How to Improve SAP Help

Executive Summary

• A background on SAP Help
• The issue with SAP Help
• What software vendors write the best technical documentation in supply chain management?

Introduction

SAP is one of the few vendors to have much of its help documentation available online. Putting help documentation is the right move, and this is particularly true for SAP as their help documentation is so extensive. However, after we have built what is essentially our SAP Help over the last few years at the Brightwork Research & Analysis SAP Planning blog, we are noticing several limitations to SAP Help that SAP should probably rectify.

1. SAP Help’s web design is based upon an old model. It is a frame with a hierarchy to the left. This approach has been replaced long ago with blogging software which shows tags and categories as flexible user defined categories.
2. The SAP Help search could be significantly improved by merely allowing Google to perform the site search. We use a Google Site search for all of our sites, and it works better and provides better results than what SAP search provides.
3. SAP’s articles need to be updated. It seems like many in the SAP APO space have not been updated for years.
4. SAP should use more screenshots. Screenshots are critical for understanding applications and how to configure the application. However, SAP uses no screenshots.
5. SAP appears to have made some navigational changes to the Help documentation. We can’t put our finger on it, but whatever was done has reduced the find-ability of material.
6. A lot of SAP’s Help needs to be refreshed with better writing. One can read an SAP Help article and get the feeling that some more commentary could be added. For instance, what types of clients often use the functionality? There is just much more improvement that could be made, which is related to the articles’ actual writing.
7. SAP should employ permalinks. This allows an article to keep the same link, even though the title changes. SAP should leverage permalinks in its documentation. For instance, this set of instructions below was provided in a Word document.

For more information about the business function SCM-APO, Third-Party Order Planning in APO,

see the business function documentation in SAP Library at https://help.sap.com under

Enhancement Package 1 -> Business Functions (SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP SCM

7.0) -> Business Functions in SAP APO -> SCM-APO, Third-Party Order Planning in APO. – SAP Release Notes

However, when one goes help.sap.com and chooses the first item recommended, notice it is nowhere to be found:

If we search “SAP Enhancement Package 1 for SAP SCM 7.0,” we find a result, but clicking on the result brings up an error page.

SAP is a very wealthy company that says it makes the best enterprise software globally, yet can’t master permalinks? This is something that free blogging platforms like WordPress offer right out of the box, and all of the articles on Brightwork Research & Analysis are permalinks, so when we enter a URL into a book that we publish, that link will always go to the same web page.

Conclusion

Essentially SAP Help, both in its writing and in the web technologies it uses, is dated. This is causing those searching for information on SAP to search very inefficiently. SAP is the largest enterprise software vendor globally and can well afford to bring its documentation up in level and its technology to a modern standard. We read a lot of technical documentation, and while SAP has a lot of technical documentation, they lag the best content providers that we have read. Examples of software vendors with great software documentation include Demand Works, MCA Solutions, and Arena Solutions. Those who want to understand how technical documentation should be written are the vendors to research.