Teched Amsterdam 2013 : Zeiss and Design Studio
Zeiss is a company producing lenses and products using lenses. As an example we were shown a picture of moon astronauts carrying zeiss camera’s. For those who want to pick them up. They are still there! (
Zeiss is a longtime SAP customer and a longtime SAP BW user. They already worked with SAP BW version 1.2a in 1999. They stayed a long time one version 3.5 but when they upgraded they opted for a rebuild rather than an upgrade. For SAP Design Studio they have upgraded to 7.3.
They are a very early adopter making the first dashboards with version 1.0. They wanted to go to Design Studio because they find that the Web Application Designer is to complex, they like the easy to use layout (however they would like more wizards and documentation about the CSS)
(css docs could be available from version 1.2 sp1)
In the demo they showed Zeiss kept the layout very basic, only using that what the version of Design Studio at the time had to offer.
We were shown a sales representative dashboard where you could select regions and customers.
They have built a button in salesforce.com linking to the design studio application. They like the flexibility they gain when building their reports instead of uploading data to Salesforce.com.
They had still a wish list for Design Studio however. 99% of those wishes were solved in version 1.2. A very big gain is Background Query loading. Components will render when relevant data is available instead of waiting for all the datasources to preload.
What they are still waiting for is some drag and drop functionality. They hope to see this in version 1.3.
Their next step is to build dashboards for the production floor. 2x per day the people at the factory meet to discuss the production and for this they have a wall full of printed reports. The goal is to replace this with a touch screen TV and run Design Studio applications to show all those reports.
- They seem committed to go on with design studio and I’m interested to see how it evolves. Talked to the IT manager afterwards and he encouraged me to give Design Studio a try J. I think I’ll listen to his advice.