as an Onboarding Advisor for SAP BTP.

While working so closely with customers, I started to see patterns in some of the pain points they were stumbling upon. One of the biggest pain points was around initial access to SAP purchases. If not done correctly, this can lead to a poor first experience and unnecessary frustrations on both the customer and SAP side. SAP leadership has listened to this feedback and decided to double down our efforts to eliminate this confusion and better streamline our processes.

As an initial step in that direction, SAP has made significant investments in Onboarding. We’ve rolled out SAP BTP Onboarding Webinars and I invite you to join us, see our events page for options and registration links. You’ll also start seeing people with ‘Onboarding Advisor’ titles from various SAP solutions joining your meetings and this is a good thing! Know that these people are assigned to ensure you, our valued customer, have what you need to login and get started right away with your SAP purchase. Ensuring customers are enabled for success immediately after contract start is something, I’m personally very passionate about.

The first thing that came to my mind when considering this role was what exactly is onboarding? Merriam-Webster defines onboarding as the following:

• : the act or process of orienting and training a new employee
• : the act or process of familiarizing a new customer with one’s products or services
• : the act or process of converting data to digital form

The second definition is applicable to us when discussing the SAP Business Technology Platform. My new focus is to deliver you enablement, resources and knowledge nuggets that will help familiarize you with your SAP Business Technology Platform purchase. Some of you that have been working with SAP BTP for some time may be wondering,

‘how is she going to do this? BTP is huge and a portfolio of solutions, not just one thing you can onboard too.’

To those of you asking yourself this, I’ll be truthful in sharing that I too asked myself and my leadership this same question ‘where does SAP BTP onboarding begin and end? When we say SAP Business Technology Platform what specifically, are we saying we onboard to?’ Before we can answer this question, we need to define SAP BTP.

What is SAP Business Technology Platform?

SAP BTP is a suite of products and services positioned to help customers become intelligent enterprises. Each of the 4 pillars consist of unique product and service offerings – more details on specific offerings can be found here. Some of the offerings are delivered together, others are standalone. SAP BTP as a suite is how we present to our customers the offerings we have available to help you on your digital transformation journey. SAP is coming up on its 50^th anniversary (wow!), and over those 50 years this company has continued to develop and deliver a great deal of solutions, services, and technologies to help businesses run better and improve people’s lives. With the breadth of solution portfolio SAP offers, it’s difficult to put it all into one image but nevertheless, what you see above is a great starting point.

When thinking about SAP BTP, the specifics of your digital transformation are less important. What is important, is that you understand that data is power for any business. You need to collect and store your data and then you need to gain insights from that data so you can make informed decisions and eventually learn more about your business and consumer base. You understand that different types of data need to be stored in different systems. You know that keeping things separate has its place and makes sense, but you also know that sometimes you may need data from 2 or more systems to interact, either in a unidirectional or bidirectional manner. You understand that SAP delivers world class software but that perhaps it doesn’t fit the specific needs of your business 1:1 and you need to extend the offering or change it to fit your needs. Finally, you understand that we’re getting ready to close out 2021 and that means technology has evolved so much so that you can benefit from smart technologies to complete redundant work for you so that you can make better use of the brain power you have from your teams.

Circling back to the earlier question – How do you onboard customers to a suite of offerings? You break it down into pieces starting with the largest one, in our case, the SAP BTP cockpit. The SAP BTP cockpit is the central point of entry to over 90 services. This is the place where administrators in your company will access subscriptions and applications and manage the activities associated with them. It is incredibly important that you understand how SAP delivers you these services and what steps you need to take to be intentional in how you set things up. We designed our offering in a way that empowers you to leverage it in the most meaningful way for YOUR use cases.

In the following blog series, I’m going to take you through the following:

• An SAP BTP Analogy – I want the SAP BTP cockpit to be something all of us can relate to and understand, regardless of your technical experience.
• Commercial models – I’ll explain the options SAP has today for how you can license the cockpit.
• Initial access – I’ll explain who has initial access to login, how to login and the first 2 important things global admins need to accomplish.
• SAP BTP Cockpit Account structure – I’ll explain how SAP setup and designed the cockpit. What options do you have and what decisions do you need to make?
• SAP BTP Account model – There is no one size fits all, but I’ll share with you some of the more commonly seen account models.

In addition to this blog series, we’re hosting SAP BTP Onboarding webinars. Be sure to check out our events page for details and registration links. I hope to see you there! I’m really excited for this new opportunity and even more excited that this role brings me closer to you all in the community.