The value of good coaching should never be underestimated. It encourages knowledge development, promotes self-reflection and correction, and elevates performance and productivity. But more importantly, the right coaching can create stronger bonds across all levels of a team – driving positive results and outcomes over the long term.
Partner enablement through coaching has become a mainstay for SAP partners, changing the dynamics of innovation with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Individual, real-time, and live access to SAP expertise provides continuous assistance with unique use cases – ranging from advisory, architecture review, and technical guidance to prototyping, realization support, certification, and demand generation programs.
The Opportunity to Overcome Challenges Faster
While innovation, at its core, is about solving problems, the discovery of new use cases can bring new questions and challenges. Examples include which best-practice architecture can help realize a scenario faster and deliver the expected outcomes? What should be included in the bill of materials to help ensure a new process or technology runs without disrupting the rest of the business?
Unfortunately, the answers to these and many other case-by-case questions are not always readily available through existing learning tools and documentation. But with the introduction of a portfolio of partner coaching services for SAP BTP, SAP partners can get the insight they need for a specific use case from SAP experts. They can short-circuit the challenges and complexities of their use cases and resolve their development or implementation milestones more quickly and with confidence.
Partner Co-Innovation Desk and Coaching Service Portfolio
Let’s take a look at the coaching offerings that are on the menu for SAP partners.
End-to-end partner co-innovation support
When unsure of where to start on a co-innovation journey, SAP partners can request support from the partner co-innovation desk by requesting the free partner co-innovation discovery service, available within the partner benefits catalog (login required).
Our team of experts subsequently engages with partners in one-on-one coaching sessions to discuss how to get started and which enablement, resources, and coaching services can best support them. With this level of assistance, partners can realize a productive co-innovation journey along a comprehensive lifecycle.
Coaching support of use cases for SAP BTP
To answer specific requirements for an innovation journey with SAP BTP, partners can select individual offerings from the coaching portfolio.
Take, for example, the co-innovated with SAP program that helps SAP partners productize and take their ideas and intellectual property (IP) to market – from idea to certified solution. In a one-to-one model, the comprehensive program provides SAP experts who can guide partners through each phase of the co-innovation process from concepts and design to build and monetization.
While the co-innovated with SAP program supports the co-innovation journey, SAP also offers tailored coaching to assist partners at specific steps of their innovation journey.
Community of partner and SAP experts
For specific solutions or use cases, partners can ask any and all questions in the SAP BTP partner group, under the ONE SAP Community, monitored by SAP experts.
Use case advisory
High-level counseling guides our partners on the development of extension applications using SAP BTP and the creation of business models to commercialize them. In these advisory sessions, SAP experts help our partners with advice on how to take their applications to market, including:
- Extensibility advisory: This one-to-one extensibility guidance is available to help partners develop and go to market with extensions for solutions within SAP BTP. The offering covers extensions for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, intelligent spend management solutions from SAP, small and midsize business solutions, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and the SAP Customer Experience portfolio.
- Commercial model advisory: This one-to-one advisory service is for partners that already have a tangible use case and a development plan for an offering based on SAP BTP and want to take the next step of commercialization.
Architecture review and technical guidance
SAP partners can request a technical advisory session, an online session with an SAP expert. Partners can gain solution architecture guidance or validation, best practices for extension and integration development, and data-to-value scenarios. In addition, they can work with SAP experts to troubleshoot specific issues or acquire conceptual understanding of certain topics.
Prototyping support
SAP Co-Innovation Lab experts offer support to our partners on their journey from an idea to a prototype running on SAP BTP. Partners can participate in Hack2Build to create a prototype around a technology theme, or engage in the Sprint1 program to focus their efforts on a dedicated industry or business theme with curated use cases. Through hackathons and the support of SAP experts, partners can learn the necessary code and present their final prototype. The SAP Co-Innovation Lab team provides subsequent support to mature the prototype into a final product.
Solution realization support
Support is also offered to partners in the technical realization stage. This entails support and provisioning of the required system landscapes. For example, infrastructure services can provide access to highly complex system landscapes configured by SAP experts and build services help partners successfully port, construct, or integrate their solutions to SAP products and platforms.
Certification and demand generation
After completing their solution development, partners can certify their solution through SAP Integration and Certification Center. While optional, this step is strongly recommended to gain additional accreditation featured on SAP Store, SAP’s online marketplace. Partners can also be accredited by SAP as outsourcing partners for operations enabled by SAP technologies, such as SAP BTP. Another bonus is the demand generation support through the App4Growth service when solutions are added to SAP Store.
Advancing the Future of Innovation – Together
Worldwide, SAP partners perform more than 80% of SAP solution implementations. And as you can see, with a comprehensive coaching service portfolio, we strive to help ensure our partners get the right level of support – on their terms.
The portfolio of partner coaching services can give partners and our joint customers the support they need to transform organizations, industries, and economies for everyone’s benefit. The more partners share and grow their knowledge, the more impressive their future growth becomes as they give our joint customers innovation experiences that deliver immediate results and long-term outcomes.
If you have not done so already, please join us on the journey with SAP BTP, attend the partner certification academies, and get certified today! You can also engage with your peers through the partner community for SAP BTP (login required). We look forward to driving successful business outcomes together.
- Access to SAP BTP, including free tier services (SAP partners only)
- Enablement path for SAP BTP (SAP partners only)
- Top 10 SAP BTP partner enablement resources (SAP partners only)
- Software partnership opportunities through SAP PartnerEdge, Build
- SAP Learning Journey guides, including certifications
- Partner certification academies for SAP BTP (SAP partners only)
- The competency framework
Pavel Penaz is global head of Partner Solution Adoption Strategy and Execution for SAP Business Technology Platform at SAP.