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agrawal
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
3,518
I’m working on SAP Enterprise Product Development and one of my focuses is customer and partner enablement to accelerate the adoption of Enterprise Product Development. I’ve implemented the solution more than a dozen times during testing and have supported successful go lives for customers and partners. In this blog I would like to share some of the insights and best practices that will help you understand how to get started with Enterprise Product Development.

SAP Enterprise Product Development helps you digitalize product development. This powerful solution is a highly customizable cloud solution that enables you to digitally orchestrate your product development from design to operate, resulting in reduced time to market, higher R&D return on investment, higher margins, and reliable product launches. It is hosted and managed via SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).

The first step to start with is to review the welcome email – ‘Access information for SAP Enterprise Product Development’ – that contains the details about your purchase and additional information. Click on the URL to access your SAP BTP. In case you face issues with accessing the SAP BTP, report an incident with SAP support using the component ‘BC-CP-CF-CPT’.

Typically to get Enterprise Product Development up and running the administrators (persons responsible to implement/manage the solution) need to perform the activation and initial setup that includes,

  • Entitlement and Subscription
    When you purchase an enterprise account, you are entitled to use a specific set of resources, such as the amount of memory that can be allocated to your applications. With Enterprise Product Development available on your SAP BTP, you can allocate the service entitlement for the solution to the subaccount where you want to subscribe to Enterprise Product Development(ref. Subscribing to the Enterprise Product Development Application)

  • Trust, Users and Role Collection
    You must establish a trust relationship with an SAML 2.0 identity provider in your subaccount in SAP BTP. SAP recommends using the SAP Identity Authentication service (IAS) for Enterprise Product Development. When the trust is setup between the SAP BTP and Identity Provider, you can define, and map users based on groups or other attributes to role collection on SAP BTP for Enterprise Product Development. Roles are assigned to role collections which are assigned in turn to users or user groups if an SAML 2.0 identity provider stores the users. The various roles bundled into the role collections will depend on the level of access you wish the user to have on Enterprise Product Development, which can be based on application access like collaboration, requirements etc. or based on persons defined. You can refer Default Role Collections to understand typical user scenarios. If they don't meet your requirements, you can build your own role collections.

  • Connectivity
    You need to establish a connection between the different services in play using the SAP BTP Connectivity Service, Cloud Connector, Destination Service and other predefined protocols for the solution. The Connectivity service provides a connectivity proxy to access on-premises resources, and the Destination service lets you retrieve and store the technical information about the target resource (destination) that you need to connect your application to a remote service or system. (ref. Connectivity)

  • Cloud Foundry
    Based on your requirement and setup to use the various Enterprise Product Development capabilities, you need to setup a cloud foundry space to create and manage the service instance and other settings. Like when setting up destinations you would be required to use service instance for the respective application like collaboration, workflow, visualization etc. (ref. Administration and Operations in the Cloud Foundry Environment)

  • Business Configuration
    Once you have completed the SAP BTP related setup, you can assign your user, or the user responsible to define the business configuration based on your business requirements and the cloud services that you use and perform the required business configuration. (ref. Business Configuration)


The application is ready to use after these minimum steps have been completed. The SAP Enterprise Product Development application URL can be found on the SAP BTP under the Instances and Subscription menu of the subaccount.


In summary to get Enterprise Product Development up and running, the administrator(s) performs two types of setups –

  • As a System Administrator, I want setup the required configurations on my subaccount on SAP Business Technology Platform to start implementing Enterprise Product Development.

  • As an Business Administrator, I want to define business rules and configurations to enable sharing of product data with suppliers and contract manufacturers.


These steps can be broadly summarized as:

  1. System Administrator sets up basic SAP BTP configurations.

  2. System Administrator sets up role configurations for Enterprise Product Development.

  3. System Administrator sets up trust configurations for identity provider (IdP) and SAP BTP configurations.

  4. Business Administrator sets up connectivity configurations on SAP BTP.

  5. Business Administrator sets up custom configurations as per business requirements.

  6. (Optional, for extension) Administrators sets up integrations to other applications and systems.



You can find additional information in the official product documentation. Stay tuned to read more about the considerations to take into account when implementing SAP Enterprise Product Development, a follow up blog with my insights from the many product engagements on adoption, implementation and best practices for Enterprise Product Development.

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Follow up blog
Considerations for Administrators Implementing SAP Enterprise Product Development
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Please do share your feedback and let us know in the comments section and hit the like button if this post was helpful. You can also tell us if you would like to read about one of these topics in more details. Follow the tag SAP Enterprise Product Development to receive notifications on future content in this area. You can also post your question on the SAP community using the tag SAP Enterprise Product Development.

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