3 Examples of How the SAP Jam Developer Program Enables Business Transformation
Editor's note: This article by Holly Simmons, Vice President of Marketing for Social Software at SAP, is reproduced from the Oct-Nov-Dec 2014 issue of SAPinsider (SAPinsiderOnline.com) with permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing. Read the entire special report on social collaboration at SAPinsiderOnline.com.
Transforming your business requires you to transform the way you work. That’s never easy — but it’s necessary for your business to remain relevant, agile, and competitive. SAP Jam provides a social collaboration platform to reshape processes today while helping you to design for tomorrow.
Every business has unique challenges and opportunities, and no solution is going to solve every problem on its own. This is where the SAP Jam developer program comes in. It’s designed to deliver the flexibility needed to customize work patterns, which are collaborative processes that bring together people, content, data, and applications; to integrate with other data and systems; and to extend SAP Jam to support departmental or industry-specific needs (see sidebar below). The SAP Jam developer program, available to customers and partners, provides the tools, approaches, and support needed to extend existing investments and to drive new revenue for customers, developers, and partners. See how three partners are delivering new business value through SAP Jam in this program.
World Sales Solutions: Building Partner Networks with SAP Jam
Launching new products such as automobiles is both exciting and challenging, especially when you consider the complexity of connecting a manufacturer with its dealer network. Launch success depends on full visibility; timely training and certification; as well as clear sales, marketing, and go-to-market execution (see Figure 1). World Sales Solutions (WSS) understands the manufacturer-to-dealer complexity as this services organization is regularly called on to assist manufacturing and service companies in making these necessary connections.
WSS relies on the SAP Jam developer program to provide its customers with a social collaboration platform that bridges the gap between manufacturers and dealers with a central hub that:
- Brings together a company’s marketing, sales, service, and cross-team staff with external parties such as advertising agencies and key suppliers
- Provides formal learning and certification using SuccessFactors Learning Management System (LMS) or SAP Learning Solution
- Delivers informal learning (via SAP Jam) such as sales best practices among dealers or quick access to experts
- Onboards new partners and employees expediently to ensure the shortest time to revenue by optimizing SAP Jam
- Supports strategizing and decision making among the entire network for product innovation, including integration with SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), SAP Cloud for Customer, or third-party innovation management systems
- Enables coordination among the entire network for product or new service launches, including large-scale activities requiring visibility into events, tasks, and deliverables
The SAP Jam Developer Program:
Extend Existing Investments and Drive New Revenue
Customize
- Develop work patterns (custom processes)
- Add pre-built third-party apps
Integrate
- Bring SAP and third-party app data into SAP Jam with OData
- Collaborate with documents from content management systems
- Embed SAP Jam in your business apps
Extend
- Build collaborative customer apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform
- Add capabilities with OpenSocial
- Incorporate third-party capabilities (gamification, for example)
SAP Jam helps align companies with their partner networks to drive efficiencies that save time and money based on the volume and scalability of their network, boosting return on investment (ROI). To use auto manufacturing as an example, each dealer has the opportunity to access SAP Jam to engage with its local sales and service staff for receiving training, learning best practices, finding experts, keeping up with regulations, managing rollout of sales and marketing plans, and sharing feedback from customers.
“As a partner, the SAP Jam developer program presents market-first options for solving complex business problems such as enabling more successful automotive product launches,” says Richard Blumberg, President and CEO of WSS. “We can now create new work patterns or bring business data directly into SAP Jam from our customers’ existing SAP or third-party systems to support customer-specific processes. This has helped us position unique social collaboration services to our customers with a strong ROI.”
T-Systems Multimedia Solutions: Transforming Sales at Itaricon Management
Sometimes being a leader in technology means you spend a lot of time educating others. That’s what Ulf-Jost Kossol, Head of Social Business Technology at T-Systems Multimedia Solutions, has been doing in evangelizing how social collaboration can transform business. One of his customers, Martin Wanitschke, Head of Sales at Itaricon Management, shares the same passion and immediately embraced how social collaboration and work patterns from SAP Jam could help him quickly ramp up a new sales organization.
Wanitschke was interested in speeding up sales team assembly, driving faster decision making and turnaround on sales proposals, and improving visibility and access to the latest updates across the team. While Wanitschke was well acquainted with SAP applications and the SAP Jam work patterns for sales that integrate with SAP CRM and SAP Cloud for Customer out of the box, his company uses SugarCRM. Was it possible to take advantage of the existing sales work patterns with SugarCRM to address the goals for a more modern sales organization’s working experience?
SAP Jam is designed to integrate with any SAP or third-party business application using open standards such as OData. Kossol and Wanitschke were able to quickly implement the sales work patterns, bringing SugarCRM data directly into SAP Jam in real time (see Figure 2). Because SAP Jam knows the context of the business data, it can recommend work patterns to the sales executive based on where he or she is in the sales process.
“The SAP Jam developer program brings together all of the necessary elements to ensure that T-Systems Multimedia Solutions can transform any process across extremely diverse technology landscapes,” says Kossol.
Additionally, Wanitschke wanted sales users to be able to collaborate directly in SugarCRM so they could initiate deal rooms — functionality that allows salespeople to collaborate with external and internal participants — when entering a new opportunity. With SAP Jam widgets directly embedded into SugarCRM, his sales executives could collaborate whenever and wherever needed (see Figure 3). Lastly, Wanitschke’s team took advantage of the business object browser in SAP Jam to explore account, opportunity, or service ticket data for problem solving or updates.
EnterpriseJungle: Transforming Knowledge Sourcing and Team Building
Today an employee’s information resides in many places inside and outside of the organization, making it difficult to find the right people and expertise needed for project engagement, mentoring, informal learning, problem solving, or decision making.
EnterpriseJungle, an SAP partner and fast-growing startup focused on helping companies drive employee engagement to improve retention and business performance, believes that bringing social collaboration together with data and applications is necessary for driving the right kind of engagement that produces results.
The company’s debut extension, EnterpriseJungle for SuccessFactors solutions on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, works with the SuccessFactors solutions with integrations into other internal and external data sets. This team saw a great opportunity with the SAP Jam developer program to incorporate social and collaborative capabilities into extension applications to enable social discovery and knowledge extension. EnterpriseJungle developed its profiling and recommendation extension application to:
- Allow users to push proactive content recommendations from across the enterprise with a way to act on them via the SuccessFactors homepage (see Figure 4)
- Bring together data from LinkedIn, the SuccessFactors profile, SAP Jam, and other internal and external data sources into SAP HANA Cloud Platform
- Include the “Who Can Help Me?” intelligent search option, allowing users to find in-house experts or potential project team collaborators within SuccessFactors solutions via SAP HANA Cloud Platform (see Figure 5)
- Expand upon social profiles and improve communication in SAP Jam directly from the application with the data from SAP HANA Cloud Platform
EnterpriseJungle’s application uses SAP Jam feeds and groups as the communications backbone, allowing users to take advantage of exclusive next-generation search and discovery functionality across their workforce and for information to find them intelligently. Additionally, the introduction and connection actions that users can start within the SuccessFactors extension take advantage of the new SAP Jam work patterns by triggering the workflows in SAP Jam to fulfill. It transforms the latent power of any organization’s key assets — its people — into the equivalent of a supercharged, effortlessly connected, expertise-based peer-to-peer network.
“The SAP Jam developer program, combined with the power of SAP HANA Cloud Platform, enables partners to rapidly develop social extension applications that can transform any business process,” says James Sinclair, Principal at EnterpriseJungle. “The program heralds the arrival of dynamic future power for the social business with accelerated collaboration at its core. Its simplicity and ease of use makes collaboration implicit and easy, rather than challenging.”
Learn More
To learn more about the SAP Jam developer program, please visit http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-55050 or http://help.sap.com/download/documentation/sapjam/developer/index.html#intguide/concepts/intro.html.
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