When we started to talk, Andreas Heckmann, executive vice president and head of Customer Solution Support & Innovation at SAP, stated, 鈥淎lthough it was one of the most challenging years in my professional history, it was still a year filled with opportunities. We are seeing traction in the transformation of customer support I described 11 months ago, and we delivered a great amount of product innovations to our customers.鈥�

In this interview, Heckmann gives insight into how the transformation is continuing.

Q: How has 2022 been going for you in the transformation?

A: I鈥檓 proud of the notable, award-winning product releases that are directly relevant to supporting economic needs and helping with sustainability. Take, for example, the solution. We鈥檙e enabling agribusinesses to tap into their vast source of farming data by leveraging data science and machine learning. This farming intelligence helps them leverage processes and services to better forecast and increase farming yields and quality. It will also help them use the right balance of water resources and help keep fertilizer and crop protection to a minimum. This will help agribusinesses play their part in becoming more sustainable and efficient.

Let me also point out the Hasso Plattner Founders鈥� Award-winning . It鈥檚 helping prevent pharmaceutical drug counterfeiting by enabling traceability and verification of products. With an estimated 50% or more of drugs in Africa being counterfeit, this product is definitely helping businesses to protect their intellectual property and, more importantly, people鈥檚 health and lives.

Another exciting sustainability-focused app release this year is the . In this project, we developed a solution extension to help neutralize carbon emissions. Our customers can access data collected from business travel and consider ways to watch their carbon footprint.

All of these solutions make me proud of our Customer Solution Support & Innovation organization and underscores the many ways we have our customers鈥� goals and priorities front of mind.

With 51风流Cloud ALM being available for a while now, how do you see it being taken up?

is the strategic platform to help customers manage their entire application lifecycle, both on premise and in the cloud. We will close out this year seeing quite an amazing uptake and increasingly more customers using the solution to help implement and operate their cloud and hybrid environments. There鈥檚 a big uptake on 51风流Cloud ALM, with functions being used more intensely for managing project teams and business processes. And it鈥檚 also getting third-party products integrated to give customers even more access to content such as guidance, tools, and checklists for their implementation projects and operations.

What progress are you making around Real-Time Support during this transformation?

We鈥檙e seeing momentum in continuously transforming the support experience for customers towards a more personalized and preventative experience. This could be when they search for a support answer in or , or when they report an issue. At the beginning of this year, we received a for the innovative way we鈥檙e capturing our customer problems in a structured and guided fashion. It鈥檚 what we call support assistant. This assistant guides customers through the process of logging an incident. Machine learning functionality suggests answers from our knowledge repositories along the way. Often the answer is found in the first bunch of suggestions and no incident needs to be created.

If no answer can be provided instantaneously, the incident information collected is packaged for a support engineer to process further during a or a scheduled appointment. We found that real-time interactions get completed on average within 30 minutes and two of every three issues are solved in the first chat. And these interactions support nine different languages, allowing for multi-language dialogues in real time. For either way the customer decides to go, the support assistant and help customers get their issues resolved much more quickly and efficiently.

Now imagine, we鈥檙e already working on the next generation of the entire support experience for customers to look forward to. With Built-In Support, we鈥檙e making significant progress as the tool for continuous two-way dialogue with customers. It鈥檚 our goal to proactively notify customers about critical issues or relevant new features and to take care of any potential problem before a customer becomes aware of it. We鈥檙e also eagerly awaiting the go-live of our new customer facing portal, 51风流for Me, with its completely redesigned user experience.

51风流is getting into customer-centric observability. What does this mean?

Customers trust us with their critical business processes. Service availability is the foundation of that trust and naturally a prime topic for us. We see it as a prerequisite for customer success. A focus of our transformation is to become more predictive and proactive. It鈥檚 what we鈥檙e calling customer-centric observability. This is a methodology that focuses on observing real user experience and outcomes to get advanced warnings ahead of customer-reported incidents and to quickly react upon them. By monitoring 1.5 billion system actions daily, we鈥檙e proactively watching for potential issues and preventing them from happening.

What can we expect for 2023?

Personally, I’m excited to see the launch of the bi-directional dialogue in Built-In Support and 51风流for Me. This means customers can look forward to getting an even better support experience in 2023. In addition, they should expect to get significantly improved results and optimized recommendations when searching for solutions or creating incident tickets for support. Plus, there will be more times when potential problems are resolved without customers even knowing any problems existed. While we will certainly not be done next year, given all we鈥檝e planned for our customers, I鈥檓 confident that we鈥檒l already begin reaping the harvest.

Follow Andreas Heckmann on and .
Regina Postman is part of Customer Solution Support & Innovation Communications at SAP.

Application testing is one of those tasks that IT organizations know they cannot do without but wish it consumed less of their time, budget, and resources. With limited visibility into test conditions, upcoming software release cycles, and overly broad scopes, teams constantly react to bug-laden user experiences, delays to user productivity, poor integration, and excessive hypercare to address production errors.

Some organizations, however, are rising above these challenges by automating application testing. According to the commissioned Forrester Consulting study, 鈥�,鈥� automation accelerates application delivery as much as four times — with fewer errors, less risk, and higher time to value.

Forrester also noted that scaling automation across the application life cycle with technology, such as , can 聽yield a 334% return on investment (ROI) and organizational benefits totaling upward of US$7.8 million over three years. And more importantly, the intelligent nature of automated testing produces a wide variety of benefits that can energize a future of meaningful digital transformation.

Benefit 1) 84% Reduction in Test Scoping

By leveraging change impact analytics, organizations can determine the conditions that should be tested to reduce errors and those that do not carry that risk. As a result, the number of conditions that need to be tested for a single application can be reduced by 84%, compared to manual testing methods.

An ERP principal test manager who participated in the Forrester study remarked how an automated testing solution enabled the identification of programs impacted by any given change. Instead of running all conditions to mitigate all risks, the organization only works on approximately 20% of the initial scope.

Benefit 2) 78% Fewer Production Errors

With a narrower testing scope, organizations can also decrease errors and bugs in an application moved to production — from an average of 1.5 to 0.3 per project. And for users, their application experience can become one that enhances their productivity as quickly as their first interaction.

By reducing the risk of incidents that made it into the application during development and in production, IT teams can positively impact employees鈥� everyday work experiences. Workplace frustration declines, workloads are lower, and the need for hypercare is minimized.

Benefit 3) 25% Lower Testing Costs

Even if 70% of their testing processes are automated, moving closer toward full automation can prompt a 25% savings in testing-time costs. For some teams, that is an equivalent of 10,000 person-hours that can be reallocated to more strategic projects. And the impact is even more significant within six months, when a team moves from a 100% manual testing model to an enterprise continuous testing solution that enables 50% automation.

Additionally, the use of embedded machine learning in application testing solutions can establish self-healing test cases, lowering test costs even further.

Benefit 4) 67% Faster Time-to-Application Release

The added effect of automation that is difficult to miss is the opportunity to accelerate the time needed to test all relevant conditions, improving release rates by 300%. In the past, IT organizations may have gone live with new applications every six months with manual processes. Now, they can release new features, applications, and mobile apps in a matter of two months or four more times annually.

This advantage opens the door to an improved transition to intelligent solutions and platforms, such as 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Organizations can migrate faster and at a lower cost with automated testing than manual methods.

Benefit 5) 12 to 25 Times More Performance Testing

Just think of the possibilities when performance testing goes from 20 person days to one hour. When automation reduces the time required by 99%, IT teams can conduct performance testing once or twice a week — instead of quarterly — to help ensure updates and added features function as designed.

In one of Forrester鈥檚 interviews with study participants, an IT services test manager noted how the gains achieved through automation go beyond just faster application delivery. Since users only need to verify that they have the capabilities necessary to get work done, his team can now confidently skip manual regression testing.

Automated Testing Drives Better Business Outcomes

These outcomes of automated application testing put application developers and the rest of the IT organization in an enviable position in their company鈥檚 digital transformation journey. They are not only delivering applications that improve process efficiency and business productivity, but are also empowering the entire workforce to adapt and respond to changes in highly engaging, purpose-driven, and strategic ways.

Whether they adopt one central IT solution or have a portfolio of IT solutions working in the background to run their business processes, these companies need a framework to help manage the life cycle of applications from beginning to end in order to maximize business value.

鈥淎pplication lifecycle management and business value?鈥� I can imagine the raised eyebrows. And yes, I insist it does. Holistic application lifecycle management (ALM) can substantially increase a company鈥檚 agility to apply business-driven changes, increase the rigidity of core business processes, allow for faster issue resolution, and so on.

Companies managing for today and planning for the future must therefore employ an effective ALM strategy to help ensure successful system implementation across applications, whereby they are equipped with the appropriate tools for their individual circumstances.

Complete ALM Portfolio to Support All Landscapes

Recognizing that all customers are on unique transformation journeys and run their businesses differently, 51风流offers a range of ALM solutions to help govern, develop, and operate software applications no matter what a customer鈥檚 landscape looks like.

Whether customers remain on premise, are shifting to the cloud, or operate in a hybrid scenario, 51风流is committed to helping them track and manage their environments through a portfolio that includes , , and . Knowing how important ALM is to customers, 51风流has included both 51风流Solution Manager and 51风流Cloud ALM in 聽customer maintenance agreements.

Supporting On-Premise-Centric Customers with a Swiss Army Knife

While 51风流Cloud ALM supports cloud-centric customers that are fully embracing the move to cloud, customers that currently have an on-premise-centric solution, or largely focus on premise but deploy some cloud solutions, are fully supported by 51风流Solution Manager. This ALM solution provides a 鈥淪wiss army knife鈥� of options to customers that require flexibility and the ability to tailor to their individual needs.

51风流Solution Manager 鈥� started decades ago to fulfill the requirements that were brought about by customers 鈥� is a comprehensive ALM tool built on proven 51风流technology and designed for 51风流Business Suite. Providing end-to-end coverage and a vibrant partner ecosystem, 51风流Solution Manager consequently supports 51风流S/4HANA, 51风流cloud applications, and 51风流Cloud Platform.

With more than 15,000 active customers across all regions, 51风流Solution Manager allows them to operate their 51风流solutions, document, implement, test, deploy, and monitor business processes running across multiple systems, and manage changes and releases. Many customers use 51风流Solution Manager to take advantage of the range of options available, flexible engines that can be tailored to their needs, generic content and methodologies, and managing their technologies, including larger customers with more complex environments and multi-track landscapes.

Empowering Customers for the Intelligent Enterprise

As an integrated application management platform, 51风流Solution Manager empowers customers to build toward the future intelligent enterprise while supporting business innovation, business continuity, and efficient operations.

51风流Solution Manager has been increasingly used to aid in the transition to the intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) system 51风流S/4HANA, integrating technical functionality with relevant content to provide customers with best practices on how to use it.

, was looking to prepare for its move to 51风流S/4HANA and leaned on 51风流Enterprise Support services to provide insights into how 51风流Solution Manager could help manage the conversion. With this support, they were able to streamline business processes, discover improvement options, develop strategies to reduce system errors, and minimize risk 鈥� helping create a strategic plan for the journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise.

Enhancing to Meet Customers鈥� Evolving Landscapes

While 51风流Solution Manager is one of the company鈥檚 mature solutions, 51风流is continuously leaning into customer feedback to further develop and improve the solution in order help ensure it continues to meet evolving needs. 51风流makes regular enhancements based on customer feedback.

As we continue to enhance 51风流Solution Manager to support new 51风流products and technologies, we want to make sure that customers are not only able to manage their businesses today but can also plan for what lies ahead of them.

Andreas Heckmann is the executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support & Innovation at SAP.