From expanded functionality and enhanced transformation planning, driven by up-front insights to additional new product content and extended access to test automation solutions, 2023 will be a big year for 51风流support.
51风流is moving into the second year of its transformation of support. Andreas Heckmann, executive vice president and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP, is excited about all that鈥檚 planned. 鈥淲e鈥檙e making great progress on our comprehensive vision to serve customers better along the entire lifecycle. We look forward to providing an even better experience around customer self-services,鈥� says Heckmann. 鈥淭his year is going to be a year of getting even more prescriptive and offering even more guidance to our customers. Functionality will be substantially expanded with a lot more content added for new products.鈥�
In this conversation, Heckmann gave more details on the goals and progress of this vision.
Q: 51风流Business Transformation Center will be introduced at this year鈥檚 51风流Sapphire, held in Orlando, Florida. Can you give details on what鈥檚 planned?
A: Customers will see a first version of what we call 51风流Business Transformation Center. This is part of the business transformation suite. The focus is to support customers in the planning stage of their 51风流S/4HANA software transformation. With this, customers can simulate their transformation and plan and anticipate what the transformation could look like when complete. Let me give an example. If a customer says, 鈥淲hat will it look like if we exclude certain company codes or business data?鈥� they will see in real time what this means to the amount of data and information needing to be transformed. The ultimate result is up-front insights that help customers shape and drive their transformation planning.
Can you share what鈥檚 planned around 51风流Cloud ALM?
We鈥檒l deeply embed business process modeling capabilities of the 51风流Signavio portfolio in 鈥� our strategic cloud-based platform for customers to manage their entire application lifecycle. Customers can get access to a world-leading business process management solution to discover and adapt 51风流best practices for accelerated solution delivery. Our focus is to give customers the best possible experience for their business users.
We鈥檙e also extending access to the to our 51风流Enterprise Support on-premise and cloud edition customers at no extra cost. Our customers can use the solution to help automate testing during their 51风流projects and validate their business processes when new 51风流releases are applied to the 51风流solution landscape. We expect to seamlessly integrate the Tricentis testing capabilities with a fully automated setup within 51风流Cloud ALM. These cloud-based test automation capabilities will help ease the testing of the 51风流solutions and help facilitate the adoption of 51风流cloud product releases.
In a world where we want to innovate and deliver value to end users and customers at an always higher speed, 51风流and Tricentis are significantly lowering the barrier to test automation. I鈥檓 very satisfied with the great partnership with Tricentis. This unique solution now brings test automation capabilities fully integrated in our business transformation suite for 51风流Enterprise Support customers.
You mentioned plans for new support functionality. Can you give some examples?
We are reshaping our content and knowledge management strategy to give customers a more robust search experience that leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning optimizations, and analytics functionalities. This search index scans knowledge from many different data sources during a single search. 鈥溾�� will be the main entry point to 51风流support and for searches. Additional features help us understand and optimize the search and knowledge relevancy at every step of the support journey.
Within , we expect to see progress on the bidirectional dialogue in and 51风流for Me. This proactive, two-way communication will help keep customers informed about news related to the solutions they are using, alert them to potential issues to watch out for, and deliver support-critical information they need to know.
Furthermore, our focus for Built-In Support is to provide predictive and preventative support. Our biggest wins are when we resolve potential problems without customers even knowing a problem might exist or could have occurred. Our AI services help us continuously improve the quality of real-time recommendations for when customers search for a solution to an issue or create a case for support.
This year, Built-In Support will expand into more 51风流solutions and will grow the functionality and adoption across our cloud solutions.
There鈥檚 also a lot going on in 51风流internally as part of the transformation of support that indirectly benefits customers. Can you describe a few of these indirect benefits?
An important internal change is that we鈥檙e increasing our capability of cross-expert interaction. More and more cases require close collaboration of various experts with different knowledge, experience, perspectives, and so on. We鈥檝e introduced an internal framework and technology that lets experts dynamically assemble and quickly collaborate on the same problem. This reduces redundancy, eliminates handover delays, and collapses the time it takes to get experts aligned. That obviously accelerates the resolution substantially for our customers.
We鈥檝e greatly improved the predictive capabilities of our cloud solutions. These predictive capabilities will give us early indications when something isn鈥檛 right. This, in turn, prompts us to start analyzing the situation and take steps to mitigate and resolve issues before the customer even recognizes or experiences problems or service degradation on their end.
These capabilities have been successfully tested and applied to a set of our solutions. This year we鈥檒l extend the reach of these technologies and onboard increasingly more solutions. Plus, we鈥檒l also integrate this more closely into our processes so our experts can respond swiftly to evolving situations.
What suggestions do you have for customers in 2023?
While our focus is to be more prescriptive and provide more guidance to our customers, it鈥檚 important that they also make an effort to stay up to speed on the things we鈥檙e doing. Follow closely on what we鈥檙e doing, embrace the new ideas and improvements, and start consuming them. It鈥檚 my motto to 鈥渄elight customers always,鈥� and we鈥檝e had the customer in mind with all the improvements that we provide and whatever we do.
Customers should talk within their organizations about how they can use all of these improvements. If you have questions, reach out to us. Let鈥檚 explore together how you can make best use of them. At the end of the day, we can invent the best features and options, but if customers stick to their old ways and don鈥檛 embrace new approaches, they鈥檙e missing out on the many benefits that can make their work lives easier. That would be a shame.
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Regina Postman is part of Customer Solution Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.