Most industries today are posed with a serious challenge of presenting seamless user experience, following workflows and getting approvals on time, which usually delay crucial decisions, the ability to interact with corporate applications remotely, and most importantly, the need to establish a ‘virtual workplace’.

In one of our recent engagements with a global utility major, we discovered major concerns through the results of an employee survey on the digital positioning of the company. While the company was embarking on a digital journey, the non-alignment of internal applications required a lot of manual intervention, which in turn, delayed approvals and the company’s ability to promote a virtual workplace. In addition, another challenge was the trainings for these applications, as it involved a time-consuming task of documenting multiple codes and manual steps. It had huge implications on employee productivity as well.

Departments such as human resources and IT faced an uphill task to ensure such complaints were addressed and aligned to the digital transformation journey that the utility major had embarked on. Modern SAP User experience powered by Fiori was the suggested solution to these challenges.

Evolution of the SAP User Experience

It is quite exciting to see how modern SAP User experience has voyaged from Classic GUI to NextGenUI. While the classic GUI is still relevant and prevalent, it involves manual entry of TCodes and extensive training is required to handle it and thus, it is prone to errors. Additionally, the pages could not be rendered seamlessly across all platforms. Towards the 2000s, this led to Webdynpros based UI, which gives a webpage-based semblance and enables customization. However, the user experience wasn’t intuitive, had a plain appearance and involved challenges as far as collaboration with social sites was concerned.

Under the new digital framework, SAP provides tools like:

SAP Jam that enables collaboration between content to process information and integration with back-office systems.

SAP Build that enables immediate articulation of user stories to prototype screens, ability to incorporate feedback and hence, seamless user experience.

Questions that organizations are confronted with:

• It is amazing to see where this is going but how do I go ahead in this journey?
• I have a complex hybrid landscape and many legacy systems in scope. Will I ever be able to modernize my user experience to align with SAP digital User Experience?
• What kind of guidance can I get during this journey?
  

3-Step Approach to modernize user experience with SAP:

We advise a three-step journey to modernize and align with SAP digital User Experience.

• Assessment
• Evaluation
• Digital Renovation

Assessment involves understanding the existing landscape and evaluating the structure of components in the landscape. It includes preparing an assessment checklist on the legacy rating, hybrid structures and complexity interpretation. The step involves a deep dive into the business processes, packages of the landscape and the current level of standardization.

Evaluation involves taking a very critical business decision based on the key aspects and learnings from the assessment phase. It evaluates device compatibility of the desired user experience, efforts needed for renovation, existing legacy & hybrid components mapping to the digital world and different options around legacy and hybrid landscapes renovation. Around this phase, workshops are integral to have an effective user discussion, present our understanding, analyze the options for renovation and to have a conversation around the new digital user experience and security needs of the new ecosystem.

Digital Renovation is the final step in this journey. It involves the design thinking methodology for consolidated evaluations and the prototype of the desired user experience. The prototype provides a modular view of the different relationships that exist within the UI ecosystem and serves as a strong foundation for design of the digital user experience. This renovates to SAP Fiori, the digital offering from SAP UX built with strong intuitiveness and seamless interoperability in mind. This step further promotes using other SAP tools including SAP Build & FLASH that support different aspects of the UI ecosystem.

Conclusion

Digital SAP UX is, to a huge extent, a possibility even on the most complex hybrid landscape. With a systematic approach toward digital renovation, organisations can achieve tangible cost benefits, low cost of trainings, thereby enabling mobilization and a virtual workplace, and most importantly, delighting users. From several customer engagements, we have gained insights around benefit margins improving from 30-80% due to productivity and reduced support cost. In addition to this, the key challenges of frequent manual intervention and being prone to errors can be handled effectively. User experience is an integral component for seamless rendering of all services, enabling easy and intuitive user interaction. Moving toward operational agility empowers personalization, improves productivity and drives insight to action.

Sujatha Srinivasan

Competency Lead−SAP Digital Technologies at Wipro Ltd

Sujatha Srinivasan is the Competency Lead−SAP Digital Technologies at Wipro Ltd., covering user experience and integration. She has over 19 years of experience across SAP technologies and has worked in various accounts in the capacities of a consultant as well as a solution architect in development, migration and transformation projects.

She can be reached at sujatha.srinivasan@wipro.com