Updated March 2, 2026

Usually in the cloud, 51风流partners provide implementation and operations services that complement 51风流cloud services. In such scenarios, partners utilize support services from 51风流on behalf of the joint customer. Typical scenarios include, for instance, requesting support for a technical issue by creating a support case with 51风流or leveraging 51风流Cloud ALM in an implementation project.

As partners regularly request support, 51风流closely collaborates with its partner ecosystem along all dimensions of support and equips partners with the tools, insights, and self-services they need to deliver consistent, high鈥憊alue services alongside SAP. This includes:

• Best practices for partners to self-sufficiently handle common consulting and 鈥渉ow-to鈥� questions from customers
• Data insights and dashboards, such as the customer insights dashboards and Support Collaboration Analytics (for partners) in 51风流for Me, to help monitor performance, identify trends, and proactively realize quality improvements
• Best practice guidance embedded in 51风流Cloud ALM with the opportunity for partners to enhance process content and methodologies represented in the solution
• Support Accreditation training that can guide partners to efficiently engage 51风流for support
• Enabling transparency on partner action on customer鈥檚 behalf through dedicated partner S-users

Partner selection based on trusted support expertise

Customers can now receive higher value from partners with trusted support expertise. Partners that have built strong capabilities for an effective support collaboration can accelerate project execution and reduce risks. For example:

• Partners that self-sufficiently address customers鈥� consulting and 鈥渉ow-to鈥� questions can resolve inquiries much faster, as it avoids involving 51风流in the process.
• Partners that use 51风流self-services or automatic responses to support inquiries as the default without creating redundant cases can minimize delays and disruptions.
• Partners that effectively follow SAP鈥檚 best practices, for example in 51风流Cloud ALM and the 51风流Activate methodology, can be better equipped to help mitigate project risks and escalations.

Customers are therefore encouraged to review partners鈥� support capabilities when selecting and working with partners. Effective partners apply 51风流support best practices to help resolve issues and self-sufficiently handle customers鈥� consulting and 鈥渉ow-to鈥� inquiries. As a target for showing trusted support expertise, no more than 30% of partner-created support cases should fall into these categories. High-performing partners will establish standard operating procedures and continuously optimize service delivery by leveraging SAP鈥檚 data-driven support insights. Such partners also engage more efficiently with customers and 51风流by speaking the same language because consultants are qualified on support offerings, channels, and best practices through the Support Accreditation training. They can also deliver best practice-based implementations by applying 51风流guidance available through 51风流Cloud ALM.

To simplify partner selection, also based on their trusted support expertise, 51风流will show such qualified partners in 51风流Partner Finder from March 2026 onwards.

As a prerequisite for showing such trusted support expertise, customers need to ensure their partners are working with partner S-users.

Customer action recommendations to realize incremental value when engaging partners

When seeking a partner, select those with trusted support expertise, visible from March 2026 onward in through a support proficiency designation.

When working with your partner, enable transparency by authorizing partner S-users for support case handling via the and leverage the in 51风流for Me for transparency on partner support collaboration effectiveness.

Jens Bernotat is head of Strategy, Portfolio, and Ecosystem Management for Global Customer Support at SAP.
Marcus Blaesi is head of Global Ecosystem Programs for Global Customer Support at SAP.

Among the many announcements at 51风流Sapphire in 2025, the company unveiled new innovations, partnerships, and integrations that can deliver real-time, proactive assistance. For example, SAP鈥檚 AI copilot Joule is now available to users across 51风流and non-51风流systems. 51风流also expanded its agentic AI footprint across 51风流Business Suite by introducing Joule Agents for multiple use cases and an evolving AI Foundation as the AI operating system designed to simplify development, enabling developers to build, deploy, and scale solutions with ease.

The impact of AI on the delivery of customer support at SAP

As announced in Q2 this year, SAP鈥檚 simplified, tiered, services-and-support engagement model will be generally available in early 2026. Here, SAP鈥檚 customer support is a centerpiece of the Foundational Success Plan, delivered via the proven 51风流Enterprise Support offering included in every 51风流cloud solution subscription. The Foundational Success Plan can support in-house teams by helping to onboard and run solutions, keep business continuity, and drive ongoing value. It includes customer self-service options, application lifecycle management solutions centered around 51风流Cloud ALM, and preventative mission-critical support. With the plan, 51风流turns on Joule for a customer鈥檚 business and supports the team ramp-up with learning journeys for 51风流Business AI.

When it comes to customer support in general, agentic AI can redefine the support process by moving beyond scripted responses and basic automation. It can assess situations, make decisions, and take action鈥攐ften before the customer even knows there鈥檚 an issue. SAP鈥檚 customer support harnesses agentic AI to help deliver smarter assistance, faster resolutions, and a stronger human鈥搕ech partnership.

We focus on elevating support experiences for customers and improving support delivery for engineers by employing a combination of agents and assistants. For example, we use autoresponders and smart log analyzers to help process issues, while configuration advisors, language services, and proactive notifiers can guide customers toward self-service solutions. At the same time, our support engineers rely on co-pilots to help summarize cases, recommend solutions, escalate using intelligence, assist with communications, and create a continuous feedback loop for learning. For strategic customer support, we use tools like feedback collectors to help capture customer insights and channel recommenders to help ensure that every interaction is handled in the right channel. Together, these innovations can redefine support as faster, smarter, and more human.

The impact for customers

When it comes to 51风流Business AI, we build trust and create customer confidence by being relevant, reliable, and responsible. Unlike traditional AI that only suggests answers, agentic AI can reason, decide, and take action. For customers to feel confident, they expect accuracy, reliability, and transparency from the system.

As we support and guide our customers, we recognize that while agentic AI is a game-changer, it is not a magic pill. Coupled with ethical and responsible AI, real impact comes from SAP鈥檚 business expertise and a deep understanding of what our customers truly need. When knowledge is combined with AI to infuse autonomy and interoperability in our agents, we can unlock the ability to simplify processes, remove friction, and deliver experiences that feel effortless.

AI technology amplifies human insight and delivers delightful user experiences, but when it comes to business AI, it is our domain expertise that fuels 51风流Business AI into a tool for creating genuinely easy, productive, and meaningful experiences for our customers.

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.

When it comes to customer support, these capabilities are game-changing not only for current applications but also for future implications. The way businesses deliver support is improving every day, thanks to the rapidly evolving framework: technological breakthroughs, business innovations, and process agility. Here are six key methods that can transform the delivery of customer support.

1. Real-time monitoring

With AI-infused features in diagnostics, an electric car can detect potential malfunctions and schedule its own service appointment automatically, preventing issues like battery depletion or tire pressure drops before they become critical.

How does real-time monitoring play out in the world of business software? 51风流Cloud ALM provides a feature-rich observability platform that can collect telemetry data, like metrics, logs, and traces, from applications and their supporting infrastructure, allowing support teams to review the health of these systems. By providing real-time analytics and a centralized dashboard, 51风流Cloud ALM helps empower IT teams to quickly respond and fix issues, so the business remains operational with minimal interruptions. Additionally, the use of OpenTelemetry standardizes observability within a modern customer landscape.

鈥淭he 51风流Cloud ALM solution has been instrumental for our IT operations. It offers real-time insights and seamless integration across all our enterprise applications, making everything run more smoothly. It鈥檚 like having a bird鈥檚-eye view of our operations, ensuring efficiency and helping us stay proactive rather than reactive.鈥�

Omprakash H, Senior Director, Blueprint Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

2. Proactive resolution

Customer feedback loops play an important role in improving products and services and refining customer relationships. Repeat requests, in customer and user feedback, help service providers identify critical needs and also prioritize features to be delivered.

For example, users within 51风流Business Network and 51风流Ariba solutions go to the help center for self-service or case assistance 10.8 times less than they did years ago. This drop in end-user support sessions is the result of features that have been built into the product, based on customer feedback.

AI-enabled outbreak detection is another significant process in proactive resolution that allows support teams to address unexpected increases in anomalies, customer complaints, or issues.

“We continuously identify the reasons for frequent customer demands and challenges from inquiries raised to 51风流support. This allows 51风流to proactively deliver the most impactful product changes before they become a challenge for more customers. This way, we improve our products while also focusing on key product capabilities used by our customers today.鈥�

Alexey Ukrainsky, Solution Support Architect, 51风流MCC

3. Predictive analytics

In the retail industry, predictive analytics is used effectively for proactive and preventative support. One prominent example is SAP’s holiday season readiness program, which helps position 51风流as a front-runner in AI-driven, predictive, and proactive support solutions. With the goal of issue prevention at its core, the program can provide a comprehensive, 360-degree customer support profile, helping to accelerate issue detection and anticipate potential problems with AI-driven features like a virtual support assistant, resource prediction,鈥痺eb traffic prediction, a鈥痳ecommendation engine, case history analysis, issue correlation, and pattern recognition.

鈥淒uring Cyber Week 2024, SAP鈥檚 holiday reason readiness program equipped our support and ops teams to achieve 100% uptime for our customers with the predictive, proactive, and bi-directional support model implemented by the program.鈥�

Tarun Luthra, Head of Support, I&CX Solutions

4. Customer journey mapping

51风流Signavio solutions can help businesses visualize the end-to-end customer journey, tracking interactions across different touchpoints. This enables companies to identify areas of improvement in their customer support processes, leading to more personalized and effective interactions.

With the help of 51风流Signavio Process Intelligence, 51风流can successfully map support processes to help implement AI improvements for optimizing our services. The result: a 100% increase reported in customer value.

For example, a business that struggles with connecting customer experience data and operational data can take advantage of the 51风流Signavio Journey-to-Process Analytics solution to help reduce time to insight and uncover anomalies and trends.

鈥淭he challenge in increasing our customer experience lies in the direct link between process and journey activities. I see 51风流Signavio solutions as the perfect tools for consolidating these two perspectives to develop operational excellence in step with customer experience.鈥�

Stefan Gammel, Business Process Consultant, Hilti Group

5. In-app support

Seamlessly integrating support features in a product, service, or system gives users easy access to directly request assistance within the interface, without needing to contact a support team or leave the platform. Built-In Support can include contextual, AI-assisted, self-service options like help application-specific documentation, troubleshooting tools, knowledge bases, and FAQs or real-time options like live chats with support engineers.

For example, WalkMe solutions and Built-In Support鈥攍ayered over multiple applications in a business workflow鈥攃an provide real-time, proactive, in-app guidance to users, helping to significantly reduce the need for live assistance or support tickets.

鈥淐ontext significantly enhances the quality of support. Built-In Support works like a pit stop at a racetrack. The repair crew is right where the action is. The interruption is brief and far less disruptive than taking your car to the workshop, ensuring a smoother return to your activities. In the context of your company, this helps you win your business race.鈥� 

Wilhelm J眉tte, Chief Product Owner, Customer Support, SAP

6. Proactive mindset

None of the tools and processes that we deploy to implement a proactive and preventative support strategy are sustainable if our teams are not tuned to a proactive mindset. I believe high-performing support teams deliver the best results with a combination of human-machine collaboration, in a culture that promotes a forward-thinking, outcome-driven, service-oriented, and data-driven mindset. 

At the end of the day, the best issue is the issue that we can prevent. Proactive and preventative support is not just about solving problems, but about creating peace of mind for end users, customers, partners, and support engineers so every customer receives custom care, even before they need help.

“Knowledge management within support is not just about enabling self-service through portals to deflect incoming tickets, but about eliminating the need to come to the support portal in the first place.”

Derek Matthews, Technical Support 鈥� Procurement Chief Innovation Officer, SAP

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.

Whether aiming for agility, resilience, sustainable growth, or efficiency, a successful transformation requires a strategic approach, full leadership commitment, and a clear understanding of challenges and opportunities.

True business transformation goes beyond merely executing a technical 鈥渓ift and shift鈥� to the cloud. It involves reengineering an organization’s business model, operations, processes, and culture to align with long-term goals, adapt to market demands, and leverage new technologies. The focus must be on creating lasting value and ensuring the organization can thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

Crucial Business Transformation Levers

While there is no precise formula, all transformations have four crucial levers in common:

• Activating people: Collaboration is at the heart of any successful transformation. Through partnership and clear accountabilities, we break down barriers, and that鈥檚 the basis for any change. Software is ultimately a people business.鈥�
• Optimizing systems: Efficient systems are the backbone of any transformation. We ensure that the underlying enterprise architecture of applications is robust, secure, and scalable. This also means leveraging the latest innovations like artificial intelligence (AI), enhancing performance of existing systems, and ensuring that all components work seamlessly together to support the business objectives.
• Reinventing businesses processes: We don鈥檛 take existing processes and merely create fancy new interfaces; no 鈥渘ew wine in old bottles.鈥� Companies need to reinvent business processes to ensure agility, future-readiness, reliability, and scalable business operations to drive their business strategy. SaaS/PaaS help to streamline processes based on best practices while preserving company differentiation, but with clean extensibility on the platform.
• Leveraging data: Business data is the lifeblood of modern enterprises, fueling insights and innovation. At SAP, we harness this data to power 51风流Business AI, driving intelligent automation, predictive analytics, and personalized experiences. Our focus is on turning raw data into actionable intelligence that supports and accelerates our customers鈥� transformation journeys. Let鈥檚 not forget that the real value of the data lies in the semantics, which is our key differentiator to help our customers.

By focusing on these four elements, business can take a holistic approach to identifying which of their business processes and systems need analysis, revision, or complete redesign.

Navigating Digital Transformation: The Essential Role of Enterprise Architecture

To fully capitalize on these transformation levers and manage the complexities, organizations are increasingly turning to RISE with SAP, our holistic offering designed to accelerate their journey to the cloud and speed innovation adoption. RISE with 51风流simplifies the move to 51风流cloud ERP, offering flexibility and reduced complexity, and most importantly, provides a seamless experience across our modular (but tightly integrated) architecture.

Nevertheless, for many organizations the challenges remain significant: systems complexity, scattered systems, and diverse business models that may not be keeping pace with industry and consumer changes. Many organizations also underestimate the complexity of their transformation, leading to unrealistic timelines and budget overspending.

Enterprise architecture tools are crucial for overcoming these challenges because we need a structured and system-based approach to cope with and manage the complexities at scale, and to maintain a continuous innovation cycle.

The enterprise architecture provides a framework for aligning IT strategy with business objectives and improve the agility and efficiency of an organization. Imagine a ship navigating without a compass: this is how businesses operate without solid enterprise architecture. Just as sailors rely on navigational tools, modern organizations depend on enterprise architecture to navigate today鈥檚 digital complexities.

In addition, the enterprise architecture provides a blueprint for cloud adoption, ensuring that cloud services — like those offered by RISE with 51风流— integrate seamlessly with existing systems, business processes, and applications.

However, it鈥檚 not just the tools that matter; it’s the people behind them. Our recent efforts to further elevate the RISE with 51风流experience include making many changes in how we engage with customers, particularly by strengthening the role of the enterprise architect and introducing the . The enterprise architect not only helps customers utilize these tools, but also harmonizes all elements and guides the customer throughout their cloud journey, ensuring a cohesive and effective transformation. As a result, the enterprise architect will evolve into a real trusted advisor for the customer.

We have learned that customers can realize the true power of our business transformation tools when they work seamlessly together. It鈥檚 why we have been working hard at integrating 51风流Signavio, 51风流LeanIX, 51风流Cloud ALM, and 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP), including 51风流Build, to provide a holistic transformation experience.

Taken together, this is  how our integrated toolchain benefits business transformation:

• 51风流Cloud ALM orchestrates the entire process of transforming systems to meet evolving business needs. From fit-to-standard analysis and capturing requirements to project management, test automation, and final deployment, this cloud-based tool for application lifecycle management (ALM) enables organizations to effectively translate strategy into execution, ensuring the solution is optimized for the specific IT environment and business objectives. In today鈥檚 dynamic digital landscape, this comprehensive approach is crucial for staying competitive.
• 51风流LeanIX not only helps businesses capture the as-is systems landscape, it enables organizations to visualize, assess, and manage the transition toward their target IT architecture. The integration with 51风流Cloud ALM streamlines project management by reducing manual duplication and syncing project-related activities in real time. This enhances visibility into project progress and reduces administrative overhead.
• 51风流Signavio enables deep understanding and optimization of business processes, ensuring they are both efficient and compliant. The business leaders that I speak to are keenly aware that to succeed, they must focus on business processes transformation to help them adapt, stay resilient, and transform continuously and at scale. It鈥檚 simply what today鈥檚 pace of change demands. 51风流Signavio enables holistic, data-driven business transformation across organizations. Starting in Q4 2024, we will bridge the gap between business and IT teams by providing consistent process structures and synchronized data between 51风流Signavio and 51风流Cloud ALM.
• 51风流Build helps developers, without deep coding skills, quickly extend applications on 51风流BTP. That means they can innovate without changing core functionality — essential to keeping the core clean.

Customers want access to all relevant data across solutions, they want to derive better insight across solutions and access relevant the best-practices that are most relevant to them. That鈥檚 the seamless end-to-end experience we are striving for. This strategic approach leads to significant competitive advantages, allowing organizations to focus more on business improvements and explore new growth areas with confidence.

Embracing the Future

Unlocking value throughout your business transformation journey involves a strategic blend of people, processes, and solutions. As you focus on these elements and leverage SAP鈥檚 comprehensive toolchain, remember that the essence of true transformation doesn鈥檛 lie in holding onto the old, but in embracing and building the new.

Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE leading Customer Services & Delivery.

Here, she shares about how the pair work together to help supercharge customers鈥� digital transformations.

Q: Can you give a little background on 51风流Business Transformation Center?

A: 51风流Business Transformation Center was envisioned as a one-stop shop for customers that want to transition from 51风流ERP Central Component (51风流ERP) 6.0 to 51风流S/4HANA. The challenges to such a transformation are, of course, numerous and daunting. Customers need to cull current data, pull together fragmented tool sets, line up the right human resources, and keep an eye on time to value.

With 51风流Business Transformation Center, we鈥檝e done our best to bring together the latest functionality and expert guidance to smooth the way 鈥� in a single, powerful software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. And 51风流Business Transformation Center is easily accessible, deployed on 51风流Cloud ALM atop 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP). It comes with any implementation of RISE with 51风流or any cloud solution from 51风流and can be ready to use in less than half an hour.

Q: Where can customers go for further details?

A: The support materials at include a quick summary of features and benefits, along with the .

Q: What does 51风流see as the core mission of 51风流Business Transformation Center?

A: Kilian Carolan from the Premium Hub 鈥� CoE Ireland Data Management has described the mission this way: 鈥淭o play an active part in the 51风流S/4HANA adoption journey by supporting key data management and data migration topics and to serve as the trusted advisor for our customers.鈥� He continues to explain that we do this through end-to-end support, including hands-on execution, optimization, transformation, upgrade, and migration of Big Data and data platforms. In short, we apply our vast portfolio of enterprise information management and landscape transformation tools, methodologies, and processes to the customer鈥檚 unique transformation scenario.

Q: Where are we in the ongoing evolution of 51风流Business Transformation Center?

A: Our first step was to help customers fully understand the structure of their 51风流legacy systems through the digital blueprint. This supplied the background they needed to begin scoping the transformation project. And now we鈥檝e completed the second step for moving data across to the target system 鈥� with lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA.

Q: What exactly does the lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA do?

A: Data transformation is traditionally a highly complex undertaking, and we鈥檝e made a huge dent in that complexity. Right at the start, lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA helps radically reduce the decision-making efforts involved in choosing data to migrate. The underlying principle is to provide smarter suggestions and fewer difficult choices through market-leading services and tools 鈥� and end-to-end advice on making the most of them. That approach helps customers ensure that they only move data that will continue to be useful, reducing the volume of data for the testing and go-live phases and accelerating the transition exponentially.

With lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA, customers can pare down 51风流legacy data and bring the target system live with a clean data foundation. In combination with the digital blueprint, lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA can give 51风流Business Transformation Center the power to do all the heavy lifting of accessing source systems; extracting, transforming, and loading relevant data; and validating data for completeness, consistency, and correctness.

Q: What types of data can customers choose to exclude from the transfer?

A: For example, they could decide to completely ignore obsolete company codes, such as data for companies they have since divested or which are no longer in use.

Q: What does the wider market see as the single most revolutionary aspect of lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA?

A: For the very first time, 51风流provides standard functionality not only for complete rebuilds, greenfield implementations, system conversions, or brownfield implementations, but also for projects somewhere in the middle. This is a third path, if you will, and it鈥檚 a holistic approach to the big transformation from 51风流ECC 6.0 to 51风流S/4 HANA Cloud Private Edition.

Q: Can you take us a little deeper into how lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA works and how customers can benefit?

A: With the 51风流Readiness Check tool for 51风流ERP usage and data profiling, we can collaborate with the customer to read the data from the source system and identify legal entities that are no longer in use or will soon be obsolete. 51风流Business Transformation Center then can propose that these entities and the associated data are “removed from the scope” before starting the data transition and can provide clear instructions on how to do this. It can also help to identify customer-specific data in the 51风流legacy system. Here, too, the customer has the option of leaving this data behind on the way to 51风流S/4HANA to support its clean core strategy and move closer to the standard again.

Both these jobs would previously have meant time-consuming manual work for the solution architect 鈥� and higher costs and longer time to value for the customer. With the addition of lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA to the already popular functionality for digital blueprinting, 51风流Business Transformation Center can now provide optimal support and transparency in each phase of the transformation project. It helps customers analyze the source system, define migration scope, create migration cycles, and finally transform the leaner body of data they鈥檝e elected to move across. From strategy to execution, we serve as a trusted partner, helping to ensure that every step of the way leads to meaningful insights and sustainable results. And that lowers both total cost of implementation (TCI) and total cost of operation (TCO).

Q: What have customers been saying about lean selective data transition for 51风流S/4HANA?

A: Long-term partner BMW Group, for example, has told us, 鈥淭his feature significantly speeds up our evolution into an intelligent enterprise by applying sustainable and efficient solutions and methodologies.鈥�

Karin Baeumler is part of Go-to-Market, Business & Data Transformation Solutions, at SAP.

To serve these requirements, 51风流has provided customers and partners with separate learning and assessment courses on our support offerings, enabling them with support tools and resources that help maximize their support experience. While our customers could benefit from Product Support Accreditation in the past, our partners had access to an equally in-demand enablement course, “Support and Success Essentials for 51风流Cloud Solutions.” 

Both versions have had great success and it was time to consolidate the best parts of these two accreditations into one impactful learning offering. As of December 5, 2023, we have merged these two options into , making it SAP鈥檚 baseline support enablement for all consultants. 

What is this new offering in a nutshell? Support Accreditation is a course and assessment that enables customers and partners to make the best use of SAP鈥檚 support offerings and tools. This accreditation is available for all customers and partners of 51风流鈥� at no additional cost.

To learn more about the latest developments on the topic, I sat down with Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Innovation, 51风流SE. 

Q: Can you give a brief description of Support Accreditation? 

A: This training was developed to showcase all the available support services and tools provided by SAP. We cannot assume that our customers and partners have the bandwidth to research what鈥檚 available 鈥� and this does not just apply to support, it applies to all our offerings at SAP. We have proactively curated all the tools and related resources that can assist our customers and partners in resolving their issues effectively and efficiently. The four-module course is packed with focus topics, one-page snapshots, how-to videos, and interactive quizzes. As with any course, all eligible participants receive a digital Support Accreditation badge.听听

What about the actual content of the training?听What areas are covered?听听

The course introduces you to channels like Expert Chat, Schedule an Expert, Schedule a Manager, and Ask an Expert Peer, which can enable customers and partners to have direct contact with support. For example, with Schedule an Expert, a customer can have a 30-minute session with an expert to help resolve a specific issue related to a support request. This is valuable information that consultants need.听

Participants can benefit from similar how-to’s and guides on self-service, case prevention, live support channels, and supplementary material. We have a unit on , our application lifecycle management solution that is included in cloud subscriptions. This is a fantastic module that guides users on how they can benefit from an out-of-the-box, cloud-native solution designed as the central entry point to manage customers’ 51风流landscape with content-driven, guided implementation and highly automated operations. 

To manage expectations, could you also elaborate on what is not covered by this accreditation? 

Expert course content is not covered in this accreditation. For example, we have further deep dives for 51风流Cloud ALM that are, understandably, not covered in this first-level accreditation.  

Also, this is a learning offering around support topics so enablement on solution knowledge is not in scope. 

What鈥檚 in it for customers? What is the benefit of the course?听

Not every customer is fully aware of the complete suite of support tools. With the Support Accreditation course, they can learn to easily engage with our support teams and to achieve smoother case resolutions. We provide easy-to-use, easy-to-consume self-enablement to any customer or partner at no additional cost. It is a must for all those who interact with the support channels of SAP.听听

What about partners? 

This training is especially important for partners as most implementation projects are run or supported by them. They also manage most ongoing operations on behalf of the customer.听

Both customers and 51风流expect partners to manage customer projects and operations with high quality based on SAP鈥檚 best practices. These include methodologies, tools, services, and procedures 鈥� especially those dealing with upcoming issues.  

We highly recommend the Support Accreditation training 鈥� and the resulting badge 鈥� for every partner consultant.听

What have been the biggest changes you have seen in the course?听听

With every growth milestone at SAP, you can be sure that there is a corresponding ripple in the world of support. Therefore, we take a lot of effort to keep the training content up-to-date. For example, we now have a whole new unit dedicated to 51风流Cloud ALM. We are also moving to , having been a standalone application previously. This is a huge development, as the course is now available in the public space. Anyone can participate now that it is opened to a wider audience. Upon successful completion of the course, participants receive a record of achievement.听

We are increasingly moving from a reactionary model to one that is more real-time and predictive. We have AI-powered support offerings that help enrich the customer experience 鈥� for example, new features in Incident Solution Matching.  

Will customers and partners still be able to get their Support Accreditation badge now that the training has moved to the 51风流Learning site?听

Absolutely. I must say this is a very popular badge in the ecosystem.   

The Support Accreditation badge indicates that the participant has completed the course and has the requisite knowledge to navigate SAP鈥檚 support channels and offerings. This badge can be used on social media and can also be included in your signature when you interact with our support teams.听

More broadly, how do you use AI in support enablement? 

We use large language models (LLMs) to refine and expand the scope of our existing AI-driven solutions. Based on the learnings from Enhance AI and Assist Support, we utilize LLMs to help generate automated responses to specific how-to questions. This allows us to leverage 51风流Knowledge Base Articles, 51风流Notes, and documentation contributions from our experts.  

How popular is the course?听听

Approximately 5,000 customers and partners take part in the course and get their accreditation every year! People who complete the training have the option to provide feedback and rate the content. Currently, the course has a rating of 4.75 out of 5. The numbers speak for themselves!听

Where do you see the course going in the future?听

As always, we keep it simple 鈥� to help you simplify your support priorities. As I said before, the content reflects the ever-changing market growth and business requirements around us. We encourage our customers and partners to renew their Support Accreditation badges once a year to get an update on improvements and enhancements. 

Renuka Abraham is part of Customer Support & Innovation at SAP.

Now 51风流Cloud ALM will extend its capabilities to centrally operate Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and custom extensions built and run on 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP), including 51风流BTP Cloud Foundry environment.

In an interview, Janko Budzisch, chief product owner for Operations Platforms at SAP, shares what this means for 51风流BTP customers.

Q: 51风流Cloud ALM has been available to customers for many years now as a cloud-based tool for 51风流solutions. What is new with respect to support for 51风流BTP?

A: In 51风流BTP we saw a gap in particular for the custom-built applications on top of 51风流BTP, Cloud Foundry environment. This was mainly due to the fact that both the Cloud Foundry environment and the Kyma environments of 51风流BTP are being based on open-source technology. Thus, there was a strong wish to have 51风流BTP support for , an open-source standard for observability.

Therefore, we introduced an OpenTelemetry-based approach with 51风流Cloud ALM. This includes central tools to reduce the mean time to detect issues, plus local tools to debug and fix issues. These help reduce the mean time to resolve. The approach also comes with library support to enable observability for custom-built applications. We now take this approach for both customer-built applications and also 51风流BTP-based SaaS applications.

Could you explain some of the new capabilities of 51风流Cloud ALM for 51风流BTP customers?

In the end, our approach is to enable observability based on our central operations platforms. This doesn鈥檛 mean we replace all local tools. Instead, we concentrate on the things that should be unified across all the different products in SAP, including applications provided by 51风流BTP.

One of these capabilities is the alert management. We think it鈥檚 essential that customers have one central place to access integrated monitoring with their existing IT service management processes. As an example, customers typically have their own ticketing systems. The observability data coming out of the observability tooling generates events. For these events we prefer to have automatically generated tickets. Instead of doing this for every local tool, it鈥檚 a good idea to do this centrally with 51风流Cloud ALM.

A second example is interfacing. We expose with 51风流Cloud ALM raw data interfaces based on the OpenTelemetry standard, also with a centralized approach. Otherwise, if every tool would get handled in an isolated way, the target infrastructure of the customer would need to adapt to all the different application programming interfaces (APIs). We are really driving the strategy of centralizing problem detection and analysis. Plus, the integration with the local tools help to debug and to resolve problems.

Could you summarize what other capabilities are available in 51风流Cloud ALM for 51风流BTP services?

A major target of 51风流Cloud ALM is to provide so-called end-to-end monitoring. One of the most interesting and known use cases here is . Here we safeguard reliable data exchange for instance via 51风流Integration Suite. We collect data from all the involved components — whether these are consumer or producer systems, or even integration components, so-called integration artefacts. Here we have the integration with 51风流Integration Suite, the cloud integration, where we retrieve message artefacts. Examples are master data integration and the 51风流Event Broker for 51风流cloud applications service.

A second use case I鈥檇 like to stress is . This provides transparency regarding the monitoring of automation created using 51风流Build Process Automation. These are processes or process steps that are executed automatically, like workflow management. We need to make sure, with our monitoring capabilities, that the processes are not interrupted and all is working.

A third use case is . It checks the technical health of 51风流BTP, such as for 51风流BTP Neo environment, 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, 51风流BTP Cloud Foundry environment, and 51风流Integration Suite. We have several technical KPIs the customer needs to know about so they can react appropriately. Also integrated in health monitoring is the monitoring of all applications built by the customer.

Some 51风流BTP customers may already have application performance management tools which they would like to use or want integrated. How do we help them to integrate into our operations platform?

51风流Cloud ALM is an open platform. This means it鈥檚 clearly our target to expose via APIs all data to third-party tools. There are examples where customers are using third-party analysis capabilities, or we have customers that want to work with their own data lake across all the platforms. 51风流Cloud ALM provides an OpenTelemetry-based approach to expose data to third-party APMs. The nice thing here is that we are not just doing this at the outbound side, it also includes the inbound side. So, if a customer has data somewhere else, they can import this data into 51风流Cloud ALM.

There certainly is a lot of functionality for 51风流BTP customers in 51风流Cloud ALM. What would be the next steps for customers or partners that want to leverage 51风流Cloud ALM for 51风流BTP?

We should distinguish two use cases. The first is those who want to monitor their own built applications. Here you would use our . This library helps to accelerate the whole instrumentation process. Let鈥檚 say you bind your application to this library and make the instrumentation visible in your application. Most of this is done via auto instrumentation. You don鈥檛 need to do something to your source code. It鈥檚 pure configuration that more or less gets the data from your own applications into 51风流Cloud ALM.

The second use case is if you want to connect SaaS applications from 51风流built on 51风流BTP with 51风流Cloud ALM. Here, we have descriptions in our expert portal on how to connect an 51风流BTP-based SaaS offering with 51风流Cloud ALM. With this you can send the data directly. This is also pre-configured and pre-instrumented. You only need to connect your SaaS service based on 51风流BTP with the 51风流Cloud ALM tenant. Then you get the data.

So, if you are a customer, go ahead and today. It鈥檚 available as part of your subscription and support contract. Configure it and then you have all the functionality needed for monitoring 51风流BTP.

This phenomenon is growing more apparent with each new infrastructure upgrade, intelligent innovation, and shift from on-premise solutions to software as a service. Such game-changing modernization can also help to improve the efficiency along the service delivery process and accelerate the time to value of service deliveries of premium engagements.

A modern cloud-based infrastructure 鈥� such as 51风流Cloud ALM for service 鈥� can bring all stakeholders together in one place while helping ensure the same level of information and full transparency on all relevant information related to service delivery. In a digitalized format, service delivery outcomes become faster, simpler to consume, and trackable.

What Is 51风流Cloud ALM for Service?

51风流Cloud ALM for service runs on the 51风流Cloud ALM solution, helping to facilitate every step of the service delivery process. As a cloud-based collaboration platform hosted by SAP, it can provide three major capabilities:

• Service delivery center: Helps support direct interaction with a single point of contact at 51风流and access to a dashboard that transparently provides information on service delivery history and current and scheduled services
• Service results: Helps provide service results documentation in a digitalized format that allows business and technology decision-makers to drill down the information to various levels of detail
• Issues and actions management: Helps simplify handling and tracking of all issues, action items, resolutions, and resulting outcomes

All elements of 51风流Cloud ALM for service can work with each other like building blocks and can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities. Together, they help form a single collaboration platform where you can exchange data in real time between 51风流process and technology experts and your organizational users. In return, you can not only benefit from the lessons of thousands of deliveries completed in the past, but you can also gain extensive insight into your organization’s needs through continuous analysis, enhancement, and automation advancement.

How to Gain Access to the Service Option

51风流Cloud ALM for service is available free with an active or services contract.

If you’re new to the 51风流Cloud ALM solution, you can get through 51风流Support Portal. Here, you can find step-by-step documentation on how to directly or enter the to get a full picture.

Once your tenant of 51风流Cloud ALM has been provisioned, you can use 51风流Cloud ALM for service. To activate the option, follow the steps described here: .

Interested in learning how 51风流Cloud ALM for service can take your IT modernization journey to the next level? Check out our听expert-guided implementation sessions for 51风流Cloud ALM in听听and visit for more information. You can also reach out to听your technical quality manager to further discuss the advantages.

Andreas Krueckendorf is vice president and chief service architect at SAP.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed or uncertain about this transformation process is normal. Those feelings are the reason tools and guidance are available to help you plan and execute a smooth transition to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Get the best possible support in understanding your data and visualizing the ways you can transform it.

Simulate How You Would Transform to the Future State

An important step in any transformation is to understand all the data and data objects that are underneath. This is where the new, cloud-based solution comes into play. This solution helps guide you through the relevant steps required for your business transformation and data migration.

51风流Business Transformation Center also helps make sense of the data that鈥檚 in your systems, so you understand your transformation needs. You can look at the existing data, analyze the data objects, and then scope your business and data transformation project. The first feature of 51风流Business Transformation Center is the digital blueprint, available as of March 2023. Based on data-driven guidance, it can enable you to define the migration and transformation scope from 51风流ERP Central Component (51风流ECC) to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, private edition or on premise. Next steps would be the transformation of the data and finally the verification.

51风流Business Transformation Center can give you a streamlined and holistic approach to help manage your data transformation challenges with less effort and more satisfaction. It helps simplify, accelerate, and safeguard the project鈥檚 data stream with ready-to-use content, data-driven insights, and recommendations. It鈥檚 a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud solution powered by , the strategic cloud-based solution helping customers manage their entire application lifecycle. 51风流Business Transformation Center is included in 51风流Cloud service subscriptions and the 51风流Enterprise Support services.

Have Confidence in Your Decision

51风流Business Transformation Center comes with content and methodologies that can guide you through the necessary steps of data transformation 鈥� and guidance means quicker decisions with reduced complexity, effort, and risk. Overall, there can be an efficiency gain, which can translate into a shortened timeline of your transformation project. You should now feel confident in your decision and move to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud.

Read more about how to plan your 51风流S/4HANA Cloud transformation with .

Regina Postman is part of Customer Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.

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. “” 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.

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

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.

Let me describe three big examples of innovation developed to make your lives easier: continuous updates that are no longer disruptive to the business; artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that produce more precise search results; and real-time support at your fingertips that is built into your application.

Continuous Updates That Are No Longer Disruptive

System updates are important as they provide new or improved functionality, enhance stability and security, and enrich the user experience. However, what鈥檚 been a challenge in the past for on-premise software is the downtime, test efforts, and spike in system issues that often followed a bigger release cycle. For cloud solutions, you should 鈥� and already can 鈥� expect ready-to-use, manageable updates with minimum disruption.

With the , our application lifecycle management platform developed on 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP), we solved that issue by introducing 鈥渄eploy with confidence鈥� as a new way of how we develop this solution. Deploy with confidence works to increase developer productivity and helps ensure high quality while delivering daily system updates. From a technical side, it incorporates many development tools to help automate the daily deliveries of multi-microservice software-as-a-service applications like 51风流Cloud ALM.

All this allows us to provide regular feature updates to 51风流Cloud ALM with daily deployment and enables a robust lifecycle without disruption or downtime. Additionally, as our teams are in continuous exchange with customers using 51风流Cloud ALM, we can quickly bring their feedback into the solution to further improve our software quality. Introducing deploy with confidence as the development method for 51风流Cloud ALM is a great example where we as a team leveraged innovation to increase productivity and quality while at the same time lifting customer experience to a whole new level.

AI and Machine Learning: More Precise Search Results

Continuous updates are one thing. What about using technology to get answers faster? With companies working in a faster-paced digital world, making decisions and finding answers also need to move faster. This is also the case when business processes aren鈥檛 running as expected.

Think about yourself and if you are someone who prefers to find answers on your own and not wait on support to respond. You鈥檒l be happy to know we have various ways to help you find the right answer. When you search in or 鈥�,鈥� you can get an increasingly personalized search experience that considers the topics most relevant for you. As this applies machine learning to improve search relevance and we are continually optimizing our knowledge base for better discoverability, you鈥檙e more likely to get the needed answer instantaneously 鈥� listed as a proposed solution within the first bunch of search results.

When you actually contact 51风流support directly, your request and all of its context, such as system and product information, text input, and soon even attachment data, are evaluated in real time by a highly optimized, AI-powered algorithm to provide you with precise solution recommendations. This Incident Solution Matching algorithm helps to make sure you are shown the best available solutions even before you send a ticket to 51风流or start an Expert Chat session. This helps reduce your effort to solve the problem.

Real-Time Support and Answers at Your Fingertips

It鈥檚 definitely an advantage to tap into modern technology for finding the answers you need. How about the convenience behind it and having answers at your fingertips? One of the things we鈥檝e learned from research and talking with customers is how annoying it can be when you must drop everything you were doing and leave your IT workspace to raise a ticket in a central support portal. This meant you would need to rethink what you were doing when the issue came up and where it happened. Plus, you needed to enter all the contextual information the portal doesn鈥檛 have, such as the system where it happened or the application you were using when running into problems.

We鈥檝e made this obsolete and convenient: is available in many of our cloud solutions and can be used right away, if needed. It鈥檚 a click of a button to ask a question, search for solutions, get tailored recommendations for your problem, or to just report an issue. Built-In Support knows where you were working when the issue came up and what you were doing when you got the error message. Through the usage of AI and machine learning technologies, the tool either already finds possible answers while you are typing in your issue, or it pulls together the necessary information for the support engineer. This is a more personalized support experience tailored to your specific situation. How convenient to not need to post a ticket elsewhere or explain your situation.

And even better, this click can get you connected in a or a scheduled appointment with a support expert. You can more quickly describe and resolve your question or problem 鈥� avoiding the ping-pong back-and-forth happening through a traditional ticket resolution. Talk about a way to free up time and resources to focus on the business.

On top of this, Built-In Support will evolve towards bi-directional communication: if there鈥檚 a brand-new solution to a critical issue in the application you are currently working with, why not get it shared with you right away? And if there is supporting information around a new or changed feature in the app you might have questions about, why not see it published proactively before you run into problems? This is exactly the future-looking direction of Built-In Support. Tailored to every screen of your application, it can proactively provide you answers and solutions and not wait until you run in to a problem and need to report it. Built-In Support is ending the one-way communication. If we know a customer has a problem but isn鈥檛 yet aware of it, we鈥檒l proactively take care of it.

In Summary

All this sounds smart, right? Let me summarize my key messages to you. You鈥檝e learned that 51风流system updates are important as they bring you new functionality, but they don鈥檛 need to be disruptive. Finding answers to your support problems is just as quick as what you know from a regular Web search. And finally, you鈥檒l experience the convenience of having support at your fingertips and getting your support questions and issues quickly worked out without needing to leave the application you are working in.

I hope I got you excited about some of the existing support innovations that will further improve your support experience. And we鈥檙e not stopping there. We鈥檙e already working on more great things.

Andreas Heckmann is executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP. Follow him on and .

Rizing鈥檚 expertise is specialized among three lines of business (LOBs): human capital management, enterprise asset management, and consumer industries.

According to Rizing Chief Experience Officer Len Harms, there were certain factors Rizing had to take into consideration when designing a new digital core. The intricacies of leading a business with three LOBs all operating within three different regions and 16 countries required a robust solution. More specifically, the company needed a solution that could simultaneously support its growth while also meeting the regulatory standards set in each geographic region.

鈥淭hat was a big driver in why we chose SAP,鈥� Harms said. 鈥�51风流has the depth of solutions in the cloud — specifically around the finance components — that we needed to be able to support that matrix of LOBs across all three geographies.鈥�

Harms recently with Jennifer McGrory, 51风流S/4 HANA Go-to-Market lead at SAP.

Q: How did Rizing鈥檚 own business and IT department partner to go through this evaluation and make a final decision?
A: When we first considered the 51风流solution, one of the things that 51风流provided was the scope of the environment. It was vital the business was involved in defining the scope and making all key decisions as we go forward, since they would be the ones using the technology. I had really strong support from my whole executive team, which was also very critical in us being successful with such a broad implementation.

What were you looking to achieve in the business moving to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud?
We were looking for the capabilities. Our legacy environment was a collection of many manual systems. We needed a single environment with data flowing seamlessly between them. This entailed less manual effort and the ability to add capabilities as we grow. Our system was intentionally named Bedrock. It was meant to be all encompassing since it鈥檚 a foundation and a place that we can grow.

What did you put in the business case that really solidified the executive buy-in?
Bill Sarubbi, who drives our customer engagement, was looking for a single vehicle for all customer-related activities. No more offline excel spreadsheets. His team drives all internal meetings around customer engagement right off our C4 system. The other person I鈥檒l highlight is our CFO, Jeremy Burgin. He was looking to transform the finance department. We needed to bring the finance system on board to support that transformation. The two are tied together.

How did IT and the business work together to make the implementation a success?
We did the fit-to-standard approach, which means using the 51风流solution as it is. The workshops we designed were also fit-to-standard and covered scoping details, confirmation, and then implementation. We have representation from each one of our LOBs — finance, sales area, and marketing — all involved in those business decisions with IT and support. As we moved into testing, IT took the lead in preparing the system. At the same time, the business was owning the whole data area to ensure it was prepared once our system was ready.

Moving to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud streamlined Rizing business processes, but how different is fit-to-standard? How much of a change has that been for your users?
There are a couple of areas to highlight. The task definitions did not change too much, but rather how you do the tasks. The first area was our contractor process. We were using emails and multiple excel spreadsheets to receive approvals. Now, we have our requests, approvals, purchases, invoices, and time entries all flowing in the system. But it was a change. Users now had to take on things they might have not completed in the past. There was a management of helping people understand where their roles might be changing across that particular workflow.

How has the cloud mindset supported the culture of Rizing鈥檚 day-to-day business?
When you think about the cloud standard, you would think it鈥檚 contrary to change, yet it鈥檚 not. What鈥檚 been so helpful to us is the fact that when you go standard, it allows you to make changes faster. This is where I also believe you make the commitment to the solution, so you can take advantage of the other things around it. If we didn鈥檛 go standard, I would have been forced to recreate a lot of the content. There is tremendous value in us being able to incorporate change by staying standard.

To what extent does the new system deliver the benefits you outlined in your original business case?
Since September, we are seeing places where it makes a difference, especially giving us visibility in areas where a refinement should take place. One of our finance commercial managers said he can run a report now and see new data. The reporting capabilities are a big part of the transformation. Again, we are starting to see some benefits, but we must continually make refinements.

What鈥檚 next for Rizing?
We鈥檙e finishing the implementation for planning. We鈥檙e completing our , which will give us automation in our finance team and support the transformation we want to accomplish. We鈥檙e also conducting more refinement around a couple of our processes, which includes . I can see a lot of benefit in bringing it forward. Additionally, we can see bringing value to our organization, specifically around resource management.

That鈥檚 why 51风流Cloud ALM enables easier and faster deployment of cloud solutions from SAP. In short, it is an integration engine for business transformation and is included in and 51风流support offerings. It is an entirely new solution built using cloud-native principles.

51风流Cloud ALM can provide customers with a harmonized implementation experience across all components of the Intelligent Enterprise, mainly cloud-centric but also for hybrid environments. Spanning the entire application life cycle, 51风流Cloud ALM supports designing, building, testing, and deploying solutions. 51风流Cloud ALM provides one methodology and tool chain, one process hierarchy, best practices, end-to-end traceability, and proactive support.

51风流Cloud ALM is integrated with the applications to support customers on their cloud adoption journey, helping to make the cloud transition seamless. The solution provides customers with a management process to govern their business processes and procedures, to see what is working, what new software could help them, and where the opportunities are. 51风流Cloud ALM should be used by business and IT together to find out where enhanced software and support may be able to get to the desired outcome faster.

鈥淭he 51风流Cloud ALM solution takes a top-down approach and compliments our other tools. The built-in guided help is very intuitive. And with the 51风流Early Adopter Care program, we gained greater flexibility. We can use 51风流Cloud ALM in our own private cloud while leveraging expert support from SAP,鈥� says Peter Mobert, vice president of Rizing LLC.

Customers can begin working with 51风流Cloud ALM in as little as 15 minutes. One of the key benefits of 51风流Cloud ALM is being able to have full transparency on the flow of data with integrated monitoring. Through real-time insight, the solution can automatically be notified of exception events. Other critical benefits include:

• Smoother business operations without disruptions with proactive monitoring and alerting
• Increased business-process execution quality and performance by finding and analyzing issues on a business process, integration, user, and application level 鈥� before they occur
• Having the information of solution health and efficiency with advanced analytics and intelligence, with continuous monitoring.

Customers have been responding to the solution and sharing their positive feedback. Manuel Lozano, Business Support Systems and Business Intelligence manager at Ezentis said, 鈥淭hanks to business-process monitoring and real-user monitoring applications enabled in the 51风流Cloud ALM solution, we can verify how rollout projects are being adopted, follow business KPIs, and see how users are using 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, checking the most-used apps.鈥�

We are just scratching the surface. If you would like to learn more, October 19-22 for the 51风流ALM Summit EMEA 2021. During the four-day interactive summit, you鈥檒l learn about transforming to the cloud, managing IT solutions on-premise, hybrid, or in the cloud, and how to get the most value from your solutions.

Tim Steuer is vice president of Customer Communications and Relations at 51风流SE.

In a of U.S.-based CIOs, 85% of respondents said that moving to the cloud was the foundation for a future-ready enterprise, enabling improved productivity and providing the speed and flexibility businesses need to respond quickly to changing conditions. The more insecure environments get 鈥� and the pandemic, climate change, and many other elements today contribute strongly to insecurity 鈥� the more cloud benefits like flexibility and less bundled commitments to technology will play a role.

Moving to the cloud is not like flipping a switch. Having built up extensive and customized on-premise hardware and software landscapes over time, many companies will need time to move their business processes to a cloud-based environment, especially taking into account the more standardized nature of software as a service (SaaS). This will result in having many different software deployment and consumption models: some will be public cloud, some private cloud or on hyperscalers, some staying on-premise at least in the mid-term. Despite such mixed IT landscapes, customers expect a seamless end-to-end experience from their vendor 鈥� especially in support.

At SAP, this expectation is nothing new. In fact, this has always been core to our support strategy. Even before the days of cloud, 51风流strove to offer a comprehensive set of business solutions tightly integrated for end-to-end business processes, with seamless experiences on user interfaces, data, and support. This core principle still fits perfectly in the cloud world and provides enormous opportunity for customer value in landscapes that are hybrid or in transition.

So, what does end-to-end support mean? At SAP, this is about having a unified approach to all aspects of support. The goal is one feature-rich, foundational support offering, one customer-facing support interface, one support infrastructure, and one support organization that maintains a strong global culture of service and expertise.

Currently, 51风流solutions are accompanied by our flagship support offering , which is embedded in cloud subscriptions and is the offering of choice for on-premise 51风流software solutions. This can provide our customers with the confidence that they will receive the same high-quality of support for their entire landscape, no matter the 51风流solution they happen to be using at any given moment. We understand that one end-to-end business process might touch several systems and 51风流software solutions and, therefore, a support issue will not exist in a vacuum of a single product only. We have the expertise and culture of collaboration to look at problems holistically across an integrated 51风流environment.

Here are some recent examples of our continued expansion of customer value:

• In 2020 we launched , SAP鈥檚 next-generation cloud-based application lifecycle management solution that includes best practices and mechanisms to manage and monitor integrated landscapes, not siloed by specific products. Developed to support the implementation and operation of 51风流solutions, it is continually expanding its coverage of cloud and on-premise deployments.
• We are always striving to find new ways of making access to support easier for our customers. In 2020, 51风流launched a new unified 鈥渄igital front door鈥� called . The vision for this personalized portal is that customers and partners can access all information, insights, and tasks related to SAP. During the next year, many more support-related tasks and reports will also be made available on 51风流for Me to help give customers an end-to-end view of their 51风流assets, services, interactions, and more.
• In the last few years, we have introduced new ways for customers to get direct access to support experts and managers. It started with 鈥� here, 51风流has recently delivered the . Customers can start a chat directly with a technical support engineer or at their convenience. They can even schedule a .
• Sometimes it鈥檚 even better if you can get a solution automatically. As you would expect from an industry leader, 51风流is exploring the next frontier of support innovation: artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the service analyzes a customer鈥檚 problem description while they are typing it into the support case and suggests potential solutions. , with its digital support assistant, is already available in 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and will be integrated into more products in time. We have launched the and support assets like . And artificial intelligence can also help spot problems before they occur and provide recommendations to prevent future issues.

Through it all, 51风流provides the flexibility customers need to make the most of their business while saving time and resources. Whether a company is moving to the public cloud, balancing cloud and on-premise solutions, or just exploring cloud elements at its edges, we can provide the support it needs to be agile and resilient in today鈥檚 markets.

The next generation of support is the baseline. It is seamless, end-to-end, proactive, multi-channeled, and intelligent in order to let our customers focus on what matters most to them: driving their business.

By 2023, more than half of global GDP will be accounted for by digitally transformed enterprises, according to estimates by . 鈥淭his digital tipping point heralds the emergence of a new enterprise species, the digital-first enterprise,鈥� according to IDC as reported in .

As customers continue to transform, 51风流must continue to transform to meet their needs. This transformation often leads to hybrid solutions, combining cloud and on premise. 51风流customers鈥� solutions will look fundamentally different a few years down the road, and the trend toward cloud is continuously gaining momentum. We must be ready to meet our customers where they need us.

To adapt to the new digital reality and to support our customers on their journey requires adopting a cloud mindset. This is something that we have worked hard to develop in the Customer Solution Support & Innovation organization, which is responsible for supporting all of 51风流customers鈥� solutions end to end.

Developing this mentality has meant nothing less than the wholesale transformation and reinvention of how our team operates. Although developing a cloud mentality means overcoming some significant hurdles, it is more than worth it, as it is this mindset that will determine the future of business. In three key areas 鈥� underlying technology, ways of working, and customer support 鈥� we were able to reap the ultimate rewards of a cloud mindset.

A Cloud Mindset Requires Purpose-Built Solutions

As an example of what this meant in Customer Solution Support & Innovation on the tools side, consider 51风流Solution Manager. 51风流Solution Manager is a typical on-premise product that must be installed on a server and requires its own database; it is a system in and of itself to manage customers鈥� actual 51风流product landscapes. It is no longer logical to have an on-premise system that must be run, operated, configured, and maintained to manage a cloud-based solution. Consequently, the idea of was born.

One of the most difficult decisions we made when creating 51风流Cloud ALM, our application lifecycle management (ALM) solution for customers that use predominantly cloud solutions from SAP, was to develop it from scratch rather than build off previous software. But in order to realize the true potential of a cloud-native solution, something entirely new was needed.

It is always tempting to take a shortcut for immediate gain. A common hurdle when adopting a cloud mindset is resistance to developing new solutions when so many of the old ones are still perfectly serviceable. After all, not everyone is using entirely cloud-based systems, and in the short term, some existing technologies 鈥� which were themselves time-consuming and difficult to develop 鈥� can get the work of today finished.

While this required more up-front work, there are multiple benefits from the resulting cloud-native system. For one, it is extremely easy to deploy. Any customer that has an 51风流cloud product can activate the program practically with the click of a button. It is also easy to scale. A multi-tenant cloud solution should offer the ability to multiply its underlining technical services and have it scale automatically, which is not only powerful today but will be invaluable as our customers continue to move to the cloud.
For a true cloud mindset, you must be willing to put in the work up front to experience continuous innovation and regularly provision new features while effortlessly scaling in the future. Still, the development of cloud-native solutions comes along with a change in the way we work.

This means that individual roles change as well. One example of how a job fundamentally changes with a cloud mindset is the product manager鈥檚 role. Traditionally, they look at big features. In a world where you introduce small, incremental changes every day, as is often true of cloud software, releasing innovation to customers is not a discrete event that happens once and then ends. Instead, product managers must learn to break things down into small features and have different groups working on each small feature. There is no grand release; it is a continuous stream rather than a sudden burst of water.

In a similar vein, programmers must learn to work without dependencies, which are common in traditional software development. In a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) cloud environment, every dependency must be continuously resolved, and changes are being released to customers on a daily basis rather than being collected for a single release date.

Another example would be the role of a software quality manager. In a world with daily deployments, the old ways of testing software are completely gone and instead, q-managers become test-automation managers.

A New Way to Work

In addition to specific roles, a cloud mindset requires adopting new ways of working. This can be a major hurdle; it is difficult to change old habits and patterns of behavior. However, it鈥檚 not impossible, and I have been thrilled to discover that, with a few people guiding the way, the vast majority of people on my teams were able to adapt to new ways of working.

The difference between traditional work processes and a cloud mentality of work is somewhat like the difference between a pre-recorded show and live television. The pre-recorded show requires a lot of work that ends once the show is released for the week, when work on the next episode begins. With live TV, everything must happen in real time. There are no second takes, and there is no pause between episodes, just a continuous stream of information. And if something goes wrong, it鈥檚 going wrong in front of a lot of people.

A New Model of Customer Support

Finally, adopting a cloud mindset means developing not only new ways of working internally, but also of working with customers.

Today, many customer business processes have turned into something I call real-time processes. They’re always on, highly mission critical, and have an immediate business impact when they’re not available. If customers are using real-time processes, then we need to offer real-time support. For my organization, this means nothing less than being available for our customers in live expert chat. Customers can choose not to send a support ticket but rather speak to our top product experts live 鈥� now! We also offer customers to book live interactions at a time of their choosing.

Another one of my favorite examples is this. In a traditional, on-premise situation, a customer鈥檚 system could receive an individual software change, with a larger change published to all customers afterwards if need be. However, a cloud-first mentality means accepting that changes must be pushed out at regular intervals to all customers. This requires managing expectations: real-time support is invaluable but might look different from what a customer might expect coming from the old system. If a customer wants a noncritical change, the timeline may be different than it once was, while we must be ready to support their critical changes constantly and without delay.
From tools to job functions, a cloud mindset requires a fundamentally different way of working, which, vitally, permeates through the entire organization 鈥� everyone is touched. However, it also means that everyone has the opportunity to contribute to the cloud mindset, and with the proper change management, can create a cohesive group with a shared mission and outlook on the future of the organization.

What doesn鈥檛 change with a cloud mindset, however, is the imperative to constantly delight the customer. The Customer Solution Support & Innovation organization exists to provide customers with the kind of world-class support they expect from SAP, and that hasn鈥檛 changed.

That鈥檚 why I believe we were ultimately successful in adopting a cloud mindset, and it鈥檚 this commitment to our customers that we take into every digital transformation we support.

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

One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is watching people of various skills and experiences work together to positively change the world. bring a level of brilliance, ingenuity, and empathy when creating and delivering the innovations, pace of change, and outcomes that our customers desire.

There is no limit in sight to what our software development teams can produce. However, that fact does not mean that they should not evolve. Businesses now operate in an environment that is quickly shifting away from traditional on-premise software toward more modern cloud-based solutions. And as 51风流customers adopt a cloud mindset from their digital transformations, developers should too.

This realization recently came to life with a breakthrough approach to development. When 51风流customers began strategically migrating their on-premise infrastructures to the cloud, we knew the time was rapidly coming when a cloud-based application lifecycle management (ALM) solution would be needed. Delivering this offering 鈥� now called听听鈥� helped optimize customers’ relationships with its existing and new 51风流solutions and its chosen cloud providers and support partners.

Evolving Software Development for True Cloud Transformation

Developing 51风流Cloud ALM was vastly different from our typical on-premise projects.

Traditionally, we implement a solution over months and then make it available for download to customers. But even while our customers are using the solution in a productive environment, the technology is updated and听 re-released as a new version when a critical mass of improvements are made 鈥� potentially impacting tens of thousands of installations across our customers鈥� and partners鈥� data centers or cloud environments running on 51风流HANA Enterprise Cloud.

With the cloud, 51风流can now stop moving applications to various data centers and offer a holistic service that enables customers to realize the speed, agility, standardization, and consolidated intelligence that the cloud promises.

Our global team of developers had to shift its design and delivery paradigm as quickly as possible to be successful. This meant transforming themselves with the right tools and processes for delivering impactful, cloud-based innovations with a flexible mindset.

Based on the advice and best practices of development executives from innovation leaders such as Netflix and Facebook, we underwent four fundamental cultural shifts.

Transform from On Premise to Cloud

Standard delivery of on-premise software is focused on the general availability of new software, completely updated versions, and service packs. Whether these offerings are released annually or biannually, these deliverables feature a bundle of functionalities designed, coded, tested, and quality assured by a team of 200 people. This model may have been profitable, but bug fixes, broken integrations, and requested modifications are inevitable.

The cloud environment requires a much more purposeful and swift development process. Now, the goal is the daily delivery of new capabilities and updates. 51风流runs smaller, more frequent iterations with a defined road map and a portfolio of relevant innovation practices, analytics tools, and process automation 鈥� from DevOps to testing and delivery.

Evolve Hierarchies to Networks

In most software development teams, the organizational chart features more than 15 roles and various siloed teams focused on a specific offering, solution capability, or user experience element. Most projects require everyone in the group to be involved 鈥� each one with well-defined responsibilities and approval authority.

By flattening the hierarchical structure, we release 听developers from the pressure of answering to various people with different opinions and experiences. They are now empowered to do what they do best 鈥� engineering. In addition to creating software, developers are taking care of the end-to-end process, including testing, quality assurance, and production.

Accelerate from Static to Dynamic

To help ensure the team stays on track and delivers valuable outcomes for customers consistently, we conduct spot checks throughout the development process. The inclusion of automation into the daily delivery model allows developers to collaboratively structure features by working on small pieces synchronously and integrating their deliverable continuously until all requirements are fulfilled. Ultimately, developers have clear ownership of the feature or version they produce, which is increasing the overall quality and speed of the development process.

Delivering small changes avoids big bang releases and, therefore, improves availability. For example, massive simplification of code lines is now possible due to this single-trunk approach. Going from 20 code lines to just one is a significant time-saver. Fixes can also be done in 60 minutes, including testing and rolling them out to all customers.

From Yearly Planning to Continuous Innovation

Daily delivery of new software functionalities and upgrades removes the risk of difficult-to-resolve surprises that often happen with on-premise software. 51风流customers’ users can submit a note immediately through the software, detailing where a feature may not work as well, a dashboard could be improved, or an interface could be more seamless. SAP鈥檚 development team receives this information in real time, assesses the request, and assigns the appropriate developer to resolve it.

This design-thinking mindset gives 51风流space to listen to customers carefully, understand their needs thoroughly, and deliver on expectations quickly. This methodology prevents the investment of time, money, and resources on features or upgrades that are not used or relevant to customers. By optimizing the balance between nice-to-have capabilities with those that customers must have, 51风流can optimize the value and agility of its cloud solutions.

By offering a minimally viable feature first, customers have a say in how the solution behaves and appears. Then, 51风流iterates development in a steady cadence of small increments until customers鈥� requirements and desires are fully addressed.听This approach gives them the freedom to try out new features or upgrade and provide feedback for further refinement and adaptation to the solution based on their needs.

Elevating the Purpose of Development

Let’s face it: software providers cannot afford to stick with traditional, on-premise development. Old approaches may be familiar and comfortable, but they do not work in an era where cloud-centric innovations and updates are expected to be delivered continuously, consistently, and quickly. No customer can afford surprises 鈥� such as release delays and quality issues 鈥� and wait for the next release, months later, to have them resolved.

So much has changed for SAP鈥檚 development team over the last year. The initial motivation may have been a native-cloud project, but everything from the way 51风流looks at its projects to the company鈥檚 delivery approach has been forever improved. In fact, the term “developer” does not fully describe what SAP鈥檚 talented team members do. They are engineers creating a better future for every business and person.

Andreas Heckmann is the executive vice president and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation, 51风流Product Engineering for 51风流SE.

Lehmann explains how 51风流collaborates on co-innovation projects to help create solutions that extend the value of each customer鈥檚 investment and quickly scale for more companies, generating immediate and industry-wide business value and results.

Q: How has 51风流transformed customer co-innovation and what is different now?

A: Co-innovation with customers has long been foundational to SAP鈥檚 evolution, driving our extraordinary growth. It remains an important piece of our strategic journey as we鈥檝e renewed our commitment to listen to our customers鈥� experiences and act on their feedback.

What鈥檚 changed is how we鈥檝e doubled down on co-innovation that extends with standardized, scalable solutions that seamlessly integrate with our intelligent digital core. A great example is our solutions. We鈥檙e bringing together customers and partners to co-innovate vertical-specific extensions at scale. This allows many more customers to quickly apply the latest intelligent technologies for faster business results that meet their company鈥檚 objectives for differentiation and growth.

What role does customer support and maintenance have in co-innovation?

It鈥檚 not unusual for support and maintenance requests to become co-innovation projects. We continuously analyze incidents, and when we find a critical mass of requests with relevance for many customers in a certain industry, those can morph into projects that our team handles. We also collaborate regularly with other 51风流development teams to create new solutions.

Why did 51风流make this change?

Customers want our guidance in understanding what standardized processes make the most sense for their particular industry and how they can use 51风流solutions to quickly apply them to their business. This is why our new co-innovation strategy involves 51风流teams company-wide, including services and support, sales, and product engineering. Working closely with customers in the context of their unique challenges and objectives, as well as market dynamics, we make sure they receive the solution extensions they require for business innovation, including seamless integration with the intelligent digital 51风流core.

How does this new co-innovation model reflect the company鈥檚 Intelligent Enterprise vision?

We want our customers to move to the cloud with us. However, we understand that customers are at very different starting points. This co-innovation model is designed to bring every customer to the next level for modern business 鈥� whether they have our on-premise systems or have already begun moving forward with cloud.

Can you share examples of how companies have co-innovated with 51风流for business results?

We are co-innovating to help numerous customers generate quick results from their investments in . A pharmaceutical company involved in clinical trials for the coronavirus vaccine was using our on-premise solutions, so we are building an extension that will allow them to connect a key process to 51风流S/4HANA. The solution will address blinding and randomization needs in clinical trials, facilitating important processes including demand forecasting, manufacturing, and shipments of clinical trial materials.

Another co-innovation project is in the automotive industry, where we are exploring how a manufacturer can inject artificial intelligence (AI) into their logistics processes to increase speed and reduce errors. The public sector is a major growth area too, where we have projects that have included procurement extensions, allowing governments to significantly simplify complexity. Co-innovation projects like these can become strategic partnerships that bring new solutions to entire industries.

What advice do you have for customers that want to co-innovate with SAP?

Be bold and challenge us. We want to understand your evolving business aspirations and challenges so we can work together to co-innovate solutions. We鈥檒l find the best engagement model to explore innovations for your company. Technology-wise, keep your core ERP system with no additional modifications 鈥� or as standardized as possible 鈥� and build extensions in the cloud so you can quickly take advantage of innovations as they become available. The biggest benefits of moving to the cloud are speed and the resultant business agility. These capabilities are critical to success in today鈥檚 environment.

Looking ahead to 2021, what should customers expect from SAP?

As we continue massively investing in cloud solutions, co-innovation with longtime and new customers is central to our strategy. We will deliver new solutions and redefine markets together, jumpstarting innovation across industries. We鈥檙e looking ahead to faster new solution delivery and measurable business results for even more customers in 2021.

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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 听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.

This kind of flexible mindset needs to be a part of a larger culture of fast and adaptable innovation across an entire corporation to help move a business toward an intelligent future. As 51风流helps customers along their journeys, fast-paced innovation within the cloud 鈥� driven by a dynamic, cloud-centric mindset 鈥� plays a crucial role.

Embracing the Cloud

One aspect of shifting from an on-premise world to a cloud environment is truly embracing the cloud. Adopting the Intelligent Enterprise in the cloud is no longer a fit-gap approach, which primarily focuses on providing individualized functionality. Rather, it is a much more fit-to-standard culture where the benefits of standardized functionalities can be leveraged with adequate functional coverage, faster implementation, and extensibility.

Customers also benefit from continuous innovation through regular updates managed by 51风流and additional offerings through the 51风流API Business Hub consuming partner extensions and own developments.

Managing the integration between the different components of the Intelligent Enterprise remains key for customer success.

Offering 51风流Cloud ALM to Meet Customer Needs

To support customers鈥� cloud strategies as well as cloud-centric mindsets, 51风流offers 51风流Cloud ALM, a cloud-native solution for implementing and managing customers鈥� intelligent hybrid and multi-cloud suite environments. This solution, part of the comprehensive application lifecycle management (ALM) product portfolio from SAP, was particularly created to meet the needs of cloud customers while also helping customers transition from on premise to the cloud in a private cloud or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) setup.

Customers benefit from an out-of-the-box, native cloud solution that helps them speed up team onboardings for their projects. It is designed to act as the central entry point to operate the 51风流cloud landscape with guided implementation and highly automated cloud operations.

A key question customers have is how they can master managing their intelligent enterprise and diverse software landscape in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

The of an application lifecycle management solution like not only help customers master their software landscape, but also achieve a fast return-on-investment (ROI) and manage the best use of all their applications. This becomes even more helpful when the provider takes over system operations, but customers still must implement and configure the processes as well as monitor integration, processes, and users.

Customer expectations on managing such an environment with a powerful ALM solution are instant access from anywhere, unlimited scalability, lower IT maintenance cost, and maximum efficiency.

As 51风流continues to expand and innovate these capabilities within , cultivating a cloud-centric mindset is critical for users to thrive in the dynamic and constantly evolving cloud environment.

Rethinking solutions with a cloud-first perspective will be advantageous in identifying and tackling new challenges in the future while creating long-term time and cost efficiencies with the support of 51风流Cloud ALM. Businesses ultimately can be better positioned to meet the demands and opportunities of the future and are enabled to better manage their digital transformation.

51风流Cloud ALM also supports intelligent operations with end-to-end transparency on integration, applications, and business processes. This helps both the customer and 51风流to fully explore the advantages of a cloud-centric approach and manage the ROI of the customers鈥� applications in an efficient and effective way.

Over time, 51风流plans to cover the entire life cycle of overall intelligent hybrid and multi-cloud suite settings with 51风流Cloud ALM.

To keep up with the latest releases and enhancements of 51风流Cloud ALM, join the upcoming . And explore the latest updates on 51风流Support Portal, where easy-to-consume videos, blogs, and replays of online sessions are available.

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

Now, 51风流is introducing improved capabilities to simplify the implementation experience, add operations capabilities to manage cloud solutions, and support additional offerings like 51风流SuccessFactors and 51风流Customer Experience solutions, among others.

Tim Steuer, vice president of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) at SAP, reveals how he and his team have been helping improve the solution since launch.

Q: What are some of the updates you and your team have been working on since the launch of 51风流Cloud ALM?

A: When we first launched, the initial scope was focused and strategic, simplifying the implementation experience for customers on their way to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. With 50 customers within our implementation portal at the time, we received great feedback from customers that did not use ALM tools from 51风流in the past. This included a 12-week 51风流S/4HANA Cloud project at a small company with only five employees in IT.

We鈥檙e now adding operations, expanding the full capabilities of 51风流Cloud ALM to support other cloud products, including 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, and integrating parts of 51风流Cloud ALM to solutions including 51风流Customer Experience, 51风流Ariba, and 51风流Concur solutions, among others. It鈥檚 exciting to get this opportunity to support so many more customers with their transformation projects and help them grow as organizations.

Additionally, we鈥檝e added several capabilities to 51风流Cloud ALM to enhance the initial implementation phase and assist with streamlining operations for customers looking to deploy and operate cloud solutions from SAP, including:

• Process management
• Task management
• Test management
• Release timelines
• Integration monitoring
• Exception monitoring
• Business process monitoring
• Event and alert management

How are these updates impactful for customers?

Customers t are going through cloud implementations are experiencing something totally different than an on-premise scenario. Instead of long cycles 鈥� let鈥檚 say with updates every four years 鈥� there are constant updates with the cloud. Customers need a tool to absorb and integrate the continuous innovation by cloud providers into existing business processes. 51风流Cloud ALM is designed to do just that.

In a recent conversation, for example, Leonardo De Araujo, a partner from Beyond Technologies, told us that 51风流Cloud ALM is a game-changer for them and the company recommends using the solution for implementing 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. The road map 51风流provided convinced them, and they plan to adopt new features in the future.

Additionally, with 51风流Cloud ALM, 51风流helps ensure cloud operations, which enables customers to shift focus away from technical administration and monitoring and allows them to focus on more strategic things, like how cloud solutions work together or how to manage a seamless flow of data.

Our ambition is that ultimately customers won鈥檛 need a dedicated administrator for 51风流Cloud ALM. That means all they鈥檇 need to do is onboard team members to collaborate on the platform and select the cloud solutions that are managed by 51风流Cloud ALM 鈥� without technical knowledge.

What is the significance of these new capabilities?听

By greatly expanding on the number of products that support 51风流Cloud ALM, we鈥檙e broadening our customer base and helping more of our customers adopt to the changes that come with transitioning from on premise to the cloud. This is also a shift for us because we鈥檙e able to not only guide our customers with the adoption, but also move into the operations space and help ensure smooth day-to-day operations after implementation is complete. This means counseling our customers in a totally different way, like solving problems of integration between various cloud solutions, as well as finding out why certain business processes aren鈥檛 working.

Can you share any plans for 51风流Cloud ALM and tell us how customers can learn more?

Expanding 51风流Cloud ALM doesn鈥檛 stop this year. In fact, we鈥檙e hoping to add 51风流Cloud ALM to all components of the Intelligent Enterprise, including 51风流S/4HANA, by 2021. We plan to increase capabilities and expand the footprint to cover hybrid solutions.

All 51风流Cloud customers will be able to leverage 51风流Cloud ALM at no additional cost through the 51风流ONE Support Launchpad. We鈥檙e thrilled about the opportunity to empower our cloud customers on their journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise.

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As a result of the update, 51风流Cloud ALM will support additional 51风流solutions 鈥� including 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, 51风流Customer Experience solutions and 51风流Ariba solutions. 51风流Cloud ALM was redesigned with improved capabilities to simplify the implementation and operations experience as more customers move to the cloud.

鈥淎s the cloud landscape advances and cloud solutions become more important, it鈥檚 critical to continuously update 51风流Cloud ALM to meet expectations of a cloud customer mind-set,鈥� said Marc Thier, SVP, Application Lifecycle Management, SAP. 鈥淥ver the last year and a half, we鈥檝e focused on simplicity and evolving 51风流Cloud ALM so the platform can be used by business and IT roles with no need for technical knowledge.鈥�

51风流Cloud ALM benefits customers during various innovation cycles, including:

• Easy deployment for companies that choose 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and 51风流SuccessFactors solutions: 51风流Cloud ALM helps with team onboarding and fit-to-standard workshops for configuring the customer鈥檚 cloud solution. It tracks project progress by guiding customers through the implementation process and reports project status automatically.
• Integration for customers who use more than one cloud service: When managing multiple cloud services 鈥� such as 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, or 51风流Cloud Platform Integration Suite 鈥� customers must monitor the integration themselves, a process which 51风流Cloud ALM can help them manage.
• Outlook for managing hybrid solutions: Customers adopting the Intelligent Enterprise will see increased support for on-premise solutions like 51风流S/4HANA. Monitoring the integration of on-premise or other cloud products is an additional discipline 51风流Cloud ALM will focus on in the future.

Customers who subscribe to a cloud service from 51风流that includes 51风流Enterprise Support, cloud editions, have access to 51风流Cloud ALM at no additional cost.

51风流is dedicated to simplifying and improving users鈥� journeys to cloud-based solutions and supporting companies of all sizes in their goal of digital transformation. In extending full ALM support, the current update to 51风流Cloud ALM takes an important step toward a more agile, innovative future.

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Media Contacts:
Martin Gwisdalla, SAP, +49 (6227) 7-67275, martin.gwisdalla@sap.com, CET
51风流Press Room; press@sap.com
Jennifer Kohanim, FleishmanHillard, +1 (617) 692-0535, jennifer.kohanim@fleishman.com, ET

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