SAP for Me is a new tool for customers offering everything they want to know about their product portfolio, plus added services to help improve productivity.
Imagine if every SAP customer had one place to go to find up-to-date information about their purchased business software — how well users are adopting it, how many seats are open within a license, what learning content is available. Imagine also that customers could access self-services like expanding their license to help them get the most out of their solutions.
This is the main goal of the SAP for Me portal, one finalist vying for the 2019 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award.
The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.
The idea behind SAP for Me is simple and powerful. There have been attempts to launch such a tool in the past, but the topic gained traction after it was fast-tracked as part of the company’s “Build Customers for Life” program under then SAP Chief Operating Officer and now SAP Co-CEO Christian Klein.
Transparency Customers Need to Decide
The SAP product landscape has become very broad, making it a challenge for customers to manage their portfolios. Numerous online tools are available for this purpose, but each has its own entry point, data source, and look and feel. SAP for Me aims to alleviate this problem by integrating data from various portals to provide one source of truth.
“We’re consolidating existing tools and providing transparency so customers can make more informed decisions about their portfolios,” says Juergen Jakowski, project lead and chief product owner for SAP for Me.
Customers are already taking notice. “We are happy to hear that SAP for Me will bring together information from different sources, and especially that a commercial view of our SAP portfolio will be made available,” says Frank Engelbrecht from Deutsche Telekom IT GmbH.
But, Jakowski explains, the tool’s purpose extends beyond just data integration: “With SAP for Me, we plan to provide customers with a digital companion and consultant that never sleeps.”
For example, portal will have advice on how to increase user adoption of a product — information of interest to both the customer and SAP. There are also plans to enable customers to update their company data in backend SAP systems, as well as to aggregate running data by SAPPHIRE NOW in 2020, helping customers to monitor current product usage and relate guidance and recommendations to it.
Good for Customers, Good for SAP
Integrating multiple data sources for SAP for Me has meant engaging with other teams.
“The charm of this project is that we’re not only working to improve the customer experience, we are also indirectly improving our own internal processes,” Jakowski says. “Together with willing partners within SAP, we are discovering gaps, improving our process chains, and ultimately helping customers use our products.
Improve the Customer Experience with X-Data
There are already plans to track how early customers are using a beta version of the tool and combine it with experience data (X-data) from Experience Management solutions from SAP (Qualtrics) to make improvements to the customer experience.
Jakowski is excited about the opportunities offered by X-data to analyze and learn more about customer wishes and needs. Bcause the goal of SAP for Me isn’t just more productive customers, it’s also happy customers.
An open beta version of SAP for Me is currently available for SAP customers. A mobile-friendly version for smartphones is planned for the second quarter of 2020.
Finalist Fast Facts
- Submission Title: SAP for Me: Our Customers’ Digital Companion
- Team: Jueürgen Jakowski, Olga Miller, Oguzhan Genis, Rene Grul, Robert Wetzold, Remy Saint Cricq, Katja Mehl, Kristian Kraljic, Anna Withum, Simon Dyszack.
- SAP Board Area: Intelligent Enterprise Group
- Achievement: A tool for SAP customers to get transparency across their SAP solutions and guidance to relevant actions, all in one place. Customers have greater transparency based on their role and interests, can explore relevant insights and drill-down into specific information types, and can take instant action and initiate follow-up activities.
- Impact: Customers can conveniently manage repeated activities and speed up the interaction and outcome of tasks. SAP can learn more about customers to optimize services and make valuable recommendations.
This article first appeared on the SAP News Center.
