Have you struggled to find the correct SAP source/repository/website to get the information you are seeking about an SAP product, licenses or support-related questions? Are you wasting precious time in trying to find a particular support-related metric? Have you relied on your SAP Account Executive and/or Customer Success Partner to get information about a product offering or your own usage of a product instead of retrieving that information on-command? Have you received varying answers (if not different) to the same question that you posed to different SAP resources? If your answer is ‘yes’ to one or more of these questions, then you need to read this article, learn about ‘SAP for Me’, and start using it today.
SAP for Me
SAP for Me is not a new application, neither is it ‘old’, in a generic sense. It has been around for almost three years. However, the value it delivers to customers is not well-known in the market and therefore, is underused. In my interactions with customers worldwide, I have realized that it is relatively unknown and each time I introduce it and espouse its benefits, the reaction is one of surprise and excitement.
So, what exactly is SAP for Me?
SAP for Me is the single and centralized conduit for SAP customers to engage with SAP. It is a ‘digital companion’ that no longer requires SAP customers to access multiple websites for generic or specific information regarding SAP or their own usage of SAP products and applications. SAP customers can now empower themselves to answer operational questions in a self-service and self-sufficient manner with the added guarantee of receiving the latest information.
In this article, I will illustrate and explain the key features of SAP for Me. Considering the plethora of capabilities of the tool, this article will only discuss a few of its capabilities.
Accessing SAP for Me
To access SAP for Me, access the URL: https://me.sap.com/. The landing page would look like what is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Landing page for SAP for Me
To sign in to SAP for Me, you can use your S-user or P-user credentials for SAP Support Portal. Since the information on the portal is related to your access rights and assigned roles, I will use the profile of a generic user, Ellie Smart, who works for Will E. Coyote Inc. A generic user (such as the one tied to “Try our Demo”) will see the (partial) home page shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Your SAP for Me homepage
This is different from the traditional interaction on SAP Support Portal. While on the left panel, you can see a list of dashboards which provides information related to some aspect of your current and/or anticipated usage of SAP, the right displays various tiles. One of the first things you will want to do is to customize the current default view to suit your business and aesthetic needs. Let me explain the (simple) steps that you can take to customize your SAP for Me experience.
Customizing SAP for Me
Click on ‘Edit’. In the resulting pop-up window, partial screenshot shown in Figure 3, select the components that are relevant to you.
Figure 3: Personalizing SAP for Me
SAP provides recommendations on the cards you should display in your default view, as seen in Figure 3. After personalizing, the default view changes to the one shown in Figure 4. Users can personalize this to their own liking.
Figure 4: Personalizing SAP for Me
Utilizing SAP for Me
After personalizing, a user can start using SAP for Me for operational and strategic needs. By default, SAP provides a curated list of information like notes and links to systems and products that the user is already subscribed to for easy searching for status or information. An area of such a default view is shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Information on SAP support topics
Prior to SAP for Me, there was no case dashboard available. Those who have interreacted with SAP systems for a long time will remember a legacy application called OSS that was used for interactions with SAP support (including creating messages or ‘tickets’, opening system connections to SAP support, checking status etc.). It evolved into the SAP Service Marketplace that modernized the whole support experience but still was not intuitive or user-friendly and needed users to navigate to a separate website. All of such inconveniences and shortcomings have been eliminated in SAP for Me. The users now get an aggregated view of their tickets or cases in this donut view and can drill directly into these. Gone are the days when spreadsheets had to be maintained or manual tracking mechanisms were used for ticket status.
The panel on the right displays operational data that one would normally have to go to different sites to find like cloud systems, their status, availability, provisioning, connectivity, license keys etc. Let us look at the systems status by clicking on the right link on this panel. The partial screenshot is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: System status
This large list of systems can be searched in many ways and can be drilled down from the system identifier to the detailed status.
In the leftmost panel underneath ‘Dashboards’ in Figure 5, one can see multiple areas with various degrees of relevance and priority to your organization. Although data provided in these areas can be accessed by navigating from other panels, SAP has made it convenient to access this information.
When I was SAP’s customer, I occasionally needed to find contractual information related to products and services my company had procured from SAP. This was not an easy task and involved reaching out to different departments including the SAP point of contact. Despite that, I could not be certain that I had the final version of a contract. However, using the ‘Customer Success’ dashboard in SAP for Me, this information is available at my fingertips and even better, it is guaranteed to be the ‘single version of the truth’. Figure 7 shows a partial screenshot of the ‘Customer Success’ dashboard.
Figure 7: Contracts dashboard
As a customer, one often needs to know, if not actively monitor, license availability and consumption of the various SAP subscriptions. But this is not an easy task. However, SAP for Me makes it almost effortless. All one needs to do is to click on the ‘Finance & Legal’ dashboard which will display the license data relevant to your organization. This is shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Cloud subscriptions dashboard
In Figure 8, you will notice that the dashboard has four tabs. We are currently on the tab that displays your cloud subscriptions. If you have on-premise contracts with SAP, you will be able to view and monitor it on the ‘On-Premise’ tab. The other two tabs provide the billing and consumption information.
A high importance for every customer is support. Most customers have historically interacted with SAP in managing incidents or problem tickets. SAP for Me has comprehensively streamlined and centralized support. Assuming you have the appropriate credentials, you should see something similar to the (partial) screenshot shown in Figure 9 when you click on the ‘Services and Support’ dashboard in Figure 5. Note that this view can be seen only after logging in and is not available in the demo version.
Figure 9: Services & support
As you explore the tabs, you will understand how comprehensive this support offering is and how it addresses. The SAP Support Portal is also hosted within this portal in case a user wants to start or resume their SAP support journey. This can be accessed by scrolling down the Services & Support portal and clicking on ‘Welcome to Support’. You can also see the informational message on the screen guiding users to SAP for Me instead of the Support Portal. This is shown in Figure 10.
Conclusion
SAP for Me is a single conduit for your interactions with SAP, going forward. I hope that you got a good understanding of some of its streamlined offerings, its key features, and its superior user experience and are therefore ready to either start or continue your SAP journey with your digital companion.
