Cloud product innovations – fast transition to sales : Case: SAP Hybris Service Engagement Center

The aim of this study is to create practices and tools for shortening the time to market for SAP Hybris Service Engagement Center cloud product. This is a completely new product and its future depends on how well it sells. To exploit the full benefits of cloud solutions a continuous knowledge transfer from SAP Product Development to SAP Sales must be created. This study will also support the overall transition to SAP cloud products through SAP’s cloud-first strategy. The theoretical part delves deeper into the benefits of cloud solutions, which are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to enable business efficiency, business effectiveness and empower business transformation. Knowledge management offers a structured way of aligning knowledge asset creation and knowledge exchange to company strategy. Knowledge transfer evaluates different types of knowledge transfer platforms and focuses on best practices in knowledge transfer, in particular to sales. To guarantee that SAP Sales will adopt SAP Hybris Server Engagement Center, SAP Sales must be able to voice their opinions. Qualitative interviews to sales-related stakeholders were arranged a to learn their preferred media and the most valuable knowledge asset types in sales context. Based on the interviews, the knowledge assets were arranged to different groups based on their importance and urgency to Sales. This study outlines a preferred order for developing the assets by maximizing what can be done with limited resources. Several teams within SAP need to be involved to product knowledge transfer to Sales. This cross-department work needs to be well planned and coordinated to ensure continuity to the process. Future suggestions include adopting knowledge management in larger scale for a more structured way to manage strategically relevant knowledge assets. Another future development area is developing more social elements to collaboration platform used for knowledge transfer