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PeterSpielvogel
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Another year, another amazing SAPPHIRE. The interest in UX topics seemed to exceed the levels of previous years. There were several great customer, partner, and SAP sessions on SAP Screen Personas through both ASUG and SAPPHIRE. The SAP Screen Personas demo area in the Digital User Experience pod was constantly busy. Some of the highlights for me included:

  • Connecting or reconnecting with customers that I usually interact with only by email or phone

  • Meeting several new partners who wanted to use SAP Screen Personas to expand their UX practice

  • Getting together with colleagues that I usually only get to see once or twice a year

  • Enjoying the keynote with Bill McDermott, Kobe Bryant, and Derek Jeter


 

The biggest surprise for me was that some people attending our demos had still not heard of SAP Screen Personas. This is a bit shocking, since we have over 860 unique live customers in 63 countries running SAP Screen Personas in production system across all 25 industries that SAP serves.



 

Amazing keynotes

While all the keynotes were great, the final day’s keynote resonated the most with me, having watched both Derek Jeter and Kobe Bryant during play during much of my adult life. Here are some quick lessons I learned from watching these two champions talk about winning and leadership:

  • Never get content. (Jeter)

  • Do your homework. Be prepared. (Bryant)

  • Competition eliminates complacency. (Jeter)

  • Don’t compromise, don’t settle; get things as perfect as you can; strive for the best. (Bryant)

  • Understand yourself. Know what you do not know and surround yourself with people who are smart and add value. (Jeter, Bryant)


 

Thanks to Presenters

Customers sharing their success stories is always the highlight of SAPPHIRE and the ASUG Annual Conference. The organizers spend lots of time curating content so the presentations contain information relevant to a variety of audiences. This year, we had the following customer and partner presentations:

  • ExxonMobil. Danielle Nascimento and Guilherme Ramalho talked about how they simplified the F110 transaction for processing incoming and outgoing payments. The title of their talk, “ExxonMobil’s SAP Screen Personas Success: From 8 hours to couple of clicks” says it all. (ASUG Session UX8740)

  • LP Corp (Louisiana-Pacific Corporation). Melissa Duke and Doug Powell discussed how they delighted their forklift drivers by making the shipping process more intuitive. In addition to reducing the transaction time by around half, they saved 262 person-hours per month across the user population of 62 drivers. (ASUG Session UX7421)

  • LP Corp. Melissa Duke led a discussion in SAP interactive session 43546. She went into more detail about the screen simplification process they followed at Louisiana-Pacific Corporation. The audience had many great questions about how they achieved the great results they did with such a small team (80% Melissa, 10% architect (Doug), 5% basis, 5% security).

  • ConvergentIS. Shaun Syvertsen and I spoke about “Simplifying your custom transactions in SAP S/4HANA and applying the Fiori User Experience”. The audience was comprised of several people from various Canadian agencies. They had some great questions about the fit between SAP Screen Personas and Fiori.

  • PwC. Gus Spivak and I had a session in the PwC booth on “Using SAP Screen Personas to deliver the Fiori user experience”. The focus was on the overall Fiori UX and how SAP Screen Personas is a fast and easy way to create Fiori-inspired screens, especially for customers on older ECC systems.


  

 

Slides from the ASUG session are available at http://bit.ly/asug17slides .

 

SAP Screen Personas sessions

Sebastian Steinhauer, product owner for SAP Screen Personas, and I had two ASUG sessions. Our lecture (UX7851) “Getting started on your Fiori journey in ECC today” was packed. The two main take-aways from the session were:

  1. SAP Screen Personas and Fiori are complementary

  2. For Fiori UX in ECC, start now with SAP Screen Personas


In addition to several demos of SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5, we also previewed some things we are working on and showed prototypes. We’ll have more details at TechEd, and possibly an opportunity to join a new ramp-up program. Details to follow.



 

Our roundtable (UX7840) was a diverse group of people, some running SAP Screen Personas in production and some who were just starting their UX journey. We had a great discussion, covering a variety of topics (see below) such as design thinking, how to use the flavor gallery, and what types of SAP GUI transactions are appropriate to simplify with SAP Screen Personas.



 

UX Booth

SAP Screen Personas was on display in the Digital User Experience pod in the Data, Analytics and Cloud Platform Campus. We were very lucky to have Danny George staffing the booth. He tirelessly demoed SAP Screen Personas, SAP Fiori 2.0, and SAP CoPilot to hundreds of customers over the three days. His authenticity and experience shines through, since he has been responsible for the creation of hundreds of Fiori-inspired SAP Screen Personas flavors used internally at SAP, some of which you can find in our flavor gallery. When the numbers were tallied, the UX demo pod and design thinking area were among the most attended areas in all of SAPPHIRE.



 

Partner Activity

There was a rich ecosystem of partners working with SAP Screen Personas, Fiori, Build, and other SAP UX technologies. It was great to meet several new partners with a “SAP Fiori” banner in their booth. They were excited about the ability to help their clients achieve the Fiori experience for classic transactions in a fraction of the time to develop new Fiori apps. They like that they have choices for how to deliver simple and intuitive screens for their clients, depending on their needs and timelines.

 

UX Marketplace

As Derek Jeter mentioned in the Thursday keynote, “Competition eliminates complacency.” Based on the number of vendors offering some sort of alternate UX solution, there is clearly an unmet need among SAP’s installed base for a better user experience. This choice is good for our customers and helps to drive innovation. With over 1,000,000 people using SAP ERP systems simplified with SAP Screen Personas, we are clearly meeting some of your needs. But, we want all SAP customers to enjoy the benefits of a better, more intuitive UX.

Call to action for SAP customers: please let me know what else SAP Screen Personas needs to provide for you to consider it for simplifying your classic SAP GUI transactions and Web Dynpro applications.

 

Usability Testing

My colleagues Sylvia Barnard and Clemens Gantert ran the usability testing for SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP5. More than a dozen people had the opportunity to build screens and test the usability of some of its new features. Their skill levels varied from having never heard of SAP Screen Personas to skilled flavor builders. Thanks to everyone that spent time at SAPPHIRE providing your feedback. You can expect to see some of your ideas in future versions of the product.

 

Mythbusters 2017

As always, the show floor, convention center hallways, and food queues are great for hearing what misinformation is circulating about SAP Screen Personas. Here are some of the things we heard, along with the reality.



Myth - FALSE

While SAP screen Personas works with SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA (Suite on HANA) and SAP S/4HANA, you can also run SAP Screen Personas on your ECC system running on any database.



Myth - FALSE

SAP Screen Personas is a key part of the SAP S/4HANA user experience strategy. Its main uses are to simplify classic screens in the Belize theme (watch video on SAP Screen Personas and Belize) and to simplify custom transactions that you move over from your ECC system. I recently wrote a blog on the relationship between SAP Screen Personas and S/4HANA.



Myth - FALSE

SAP Screen Personas is one way for you to obtain the Fiori user experience. Most customers will use a combination of Fiori apps and SAP Screen Personas flavors in their environments. The key thing to know is that SAP Screen Personas and SAP Fiori are complementary.

 

What did you hear about SAP Screen Personas that you want clarified?
Just email us or post your question or comment below.

 

Overheard on the show floor

  • “We have implemented Screen Personas in every EAM project for the last three years and we are interested in packaging our flavors”
    - Chief Strategy Officer of SAP partner

  • “I bought [competing product], do you know if they have a return program – I would like to use SAP Screen Personas instead.”
    - Customer in one of the SAP Screen Personas sessions.

  • “We need to absolutely consider SAP Screen Personas as well as Fiori for all our UX requirements”.
    - SAP account executive

  • “We see a lot of synergy between KNOA UEM and SAP Screen Personas. It is a path of least resistance for customers to act on the results of KNOA UEM and provide great user experience” - KNOA executive team


 

For the SAP Screen Personas product team, Peter Spielvogel.