Reducing business complexity is a major strategic objective for SAP. By delivering best-in-class, industry-leading products and services, we help customers with a product portfolio that builds an important backbone to their business.
What is called customer experience goes far beyond the pure experience of the purchased products, however. Processing the purchase, controlling the costs, monitoring the value that comes with the product, easily identifying new opportunities to optimize the product portfolio: it all plays an essential part of how the customer experience is being perceived.
And in today’s 24/7 business environment, acting fast is important. The current conditions of working remotely and being physically distant from each other underlines the need for a digital solution that allows for viewing and immediately acting on business-critical information. We need access to information at a moment’s notice. It must be easy and relate to our specific business role.
Transparency across the various facets of the entire purchased SAP product portfolio is very important for our customers — I speak from a place of knowledge when I say that.
Imagine easy access to all current product licenses, quantities, and how they have been ordered in a one-stop shop, one that also provides insights into employee product utilization and important product notifications when an action is required. Easy access saves real time and real money.
Let’s take it to another level. Let’s make it holistic and as simple as one click.
Digital Companion and Central Point Access
With the idea of a digital companion in mind, the SAP for Me journey begins with the purpose of aggregating everything relevant to the user in one place. Most customers are familiar with SAP.com as the main entry point to explore product offerings. They may also know SAP Community as a place for customers to exchange information with others or to simply follow community members and their insights.
To explore their purchased product portfolio, SAP for Me is the answer. In addition to SAP.com and SAP Community, it forms the primary access point into SAP, serving as a dedicated customer portal with strong focus on individual customer needs, providing an effective digital self-service.
SAP for Me is designed to deliver important alerts, metrics, and information about a purchased SAP product portfolio, based on user preferences. It collects information that previously resided in various places into one environment, with a clear set of capabilities areas. This includes “Financial & Legal,” which offers customers insights on licensed materials and orders for on-premise and cloud products. It also includes license consumptions, which currently focuses on cloud solutions but is planned to include on-premise solutions in the future.
SAP for Me started in the finance area because that is where most customer feedback resides. However, we wanted it to cover the full spectrum of interests from a customer’s perspective. Today, SAP for Me delivers business critical information to our customers on “Products & Portfolios,” “Systems & Provisioning,” “Knowledge & Learning,” “Maintenance & Support,” and “User & Contact” management.
SAP for Me makes disparate information a thing of the past. Customers find everything they need to know about their product portfolio in one place. It is as simple as that.
More Than a Simplified Dashboard
While simplifying access to customer-specific product information, SAP for Me is a comprehensive and sophisticated tool that offers information based on important role-relevant parameters. Starting with an intelligent home screen, customers will find all relevant data related to their SAP product portfolio in a holistic environment. From there, users can drill down into their respective product topics — for example, gaining insights into why an alert was triggered and then leveraging SAP for Me to take the appropriate action.
Most users will take the list of products associated with their user ID and start their exploration from there. For example, a user with an interest in support might start with the support and maintenance dashboard to review the status of support tickets. A business owner might start in the central calendar feature in order to get information about upcoming events such as scheduled downtimes or license renewals. Finance or IT executives might start working with the finance dashboard to view their license and consumption data, or think about product training, another critical aspect of an organization’s efficiency.
SAP for Me helps close the loop by providing information on how many training sessions were started and completed to date, based on user IDs. Users do not need to jump from one access point to the next to find information, to execute a decision, or to determine what training is needed. SAP for Me significantly assists customers by providing full visibility in one place.
Comprehensive Transparency of SAP Investment
Before SAP for Me was developed, customers had to log in at multiple access points to obtain comprehensive information about their product portfolio. The focus was on designing an environment that would let customers easily grasp how their products were adopted and performing.
In my role as CIO, it is critically important that technology investments are made based on real business needs. I need a comprehensive view of how that investment is performing. This is also true for SAP products — if they are underutilized, they are affecting our customers organizations’ efficiency and, more importantly, they have a detrimental impact on the ROI of the software investment.
Turning important metrics into real context by connecting the dots, SAP for Me allows customers to develop a better understanding of how to maximize the value from their SAP software investment.
Technology investment decisions made by CIOs are always about their organization’s efficiency. That is certainly true for SAP as well as for our customers. To me that also translates into providing an efficient way to manage that investment. SAP for Me provides comprehensive transparency that greatly enhances customers’ SAP experience.
For more information about SAP for Me or to view a demo, visit me.sap.com.
Florian Roth is CIO of SAP SE.