Q2 went by fast! I hope that you all were able to participate in SAPPHIRE 2026 either in person or virtually. The SAP Autonomous Enterprise was announced and a shout out of huge thanks to our service customers Pfizer and Doehler for sharing your incredible stories & insights about your transformation, AI adoption and value outcomes with SAP Service Cloud and SAP ESM! Our next value-add event is queued up – SAP Connect 2026 is coming to Las Vegas, October 5-7 and we welcome our customers and partners to secure an early bird rate by August 10th to discover how to maximize value of your solutions, explore best practices in AI and business transformation approaches and much, much more!
Before I jump into our Q2 innovations for SAP ESM there are a couple of exciting opportunities I’d like to share.
- It’s not too late to join our SAP ESM webcast on Tuesday, July 21st, focused on HR Service Delivery: AI, Data, and Experience: From Transactions to Intelligent HR Services also featuring a widely recognized expert Anita Lettink. If you’re reading post-event, click the link above and watch the replay!
- Also, there is a new SAP Learning module for SAP ESM: Integrating SAP Enterprise Service Management. This course is available at no cost and is designed specifically for administrators, consultants, and business users to deepen their knowledge of SAP Enterprise Service Management. This course focuses on integration configuration to enable execution of end-to-end scenarios delivering true value and operational efficiency across the organization.
Now back to the focus of this blog – our Q2 innovations for SAP ESM! There are so many innovations and improvements please register for our Q2 Innovation webcast July 29th hosted by our product team.
Self-Service Catalog
The Self-Service Catalog provides employees with a guided, intuitive way to find and request the services they need, without requiring an understanding of the underlying processes or systems. Requests submitted through the appropriate topic catalog or tile are automatically resolved or routed based on the inquiry context, which reduces manual triage effort, frustration in solutioning and shortens resolution times. For service agents, this means fewer incomplete or misrouted cases and more time spent on higher-value work. For employees, it means a simpler, more predictable experience when engaging with their enterprise or shared service teams.
Service Catalog configuration
Service Catalog Self Service
Content Package Framework
The Content Package Framework enables organizations to deploy SAP ESM more quickly by leveraging prebuilt, reusable configurations for case types, workflows, and catalogs. Rather than building service processes from the ground up, customers and SI partners can start from proven templates and adapt them to specific business needs. This reduces implementation effort, simplifies rollout across lines of business, and helps organizations standardize service delivery at scale. Content packages for HR service delivery are planned for a future release.
New Email Editor
The new email editor provides service agents with a modern, streamlined interface for composing, editing, and managing customer communications. Designed with an AI-first architecture in mind, the editor supports faster email creation while maintaining the quality and consistency expected in service interactions. Coupled with the AI email drafter capability, agents truly spend less time formatting and more time focused on resolving customer issues, which improves response times and communication quality.
Email editor
Creation of Sales Objects from the Customer Hub
While this capability is more closely aligned with SAP Service Cloud, sales support and B2B supplier support are common use cases we see deployed for SAP ESM as well. With that said, service agents can now create and manage leads, opportunities, appointments, and sales orders directly from the service agent desktop when the interaction calls for it, reducing clicks and upskilling time. The capability supports closer alignment between service and sales teams and delivers that seamless experience you expect between SAP solutions.
Self-Service Enhancements
Two enhancements provide administrators with greater control over the self-service experience:
- Edit Form in Self-Service During Case Lifecycle feature allows administrators to define conditions under which a form remains editable, giving employees the ability to update information at appropriate points in the case lifecycle without agent involvement.
- Adapt Case Details Screen per Case Type feature allows administrators to configure the Case Details screen in Self-Service on a per-case-type basis, ensuring that users only see fields and actions that are relevant to their specific scenario.
Together, these enhancements help drive higher self-service adoption and reduce unnecessary agent handoffs.
Embedded Component for Custom Services
Administrators can now define list views or object forms within a custom service and embed them into custom user interfaces, as well as selected standard UIs. By mapping parameters from the host page, related custom records can be viewed and worked on directly within the relevant UI view. This capability makes it easier to extend SAP ESM to fit unique business processes and ensures that agents and users have access to contextual information exactly where they need it, without navigating away from their current task.
New Self-Service Experience (Restricted Release)
A new Self-Service experience for SAP ESM is being introduced as a restricted release. Aligned with the latest self-service catalog capabilities, the new experience is designed to support cross-functional deployment across the enterprise, providing instant solutions to common inquiries and enabling contextual case creation and management. As this is a restricted release, customers interested in exploring the capability are encouraged to request access via the solution. Early feedback from customers will play an important role in shaping the general availability release, and participation is strongly encouraged.
Sign In as Another User
Administrators can now sign in as another business user seeing the same functionality and authorizations as that user. This allows administrators to reproduce and troubleshoot issues from the user’s perspective without screen sharing or password exchange. This results in faster issue resolution, stronger security practices, and a more efficient support process for both administrators and end users.
Analytics Improvements
This release delivers two important improvements to analytics capabilities:
- Embedded SAC Widgets allow SAP Analytics Cloud visualizations to be embedded directly into the SAP ESM interface, displaying focused analytics with individual tiles within the daily flow of various business objects such as cases, customers and opportunities. These widgets can also be incorporated into mashups for more comprehensive analytics overall.
- Custom Service Entities in Analytics allow custom service entities to be used as data sources in SAP Analytics Cloud. Once a custom entity is marked as Analytics Relevant, the system automatically generates a corresponding data source that appears under Custom Data Sources in the Query Designer, where it can be combined with standard data sources to produce tailored analytics content.
These enhancements bring insights closer to where work happens and reduce the need to switch between systems for data-driven decision-making.
Approval Process Simplification
Two enhancements to approval processes help organizations improve consistency and reduce delays.
- Configure Approval and Rejection Reasons: Administrators can now configure predefined approval and rejection reasons, create custom reason lists, assign them to specific approval processes, and control whether reason selection is mandatory or optional. This supports more consistent decision-making and improves auditability across approval workflows.
- Automatic Approval Settings: Configuration allowing approval steps to be automatically approved or rejected if no action is taken within a defined duration can be defined from one hour to ten days. This helps ensure that workflows continue to progress even when approvers are unavailable, reducing bottlenecks and shortening overall case cycle times.
Accelerating Case Resolution with UX Simplicity and Automation
Several enhancements in this release focus on simplifying the case experience and giving administrators more configuration control. A few examples include:
- Case Data Retention Rules by Case Type: This feature allows administrators to configure retention rules for automated transaction depersonalization on a per-case-type basis, helping the organization meet legal, regional, and business-specific data retention requirements.
- Multiple Catalogs Mapped to One Case Type: The ability to map multiple catalogs to one case type allows administrators to assign additional category catalogs to a case type, minimizing configuration effort where similar case types can be used across various business functions.
- Hide Category Levels in Case: This feature allows administrators to selectively hide specific category levels within cases, providing agents with a cleaner and more focused interface by removing unnecessary hierarchical information.
Case adaptation
These enhancements help streamline the agent experience while giving administrators the flexibility to align case management with compliance, business, and operational requirements.
Useful Information
For additional Q2 innovations relevant for SAP Enterprise Service Management please reference Kirsi Tarvainen’s blog on SAP Service Cloud and register for the upcoming Q2 Release Webinar. To stay up-to-date as we release capabilities each month and to get a full view of what’s new for Q2, reference the What’s New page in our help portal. Also, reference these valuable links for more on SAP ESM and SAP CX solutions:
SAP CX Q2 2020 Innovation News
SAP Service Cloud V2 Certification Course
SAP ESM’s free trial Get hands-on experience today with an HR service delivery scenario (Finance shared services coming soon).
Use the SAP Enterprise Service Management managed tag when posting on SAP ESM topics in the community!
And finally, thank you. The continued growth of this community, and the willingness of its members to share, question, and collaborate, is what moves SAP ESM forward. Every SAP employee, partner, and customer benefits from the collective knowledge exchanged here and it’s genuinely appreciated.
Source link