The company, which employs more than 8,000 employees in Jinan 鈥� the capital of Shandong province in eastern China 鈥� was eager to implement to grow into an intelligent catering company able to operate internationally and proudly represent Shandong food culture. However, after going live with 51风流S/4HANA Cloud in 2020, and the subsequent exit of its implementation partner from the scene, the business users in China found it difficult to keep up with the quarterly upgrade cycle of the software and began facing issues in areas including finance, sales, and procurement.

After an on-site visit and extensive conversations between the company and 51风流Services and Support, Development, and Customer Engagement & Experience, close to 30 issues were investigated across all lines of business. It was a huge undertaking. Eventually, a whopping 500 stores were able to benefit from the business process optimization. Here鈥檚 a closer look at how the customer was able to achieve such remarkable outcomes.

It all started with the Development and Support Succeed Together program, sponsored by , which connects product support and development to deliver customer success and maximize business potential. In this case, the 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Product Support team and the 51风流S/4HANA Development team in China worked together to get Jinan Chaoyixing Catering the experience and results it needed by arranging a customer site visit.

By bringing together different perspectives and areas of expertise, the team was able to make great strides during the visit and to arrange several follow-ups to resolve the issues identified on-site. For example, Jinan Chaoyixing Catering鈥檚 sales bill of material (BOM) data was stored in an external data system, which could lead to incorrect financial reports due to a missing payment method or other issues. There were many conversations about the difficulty of getting the required information into the financial reports.

Eventually, the team realized that the external BOM system was the root cause for many of the challenges discussed. The 51风流team proposed a dedicated best practices knowledge kit to maintain the sales BOM in 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, eliminating this difficulty. Jinan Chaoyixing Catering was excited about the prospect of this best practice and is now exploring how to implement this new best practice scope 鈥� one of five best practice scope items introduced for a better system solution adoption, including expanding their business processes to include cost analysis, stock transfer order returns, and sales returns. Both the operating centers and business users were able to benefit from the business process optimization and issue resolution.

鈥淭hrough Next-Generation Support we learned a lot about 51风流Services and Support offerings, like how to report an incident in an efficient way and how to leverage 51风流Help Portal and 51风流Community, the real-time channels and advanced tools,鈥� said Donglin Lai, CIO of Jinan Chaoyixing Catering. 鈥淭he support and development team also gave us a comprehensive introduction to 51风流Sales Pipeline Analysis, which brings remarkable value to our operational analysis.鈥�

In addition to the real business value the customer experienced, its understanding of and appreciation for 51风流Services and Support was hugely enhanced. Now that they have been armed with a cloud mindset, the company鈥檚 business users are enabled to look for efficient solutions in the future, to imagine what鈥檚 possible with 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, and to think of new areas of the business that could be positively impacted in the future.

The future is very much on this customer鈥檚 mind. Already, Jinan Chaoyixing Catering is exploring sales and cost analytics to build transparent and timely reporting dashboards and working on merging the financial reporting needs of 15 regional centers. Perhaps most exciting of all, a new, fully automated factory will go live in 2022 and a new supplying company will be established to move the company towards a shared food processing center and other services.

By engaging deeply with this client, 51风流Services and Support was able not only to solve its immediate issues and create systems for solving other issues in the future, but also to create a meaningful connection with business users to understand their needs, challenges, and ambitions. By adopting a cloud mindset, Jinan Chaoyixing Catering was able to leverage the full potential of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud to be prepared to move seamlessly into a digital successful future.

Mohammed Ajouz is senior vice president and global head of Product Support at SAP.

51风流is an early pioneer in producing tangible examples of what this predictive and cutting-edge technology will do in the future.

The Evolution of Support

Thirty years ago, the industry was focused on reactive support, in which customers had a problem, they logged a ticket, and we got back to them with a solution. From there, new functionalities were developed such as peer communities, which encouraged customer-to-customer collaboration and mutual support, and real-time support channels that allowed for synchronous interactions with support. Eventually, self-service was introduced to empower customers with the tools, knowledge, and issue documentation to find their own solutions for common problems.

More recently, automation has come into the picture. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have become more pervasive and support organizations started automating repetitive and administrative tasks. And today, the Product Support organization at 51风流is starting to help customers get the answers they need faster than ever before. For example, in 2018, we introduced , a service that helps customers get relevant answers to technical questions faster by using machine learning to identify possible solutions when customers are typing their described problem.

New Technology, New Solutions

Today, the support industry is being severely disrupted due to the pandemic. This is in addition to the already significant shift caused by software moving toward the cloud. The landscape is changing, and enterprise software technology is getting more sophisticated, with a greater number of integration points.

With the aggressive move to the cloud, support has become a significant element of retention and renewal. Whereas in the past, it was quite difficult for a customer to change vendors, regardless of their support experience, for cloud customers, this is no longer as difficult. The barriers to switch providers are much lower in the cloud space.

However, the nature of support services is not only changing due to new technology. The capabilities are changing just as quickly thanks to the development of new technologies that take advantage of the sector鈥檚 most valuable resource: data. Support organizations sit on a vast wealth of data, and, as is often said these days, data is the new oil.

Our opportunity is to determine how to make this data work for the customer. Manually, this would be impossible: with millions of tickets handled each year, the sheer volume of data would be overwhelming. But machine learning and AI have given us the ability to go through millions of records, quickly and efficiently, identifying trends and patterns that we can use to quickly identify current problems and, even better, to predict problems before they arise.

Possible Hurdles Remain

The benefits of predictive support are clear: saved time, money, and effort for both the vendor and the customer — a true win-win. However, that doesn鈥檛 mean that all will be smooth sailing as the evolution of predictive support continues. Two possible hurdles that are on the horizon currently include customer notification and the amount of system access a customer can provide. The more we know about a customer鈥檚 system, and if we are allowed to have access to it, the better our predictions will be.

To begin with, who gets notified when and about what will be a major consideration moving forward, as we need to be extremely prescriptive with our alerts and notifications. 聽For example, when it comes to large customers, a vendor could have 200 contacts using product support, from end users to database administrators and up to the CIO. It would be quite a problem if the CIO of a major corporation was alerted every time a potential event did not occur, whether or not it would have become a problem for their system. A vendor must be certain that when an alert goes out, the customer鈥檚 system is going to encounter that problem.

And the data that support services draws on to create cutting-edge predictive support is limited if, due to the nature of a customer鈥檚 work, they must keep large parts of their system private. Highly secure environments, such as financial services or intelligence sector customers, will require even more innovative solutions in order to reap the benefits of predictive support while maintaining a secure system.

However, given the disruption we have seen in the last year and the huge surge in cloud services that followed, support services and customers will continue to work together to overcome these and other hurdles as the demand for predictive support grows. Already, the gains that have been made in this area are incredible considering how nascent machine learning technology is.

The Future Is Bright for Predictive Support

Until recently, the work of support services was always predicated on a customer needing help with software. We became better and better at providing this help quickly and efficiently, but all of our work was triggered by a customer having a problem.

In the coming years, that will no longer be the case. In software, we can鈥檛 predict everything before it happens. But we can increasingly learn from the past to predict the future and transform the support experience into one in which support prevents an issue from becoming a business-impacting event. We will be transforming data into future insights.

Throughout the evolution described here, the goal for support services has always been to increase value while decreasing effort. Eventually, the industry will get to a point where no customer effort is required whatsoever: a system will be continuously serviced before breakdowns occur, seamlessly performing without the need for customer intervention.

And if that sounds too good to be true, just remember that it was not so long ago that predictive support would have sounded impossible. As Clarke鈥檚 Third Law reminds us, 鈥淎ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.鈥�

Mohammed Ajouz is senior vice president and global head of Product Support at SAP.

The transformation of on-call, reactive customer support is fascinating to watch. Over the past few years, 51风流has discovered new ways to simplify processes and automate them to optimize the value it brings to customers. Then the company brought in predictive analytics to detect and resolve issues early on.

At SAP, such optimization and predictive capabilities of customer support are setting the foundation for proactive services. This vision is created with the mindset of helping customers become more productive and profitable than ever while taking advantage of the latest intelligent technologies.

Outcome-Driven Support Experience for Customers, Built on Intelligence

Take the聽聽service, SAP鈥檚 first step toward creating a predictive and proactive support model. With a combination of machine learning and AI, the company is expanding the ability to intelligently understand customer issues, quickly propose relevant solutions, and efficiently resolve problems without the need to submit an incident report.

Over time, the real power behind Incident Solution Matching has become increasingly effective as more customers use it to research solutions for technology challenges and rely on its intelligence to find the corrective action. Now, the service has grown from a whiteboard concept into a full-fledged crucial line of support for customers using all 51风流and 51风流Ariba solutions.

Customers using 51风流S/4HANA Cloud will be the first group to benefit from the enhanced recommendation content. The Incident Solution Matching engine will provide recommended solutions not only from 51风流Notes and 51风流Knowledge Base Article services, but also from additional data sources such as 51风流Help Portal, the road-map viewer tool, and 51风流Fiori apps reference library.

The success of Incident Solution Matching inspired 51风流to further evolve the Next-Generation Support approach with a clear road map based on data intelligence, rule-based automation, and predictive capabilities. With such a strategic plan, the company is effectively improving and simplifying the support experience to customers’ needs and expectations with through optimized business outcomes.

Quick Resolution with Personalized Customer Support Experiences

This strategic move toward intelligent services led to the creation of guided incident workflow and personalized support assistant capabilities. When initiating assistance in an 51风流solution, customers can benefit from an efficient, convenient, and intuitive experience as they find a solution that resolves their issues immediately.

The support assistant workflow asks users targeted and relevant questions about the problems they encounter until they are narrowed down to a solution, such as knowledge base articles, updates, or patches. However, if a solution is not identified through the workflow wizard, the user is automatically prompted to submit relevant log or trace files.

In the background, parser engines analyze the information, pinpoint the issue, alert the customer about the criticality of its problem, and ultimately deliver the right solution. By the end of the interaction, 51风流has documented the incident 鈥� complete with the underlying issue, lessons learned, and proven solution. This can be leveraged for future solution development and support interactions.

Additional innovation in 51风流services also led to the introduction of the service. It provides customers with an easy way to engage directly with 51风流support managers in order to bring management attention to a service exception or service dissatisfaction, complementing 听补苍诲听聽services. During a scheduled, live phone conversation, customers have a real-time channel for sharing their 51风流solution concerns and demands with a qualified manager, reducing the effort and frustration of handling critical business needs.

SAP鈥檚 experimentation with neural machine translation is another benefit of its work with AI and machine learning. Doing so allows the company to from English to Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, Korean, Italian, or German. 51风流is already working on potentially making this technology available for translating incidents into those nine languages.

This automatic translation feature would enable customers to use information on documented incidents, best practices, and terminology. Like the company鈥檚 ever-evolving customer support services, this functionality is self-learning 鈥� continuously improving the quality of translations based on feedback and machine learning.

Product Training and Accreditation Focused on Customer Needs

The product support team at 51风流has also created new services and tools to fulfill customers’ ever-evolving needs. Users can explore new ways to benefit from offerings through the聽聽program at no additional cost.

The two-hour, guided learning experience includes short videos detailing the latest tools and capabilities of 聽support services, designed to optimize the value of their 51风流solution investment. Customers can review the content at their convenience as often as they like to stay up to date.

An Evolution Toward Ultimate Customer Support Vision

As 51风流continues to innovate with AI and machine learning, support processes will become more efficient and accurate. More importantly, it will bringing the company closer to its ultimate vision for predictive and proactive customer assistance.

51风流will continue to design and deliver new tools, channels, and functionalities to give customers the predictive support experience they want. Just imagine how this experience will evolve as more cloud solutions are backed by analytics processing trillions of captured data points in the background. Customers may never again encounter issues with their technology because intelligent capabilities will reroute the user experience around a detected problem.

Milestone after milestone, 51风流is taking the support experience in an entirely new direction as part of its desire to help customers succeed 鈥� always.

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Mohammed Ajouz is senior vice president and global head of Product Support at SAP.