Goodbye Process Discovery, Pathfinder and Spotlight by SAP - Hello Discovery Edition! (looking back in appreciation)

Finally it‘s time to say goodbye: Since 31st of March 2024 Process Discovery for SAP S/4HANA Transformation and SAP Innovation and Optimization Pathfinder on Spotlight are not available anymore.

It's time to pause for a moment and appreciate the journey that brought us to the successor solution SAP Signavio Process insights, discovery edition.

The journey started 14 years ago together with Robert Pinzke , when Robert and myself created Business Function Prediction, which later became SAP Business Scenario Recommendations (after the creation of SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA) and afterwards Process Discovery.

Back in 2010, I just finished writing a book about SAP Enhancement Packages with Martina Kerner , working in the SAP Business Suite solution management.

The simple insight at the beginning was that customers want guidance and our idea was to provide tailored recommendations, based on their individual SAP system usage. SAP Enhancement Packages contained hundreds of Business Functions and customers needed help to find the relevant Business Functions. Business Function Prediction was quickly a success, scaling to thousands of customers in the first year.

Business Function Prediction was followed by SAP Business Scenario Recommendations (after the creation of SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA). Instead of Business Functions we recommended SAP S/4HANA Solution Capabilities and over the years we added new elements like Process Performance indicators (PPI's) and benchmarks. This was then known as the next-generation SAP Business Scenario Recommendations.

And later, Spotlight by SAP became the cloud version of SAP Business Scenario Recommendations / Process Discovery and SAP Innovation and Optimization Pathfinder.

Till today more than 50.000 customers and partners requested the free offerings. And year by year we helped customers to discover the value of SAP S/4HANA, cloud solutions, SAP innovations like SAP Process Automation and AI and RISE with SAP.

The new SAP Process Insights, discovery edition still helps customers to build their case for SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP, get tailored insights into their current process performance, based on data from their SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA system and get the latest innovation recommendations.?

Some elements still exist in the Discovery Edition, like the ranked recommendations based on usage-based relevance. But there are also some really cool new features, for example the recommendations are now linked to Process Performance Indicators and process improvement opportunities.

I want to thank all leaders supporting this great journey: Volker Zimmermann , Roland Schmid , Sven Denecken , Eric van Rossum , Dr. Uwe Grigoleit , Ulrike Raidl , Yasmin Awad , Thomas Bamberger , Gianluca Battaglini , Andre N Wenz , Bernhard H?ppner , Gregor Berg , Marco Valencia , Stefan Voll , Torsten Zube , Hans Kroes and Wassilios Lolas .

And I want to also thank some of the key contributors over the years: Steffen Thiem , René Cedat , David Ya?ez del Pino , Alessandro Monaco , Volker Von Gloeden Sudheer Nidiginti and Thomas Grande .

I'm looking forward to the evolution of SAP Process Insights, discovery edition - some cool ideas are planned for the future, so stay tuned!