How SAP for Me connects your Product Portfolio wit...

BeGanz · ‎2021 Mar 30

In SAP for Me, our role-specific customer portal to easily interact with SAP, you can now view all road map innovations integrated into your cloud and on-premise product portfolio.

As Product Manager for the SAP for Me capability area "Portfolio & Products" I give you a short overview on how SAP for Me connects your product portfolio with new road map innovations. To let you better find those innovations that are most valuable for your business I also explain the underlying content model with its different entities. It's very important to understand what products, software products and versions, business capabilities and innovations are and how they are related with each other.

For an introduction to SAP for Me from an enterprise architect's perspective first read juergen.jakowski related blog on "How Enterprise Architects benefit from SAP for Me".

Understanding the Road Map Content Model

How SAP for Me connects portfolio categories and products with road map innovations and business capabilities

Let us first look at the content model. As depicted in the above diagram, SAP for Me structures your whole product portfolio by portfolio categories and by the contained cloud or on-premise products. The related customer dashboard "Portfolio & Products" is the place to go in SAP for Me where you can find all product-related information including financial and legal content (orders, license materials), systems, product-related contacts in your company, knowledge & learning resources and additional information. Road Map innovations are new functions or capabilities that apply to the "technical" software products but not directly to the "logical" products as they are shown in SAP for Me. In this sense You navigate to a software product with its road map innovations starting from a portfolio category like Customer Experience, a level deeper to one of its products like Cloud for Customer that itself contains the software product SAP Cloud for Customer core apps.

Road Map innovations apply to software products (the "how") and to business capabilities (the "what" for example account and content management) and are grouped by their availability (in quarter year) timeline. These relationships are key to understanding and identifying product road maps and all contained innovations that are most valuable for your business. They are not specific to SAP for Me but also used in SAP Road Map Explorer or in SAP Discovery Center for SAP Business Technology Platform.

Road Map Innovations for Products

The Product Detail Page in SAP for Me now displays information about the product road map and its contained innovations. The content is retrieved from the SAP Road Map Explorer and displayed in SAP for Me according to the selected product.

In the Overview section, the new innovation card shows the number of product-related innovations available in the current quarter or planned for the next three quarters.

New Innovation card in Product Detail Overview

In the new Road Map & Innovations section, the product road map is displayed for four quarter years. The SAP Software Products and Product Versions that are associated with the product currently displayed in SAP for Me are shown at the top. This information is important as the displayed road map innovations are directly related to Software Products and Product Versions. In this sense products in SAP for Me group one or more Software Products in one place.

New Road Map and Innovations section on Product Detail page

All innovations are tagged by availability (available, future) and by software product or product version. By clicking the small arrow button under the innovation title you can read a further description inside SAP for Me. By clicking an innovation tile you can read the full innovation details including benefits, features and technical view (currently in a new browser tab linked to SAP Road Map Explorer).

In addition to the quarterly display, road map innovations are grouped by so-called business capabilities. A business capability describes “WHAT” a company requires to run their business activities, thereby achieving its business objectives and delivering value to its customers. Software products with their related innovations describe “HOW” a business capability can be implemented.

The total number of related product innovations is displayed in the header of each quarter year. Please note that this number reflects the total number of unique innovations not the number of their occurrences across multiple business capabilities. This means the same innovation can be listed under several business capabilities that all make use of it.

What makes Viewing Product Road Maps inside SAP for Me Unique

The focus of the "Portfolio & Products" capability area in SAP for Me is your purchased SAP portfolio and its related products. SAP for Me users can easily acquire an overview of the constituent parts of the portfolio they have purchased, and can personalize this view for example to display their favorite products. This serves as the perfect starting point for explorations in SAP for Me (for more details read this blog: What is SAP for Me?, by Jürgen Jakowski, May 2020)

The unique benefit of viewing road map innovations within SAP for Me is its connection with your company's complete product portfolio. By integrating with SAP Road Map Explorer you can now explore and identify new and planned innovations for your purchased products in order to build better solutions and discover new opportunities.