A Unified Language Across the SAP Portfolio

What Is the Reference Capability Model?

Over the last years, SAP has developed the SAP Reference Architecture based on Enterprise Architecture methodology. The SAP Reference Architecture consists of the SAP Reference Business Architecture (RBA) and the SAP Reference Solution Architecture (RSA).  A key element of the SAP Reference Architecture is the Reference Capability Model that provides consistent taxonomy. SAP has decided to adopt the Reference Capability Model for a variety of use cases and different tools that go beyond the original Enterprise Architecture related scope where SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio played the most important role. 

SAP is making a decisive architectural commitment: a transition to a new Reference Capability Model built on a rigorous Enterprise Architecture approach. The goal of the model is both straightforward and far-reaching: establish one unified capability taxonomy across systems, tools, and teams, bringing it all together with a single authoritative structure that speaks the same language everywhere it appears. This is not a housekeeping exercise. It is a deliberate repositioning of how SAP organizes, communicates, and demonstrates value, from the internal processes of portfolio planning and go-to-market execution to the front line of customer engagement and transformation advisory.

At its heart, the model connects two distinct but inseparable layers:

• Business Capabilities: A structured, hierarchical map of business functions and activities, grounded in real enterprise processes and deliberately aligned with how customers think about — and describe — their own organizations. This layer provides shared vocabulary for every business-level conversation, from strategic planning to process transformation.
• Solution Capabilities: The corresponding SAP products and solutions that enable those business capabilities, clearly linked, consistently named, and governed across the entire portfolio. Each solution capability is traceable to the business capability it serves, creating an unambiguous, auditable line of sight between customer need and SAP solution.

Together, these two layers provide a single, governed bridge between what a customer needs to achieve and the SAP solutions designed to help them get there. The connection between business intent and technology enablement is no longer implicit or approximate: it is explicit, navigable, and consistent at every level of abstraction.

This directly supports SAP’s broader Enterprise Architecture vision: systematically guiding customers from their business challenges to the most relevant SAP solutions, at every stage of their journey. Rather than presenting the SAP portfolio as a flat catalogue of features and modules, the Reference Capability Model allows to easily identify the relevant SAP solutions based on business requirements and helps EAs to guide through the Transformation. Conversations begin with what customers are trying to accomplish — reducing days-sales-outstanding, accelerating procurement cycles, improving supply chain resilience — and the capability model provides the structured pathway from that business intent to the specific SAP products and features that enable it.

Critically, this design also ensures that the model scales across every context in which SAP engages with customers. Whether a conversation is happening in a boardroom during an enterprise transformation scoping session, in a Signavio workshop tracing process flows to solution coverage, or in an automated recommendation engine surfacing the most relevant solution for a given scenario, the same capability structures apply, consistently and without ambiguity. The discipline established at the foundation is precisely what makes that consistency possible.

In Which Tools Will It Be Utilized?

The Reference Capability Model will be embedded across SAP’s core customer-facing and internal tools, with adoption expanding progressively. In each tool, capabilities are surfaced in the way most natural to that tool’s workflow, ensuring that the unified taxonomy enhances, rather than disrupts, existing user experience patterns. Here are some examples of how the new Reference Capability Model affects the tools:

• SAP LeanIX: Business Capabilities have served since 2024 as a Reference Catalog, giving Enterprise Architects a governed, portfolio-aligned set of building blocks for their application landscapes. Solution Capabilities are surfaced as suggested SAP solutions, empowering architects to make informed, capability-driven technology decisions grounded in the full SAP portfolio rather than ad hoc product knowledge.
• SAP Signavio Process Navigator. Exposes the full Capability Hierarchy alongside Solution Capability details and their mapping to S/4HANA Best Practices Scope Items, giving customers an end-to-end picture of how SAP solutions relate to their processes. Consultants and customers can navigate from a business capability directly to the scope items and best practices that implement it.
• SAP Signavio Process Insights: Solution Capabilities power intelligent recommendations, ensuring that every insight generated from process mining data is anchored to a relevant, concrete SAP solution. This closes the loop between process performance visibility and actionable improvement guidance.
• SAP Signavio Value Accelerators: The Reference Capability Model is also used in SAP Signavio Value Accelerator packages to ensure consistent taxonomy along the transformation toolchain.
• SAP Road Map Explorer: Innovations are structured around Business Capabilities, with Solution Capabilities shown as attributes of each innovation, providing a capability-driven view of SAP’s product direction. This makes it straightforward for customers to understand which planned innovations are relevant to their specific business capability landscape. For more information on the transition of SAP Road Map Explorer, check this blog.
• SAP Solution Scout: Solution Capabilities appear at the most granular level of the Industry Value Map, making it easier to pinpoint the right solution for a specific business scenario. The result is a more precise, capability-anchored discovery experience that reduces time-to-recommendation for both customers and SAP account teams.
• SAP Value Lifecycle Manager: Solution Capabilities are assigned to Value Drivers, ensuring that value realization conversations are grounded in capability-level evidence rather than high-level abstractions. This enables more credible, measurable business cases tied directly to the SAP solutions a customer has deployed or is planning to deploy.

What Are the Benefits for Customers?

The Reference Capability Model is available for many different industries. While it is provided by SAP, it is important to note that the Business Capabilities are modeled purely from a business perspective and not from an SAP application perspective. The model contains even Business Capabilities, for which SAP does not offer solutions. The mapping to the SAP applications is done systematically through the Solution Capabilities as described above.

Customers have the freedom to decide how to leverage it for their own customer specific capability model as part of their Enterprise Architecture practice. Some customers regard the Reference Capability Model as industry leading practice and adopt it to a full or very large extent. In any case does the Reference Capability Model significantly accelerate the creation of a customer specific capability model.

A high-quality capability model provides numerous advantages:

• A business capability map serves as a framework to help you understand the resources needed to run your business.
It enables you to evaluate how well your existing technology is aligned with your business needs.
• Mapping applications to business capabilities will reveal gaps and redundancies in your IT landscape. In this way, you can uncover opportunities for consolidation, elimination, or modernization.
• Business capability mapping of your target state is also critical for business transformation. In order to support new business capabilities, you must determine how your IT landscape needs to evolve.

The Reference Capability Model is not simply a new taxonomy; it is a practical tool with tangible outcomes for customers, enterprise architects, and SAP teams at every stage of the engagement lifecycle. The following benefits reflect both the immediate advantages of a unified capability structure and the longer-term value that accrues as adoption deepens across tools and teams:

• A shared business language.  Customers and SAP teams now operate from the same capability taxonomy, fully aligned with the SAP portfolio. This eliminates ambiguity in conversations about needs, gaps, and solutions — replacing the informal, often inconsistent vocabulary that previously varied from team to team and tool to tool. When a customer describes a capability, SAP can immediately map it to the right solution; when SAP proposes a solution, the customer can immediately understand which of their business capabilities it addresses.
• Streamlined customer experience.  Consistent capability structures across different touchpoints mean customers receive coherent, connected guidance for their journey. There are no jarring transitions between tools that use different terms for the same concept, and no need to re-establish context as a conversation moves from discovery to design to value realization.
• Full transparency into software adoption.  With capabilities mapped end-to-end from business need to product, customers gain clear visibility into which capabilities are covered by their current landscape, where gaps exist, and what the path forward looks like. This supports more confident, evidence-based decisions about investment priorities and transformation sequencing.
• Empowered RISE Enterprise Architects.  A structured, unified framework makes it significantly easier to bridge business and IT conversations — accelerating alignment and reducing time-to-value for transformation programs. Enterprise Architects gain a reliable, governed reference structure that supports both strategic planning and detailed solution design, without the need to maintain their own custom capability catalogues.

The Reference Capability Model represents a foundational shift in how SAP connects business intent to technological outcomes. It resolves a structural challenge that has persisted across the portfolio for years, replacing fragmented, tool-local definitions with a single, authoritative, and governed taxonomy that spans tool, team, and customer conversations. As adoption deepens across tools and teams throughout 2026, the model will become an essential asset for every customer, architect, and partner navigating the SAP portfolio, not as one more framework to learn, but as the common language that makes every SAP engagement more precise, more connected, and more valuable.

More Information

To explore how the Business Capabilities and the Solution Capabilities of the Reference Capability model relate to the legacy capabilities, refer to the Capability Mapping Excel.

For an introduction to Reference Business Architecture (RBA) and Reference Solution Architecture (RSA) please see the following Blogs: