As a market leader in enterprise application software, SAP helps companies run better by redefining ERP and creating networks of intelligent enterprises that provide transparency, resiliency, and sustainability across supply chains.

Locations:

100 worldwide +
Employees:

105,000 +
Revenue:

€29.52 billion

Summary

Challenges

SAP had digital assets stored in multiple separate repositories.
SAP needed a central approach to digital asset management to enable employees to find compelling content faster.

Solution

Consolidated 100,000 assets on a powerful, innovative, and highly scalable digital asset management solution.
Supported over 35 million asset interactions per year for thousands of users.

Results

Empowers users to search in natural language
Optimizes campaigns based on data insights
Boosts asset reuse by up to 70%

Challenges

Approximately 100,000 digital content assets in active use
Multiple content repositories reduced digital asset management efficiency

SAP SE helps companies of various sizes and in multiple industries run better. To communicate the value of its solutions, services, and technology platforms, the company strives to create compelling marketing, sales, partner, and technical content, and manages and distributes the right digital assets to the right audiences at the right time.

Peter Chamberlain, senior director, marketing technology and transformation at SAP, elaborates: “To empower marketing, sales experts, and partners across SAP to have impactful conversations with customers and prospects, it’s crucial to connect them with high-quality content that helps them communicate their message effectively.”

Across SAP, content producers support marketing, sales, and partner teams with enablement materials, demand-generation assets, customer stories, white papers, and more. To help ensure consistency and quality across thousands of pieces of content, the company has established processes and workflows that support collaboration with both internal and external creative agencies to develop content that is relevant, compliant, and on-brand.

Chamberlain continues: “In the past, we used many separate repositories to store and manage our assets. We have around 100,000 pieces of content in active use across the business at any given time, and we saw a chance to simplify the landscape and help our teams find these resources faster by moving to a central platform.”

SAP was confident that replacing separate content repositories with a single platform would bring additional benefits such as optimizing content investment and reducing content duplication and infrastructure. As well as saving marketing and sales teams time searching for assets, a single point of control for content would make it easier for creators to publish materials, and for consumers to find and access the latest versions. It would also encourage greater reuse of assets, ultimately contributing to improved return on investment (ROI) for content production.

“We embarked on a project to create a single digital asset management [DAM] platform,” says Chamberlain. “The aim was to support end-to-end management of content and its associated metadata throughout the lifecycle, including publishing, cataloging, versioning, governance, and archiving. We were also keen to capture consumption data from the new DAM solution—helping us to understand how assets were being used and identify opportunities to leverage them more effectively.”

Flexibility and ease of integration make OpenText Digital Asset Management for SAP Solutions an effective solution for SAP.

Peter Chamberlain
Senior Director, Marketing Technology and Transformation, SAP SE

Solution

SAP uses Digital Asset Management for SAP® Solutions to underpin SAP’s Digital Library. Based on a headless architecture, the solution enables SAP to continually enhance the front-end experience for its thousands of users.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Digital Asset Management for SAP® Solutions

Seamlessly integrate digital media into business processes with SAP

Selecting a flexible solution

Two of SAP’s key criteria for selecting Digital Asset Management for SAP Solutions were its flexibility and extensibility

“One of the key advantages of the way we have deployed the solution is that we can build our own content workflows on top of OpenText Digital Asset Management (DAM),” explains Chamberlain. “As a result, we can continually innovate our user experiences, channels, and tools without the need for time-consuming development work on the DAM technology behind the scenes.”

One platform, many channels

Today, the OpenText solution forms the basis of SAP’s Digital Library—the company’s single point of control for producing and distributing the essential content that helps SAP tell its story. The DAM platform is integrated with multiple content authoring systems, and source files are managed and hosted from a central location. As well as helping ensure that SAP’s creative agencies have full control over the source files for all assets, this approach means that new versions of assets are immediately available on multiple channels as soon as they are published.

“We have connected SAP’s Digital Library to 25 content syndication platforms,” says Chamberlain. “These platforms include our internal client reference and partner portals, as well as enablement and education tools for our sales teams. We store our assets in multiple formats, enabling us to optimize content for each of our platforms—an XML format is easier to use than a PDF when publishing a case study as a web page, for example. Our DAM solution allows us to deliver content in the optimal format for each channel but manage all these different formats as a single asset.”

Enabling effective search

To allow marketing, sales, and partner teams to find content effectively, SAP captures rich metadata for each asset—all based on a centrally managed terminology and taxonomy.

“To help our teams find relevant materials that resonate with customers and prospects, we want to allow them to search by as many different fields as we can,” Chamberlain continues. “Asset metadata is crucial to enable fine-grained search capabilities: for example, searching for all customer stories from a specific sector or that include certain SAP solutions. By using a central taxonomy management platform, we can include the required metadata fields and help ensure they are used consistently across the organization.”

Promoting employee self-service

To accommodate thousands of Digital Library users while keeping management workloads lean, the company delivers self-service capabilities within a strong governance framework. Using automated business rules, SAP helps ensure that assets such as customer stories are not published externally without the requisite approvals from the customer. The company also automatically removes assets from its repository at predetermined expiry dates, helping to contain storage costs and ensure effective content management for the long term.

“Over the years, we have built up a great deal of internal experience and expertise in the OpenText solution,” adds Chamberlain. “When we do need to answer a technical question, we have always found OpenText support to be knowledgeable and professional.”

By using OpenText to deliver the content repository that underpins our Digital Library, we can create, publish, and reuse compelling content, helping SAP communicate its message consistently, effectively, and cost-efficiently.

Peter Chamberlain
Senior Director, Marketing Technology and Transformation, SAP SE

Results

Today, SAP manages and delivers content to over 100,000 users. Every year, the company’s DAM platform supports more than 35 million asset interactions, helping SAP share compelling content with global audiences and drive ROI by promoting content reuse.

Promoting new assets across the business

Since it first deployed OpenText Digital Asset Management for SAP Solutions, SAP has continued to innovate its DAM platform. The company has built rich capabilities on top of the OpenText solution, including smooth digital workflows to support content creation, production, and publishing, as well as apps to guide teams through campaign planning, publishing, and analysis.

“SAP teams leverage a large amount of content across the customer journey, and one of our goals is to help them find and use new assets as soon as they are live,” explains Chamberlain. “For our sales teams, we have developed a curator’s dashboard that automatically surfaces new assets such as customer stories and white papers. Generating internal exposure for assets in this way is a big advantage, as it helps us to maximize the business value of our investment in content production.”

Empowering users to search in natural language

Thanks to the flexibility and openness of the OpenText solution, SAP can tightly integrate the solution with its own technologies—shaping high-quality user experiences that help teams across the company rapidly find the assets they need. With the search and text option for SAP HANA®, the company leverages natural-language processing to interpret search queries, organize results by relevance and context, and auto-tag content during its creation.

“The search and text option for SAP HANA is helping to enhance our search capabilities in a number of areas,” says Chamberlain. “It can search metadata tags and the content of the assets themselves to select the most relevant results. Using full-text search, the Digital Library solution collects the most executed queries and proposes autocomplete results to the user. Auto-tagging was one of the features most requested by our users, and with text analysis capabilities in SAP HANA, we can support them on the first steps of content creation.”

Optimizing campaigns based on data insights

Using SAP Lumira® software, SAP analyzes workflow logs from the OpenText solution to measure how and where assets are being used—delivering valuable insights that help boost engagement.

“We can provide engagement scores for our assets, such as how many times a video has been watched, how many times a case study was downloaded, or how many slides were read in a deck,” Chamberlain elaborates. “Based on this information, our teams can adjust campaign assets on the fly—substituting lower-engagement assets for more compelling materials.”

Boosting asset reuse by up to 70%

By building on the OpenText solution over the past decade, SAP is simplifying search and discovery, making better-informed decisions about how best to deploy its assets, and encouraging asset reuse.

Chamberlain confirms: “On average, around 20% of our content is reused at some point throughout its lifetime—and for some asset types, we see reuse rates between 50% and 70%, which significantly boosts our ROI.”

Looking to the years ahead, the company plans to continue to enhance its Digital Library to support its stakeholders.

“Flexibility and ease of integration make OpenText Digital Asset Management for SAP Solutions an effective solution for SAP,” concludes Chamberlain. “By using OpenText to deliver the content repository that underpins our Digital Library, we can create, publish, and reuse compelling content, helping SAP communicate its message consistently, effectively, and cost-efficiently.”

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