Just returning from SAPcentric EAM at Huntington Beach, which was a great event with more than 400 asset managers and maintenance professionals from both business and IT. In the course of this event and on other occasions I’ve often been asked where to find information about SAP’s latest innovations and also continuous improvements. Let me share some great sources of information that Paul Kurchina and I also presented during the Mastering PM at Gold Coast, Australia, as part of the Jumpstart session.
First of all, it is always a good start to just click www.sap.com/eam. When you explore our solutions you can see the various EAM solution areas
- Asset Portfolio and Project Management
- Asset Information Management
- Asset Visibility and Performance
- Maintenance Operations
- Maintenance Parts and Services Provisioning
- Mobile Asset Management
- Operational Risk Management
- Real Estate Lifecycle Management
Behind the links there is a lot of further information.
But, you can also click on the Resources tab and download documents for offline reading, like the "Solution in Detail" collaterals that provide you an approx. 30 page overview on the various end-to-end solutions (bundles of the above solution areas). If you are rather looking for a complete overview, read the e-book on EAM. We are also working on a more intuitive visual representation of our portfolio, the so-called Solution Explorer. This is still in beta, but selecting your industry and area of resonsibility you will be able to visit further details on these entities.
While current product version are always visible with all details on our Service Marketplace in the Product Availability Matrix tool (http://service.sap.com/pam), roadmaps for all industries and lines of business can be found via http://service.sap.com/roadmap.
For this website you need a user that you can easily create yourself in case you are an SAP customer. Just click Registration at service.sap.com and keep your installation number ready. You can find it in your SAP system looking under System --> Status.
Now coming to recent innovations…
There is a nice overview page explaining the respective sources of information you can find at http://service.sap.com/findinnovation.
Starting from there
- the Improvement Finder will get you the latest details on the content of support packages
- the Solution Browser describes all innovation comparing two different releases for a specific area, so you can e.g. search
for everything that happened in EAM between 4.6c and ERP 6.0 EhP 3
- and finally, there is also a database of all Business Functions, meaning every new functionality delivered with the Enhancement Packages you can pick and choose from. As you might already know, your company can choose to perform just a "technical upgrade" to the latest EhP and business functions can the be turned on according to your specific needs using SFW5, the "Switch Framework".
Last but not least, SAP even offers a free service, called the Business Function Prediction that provides you with an analysis based on your current use of the system which additional functionality might be beneficial to activate. You can find more details at http://service.sap.com/BFP.
Our Value Management professionals can also help you with different other services.
An overview on continuous improvements that we have made available through our Customer Connection Program (our collaboration model with the user groups) can be found right here on SCN. These smaller enhancements can be deployed as notes and are therefore minimal invasive for your current setup. And – as always – the EAM pages on SCN are a good place to look at, if you have additional questions.
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