When Was The Last Time a Customer High-Fived Your Software?

7 Australian & New Zealand cities, over 120 eager customers, 10 workdays timeframe, radically new product version, fresh new workshop materials – These are the facts about a series of workshops I ran with the local teams in Australiasia region, never knew what to expect so we took what we had and enhanced all materials to the latest version of SAP Lumira, all hoping to strike accord with our customers on our BI self-service vision and offering.

Over the 2 weeks, the first workshop was held in Melbourne, then Adelaide, Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Wellington and had the last session in Auckland(Probably in the order of good to bad weather conditions). We were thrilled to have our Global Head of Analytics, Christian Rodatus, delivered the opening presentation for Sydney workshop which had the largest attendance. Most customers did not have any specific agenda coming to the workshops, they probably joined the session to learn a new tool,  and most are currently using BusinessObjects on top of existing SAP BW and some currently have other data discovery tools as well. We were glad to have tailored a structural approach to the workshop from the start that could be easily understood by Business and IT users about data discovery processes.

Having a guided show & tell during the workshops before each process helped customers to understand what to expect and how they could apply to their discovery process. SAP Lumira is about acquiring desired data as the starting point which most users found it intriguing that they could do it instead of someone in their IT organisation. What made it all worthwhile was customers were able to further manipulate the data easily on their own with no scripting skills, they were loving the prescribed data actions for each data attributes they clicked on and helped them to swiftly modify data information the way they wanted to consume and analyse later.

Data discovery would be nothing without sensible and appealing visualisations, and with the current HTML5 release, customers were impressed and we think it has never looked better. This was when customers got themselves into a world of animated and dynamic chartings that made sense to them, simply because they were answering business questions with visualisations, making sense of the data they had prepared. We were excited when they were, one customer actually high-fived me when she accurately answered some tough business questions on her own without referring to the workshop scripts – just imagine the new insights customers could achieve with their own data that they already familiar with in a uniquely intuitive data discovery solution like SAP Lumira

…and then I was wondering when was the last time a customer actually high-fived me for a software!

So what’s next?

Customers wanted to tell and construct a story on what they built and consumed and they fell in love with the story-boarding feature in SAP Lumira. To them, sharing is the next most important activity, the goal is really to provide a pathway of understanding with other users who share the same analytical interests seamlessly. SAP Lumira completes the flow with information shared through cloud, mobile, BI Platform and even back to the data sources.

We were excited that customers liked what they had experienced in just half a day and feedback were extremely positive as most will re-look at their current self-service strategy and will include SAP Lumira now.

I am glad I was part of this 2 weeks of engaging experience and I may say that SAP Lumira is not just a data discovery desktop tool, it is a self service strategy platform that consists of a personal desktop capability, a real time platform, a cloud BI, a full mobile capability, and with our natural sense-making ability which is so apparent in all the users I had met in all our sessions, the combination provides customers a profound new data discovery experience!

Do you want to experience SAP Lumira like our customers did? For a copy of trial and free copy, click here.