For many years SAP ONE Support Launchpad has been one of the main locations for customers to access SAP support, alerts, and its vast knowledge base. The SAP for Me portal is now the full successor of the launchpad.
“As part of the evolution in providing customers an even better SAP experience, SAP ONE Support Launchpad is now fully part of the SAP for Me portal,” says Peter Kappelmann, SAP for Me product manager. “We’re excited that customers can get even better insights into their SAP product portfolio from within SAP for Me,” adds Anna Withum, SAP for Me customer collaboration manager.
In this interview, Kappelmann and Withum give more details on what the replacement of SAP ONE Support Launchpad means for customers.
Q: What’s the major difference between the old and new portal?
Kappelmann: SAP ONE Support Launchpad was the single entry-point for the services and support world. Its main target audience was system administrators with a technical focus. With more and more applications being offered in the cloud, we’re also serving new target groups: the end users.
For some years now, SAP for Me has been reaching the end users. Thus, now was the right time to enhance the scope of SAP for Me to also cover what’s been known in SAP ONE Support Launchpad. SAP for Me is designed to provide a holistic view of the customer’s SAP landscape, from products, orders, and licenses to provisioning, maintenance, and optimization. It made perfect sense to now include the support-related tools. Everything that was offered in the launchpad continues to be available in SAP for Me. We have expanded the coverage for the needs of the end users. In SAP for Me, we offer so-called dashboards that can give both technical and non-technical users the details they need. One dashboard is labeled “Services & Support.”
The newly developed tools on SAP for Me make use of artificial intelligence (AI) features, which can simplify the user’s interaction with SAP. Examples include the support knowledge search or the channel recommender in the “Get Support” application.
How were customers involved along this journey?
Withum: We already had a good relationship with our pilot group that was established on SAP ONE Support Launchpad. From the very beginning we involved customers in the move to SAP for Me. They received early prototypes and beta features to give us direct feedback on usability.
We had SAP ONE Support Launchpad and SAP for Me running at the same time. This gave us the opportunity to gather early insights and get feedback from the beginning. It also enabled us to tweak a few details and further improve the overall experience. Customers were at our side during the development, so we could build out the SAP for Me portal together. They felt involved and heard.
Program participants helped define important aspects of SAP for Me, such as the first-visit experience, navigation search, integration of applications, and more. Their insights helped us identify any shortcomings and design the final product. They also revealed potential deficits in the early stages, when they could be easily corrected. This type of collaboration will be extended and built upon in future projects.
What was key to the success of this large-scale migration?
Kappelmann: As mentioned, customer involvement was our key component in the migration. Not only were we building something new for our support customers, this was also new for SAP. We combined the service and support world, which included a lot of tools, Web sites, and services to offer our customers.
The key ingredient to success was considering the needs of the great number of users who would be touched by the move. For many customers, SAP ONE Support Launchpad was their daily work environment. Having the launchpad and SAP for Me run in parallel helped them get used to the new environment at their own pace. This also helped ensure the necessary acceptance.
What can customers look forward to in the future?
Withum: We will transition more and more SAP line-of-business customer portals to SAP for Me. The portal reduction will help simplify operation complexity and associated costs. More importantly, it will improve our customers’ user experience by replacing fragmented Web site landscapes with a central entry point across all SAP solutions.
As it could get a bit overwhelming when a lot of services and tools are offered in one place, these will be enriched with new self-services and artificial intelligence. Add on top of that the diverse focus of users, and personalization and intuitive customization features will help the users see what’s really important for them. The addition of new self-service scenarios will help make transactions and the interaction with SAP for Me more efficient and less time-consuming.
How can one get started with SAP for Me?
Kappelmann: Explore and try out SAP for Me. Join our regular SAP for Me webcasts or quarterly rollout sessions where we share the latest news, features, and upcoming releases. SAP for Me also has a vast knowledge library of information that fits each user’s level of need.
Regina Postman is part of Customer Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.