Summary of SAP Screen Personas at SAPPHIRE 2016

Another year, another SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference. Once again, I returned from Orlando excited, energized, and exhausted. In this blog, I’ll share my quick summary of the event and the key people that made it a success.

Thank you to the customers who presented and partners that hosted sessions in their booth

• Nestle – Francis Rodrigues shared the story of how he started with SAP Screen Personas for a single business and now has deployed it around the world.
  Tip: involve the end-users and iterate.
• Cargill – Kari Ingebritsen and Mike Berg discussed Cargill’s user experience transformation, including some great productivity metrics.
  Tip: simplify the business process first, before touching any screens.
• Convergent IS – Shaun Syvertsen talked about how he uses SAP Screen Personas with SAP S/4HANA to simplify complex scenarios.
  Tip: use a combination of SAP Screen Personas and Fiori for a coherent user experience
• U.S. Army – Daniel Trudgett and Daniel Parker described how they used SAP Screen Personas to make an SAP system match the look and feel of an existing tool.
  Tip: have a clear target and gather user input to ensure you are meeting the goals
• PwC – Abhinav Gupta hosted a standing room only session in the PwC booth on when to use SAP Screen Personas or SAP Fiori or both.
• TCS – Vikram Shankar and Pranay Nayyar held an intimate session in the TCS meeting area in which we discussed how to build Fiori-inspired screens with SAP Screen Personas

The slide decks for ASUG sessions can be found on the ASUG website at bit.ly/asug2016_slides.

The UX pod was packed

Hundreds of people visited the demo pod we shared with the Fiori 2.0 team. Demo rock star Danny George was able to meet the demand for SAP Screen Personas information tirelessly throughout the show. We are so excited that he is part of our extended team.

We also had full participation in our usability testing lab, in which participants had a chance to try several exercises on SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP3 under the guidance of Sylvia Barnard and Ashley Tung.

In the sessions, UX booth, and elsewhere on the show floor, there was much excitement from customers and partners about:

• The new template feature of SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP3
• Pre-built content in the SAP Screen Personas flavor gallery
• Using SAP Screen Personas as a tool to create a Fiori-inspired experience
• Compatibility of SAP Screen Personas with S/4HANA and the fact that flavors built today on ECC versions will still run when customers migrate to S/4HANA

As with most SAP events, we always hear some interesting things. Here is what we heard and the reality.

• There are still many people that had not heard of SAP Screen Personas. If you are reading this blog, please send it to three or more colleagues, ideally at least one outside your organization.
• Some people still had lingering questions about the long-term viability of SAP Screen Personas. We just released a new service pack and are continuing to innovate, including close collaboration with the S/4HANA team. If you hear rumors to the contrary or have additional questions, please reach out to me directly.
• Bill’s keynote focusing on empathy reinforced the approach many of our customers are taking with design thinking, which starts by finding the problems most important to your users.

For a video analysis by Sebastian Steinhauer, Tobias Queck and me about the customer sessions at SAPPHIRE NOW and the ASUG Annual Conference, please watch our Productivity Power Play episode.

Many people requested a list of resources where they can learn more information about SAP Screen Personas. Here is the content of the slide we showed in several of our sessions.

Thank you for attending SAPPHIRE NOW and the ASUG Annual Conference. Hope to see you next time or at TechEd in the fall.

For the SAP Screen Personas product team, Peter Spielvogel.