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Digital Experience is increasingly taking center stage in our customers’ minds as they pursue their digitization initiatives. With an increased reliance on technology to achieve business success, it is imperative for companies to bring together technology and operations in order to ensure that the customer, partner and, internal user ecosystem can seamlessly interplay with systems and each other to operate finer.

Delivering a great digital experience starts with design and putting the right effort in the design of new applications is critical for the success of not only individual digital initiatives but also of the organization as a whole. According to the Forrester report, Lead With A Scaled Design Thinking Mindset, published in May 2017, the UK’s Design Council found that “design-led companies were … outperforming the S&P 500 by 211%.”

 

Design as a catalyst of process innovation

Design thinking breaks down the organizational silos and well-designed apps span across people, places, and processes. But designing the right user experience is not a daunting task if you know what your users want. As the Forrester report notes, “traditional companies are hampered by processes that jump straight to solving a problem instead of framing it.”

A collaborative approach allows companies to adopt an agile development and experience-driven design. Employees can collaborate, find new solutions to problems, and co-create solutions with the actual end users or customers. This allows them to gain real and deeper insight and focus application development on things that really matter for the people and businesses.

 


Source: Lead With A Scaled Design Thinking Mindset, May 2017, Forrester


To help you adopt a design mindset and create apps that deliver what your users need, SAP Cloud Platform digital experience services offer BUILD, an innovative toolset that opens prototyping to a broader audience – beyond IT. With BUILD, you can collaboratively develop prototypes with your project team and engage end-users for feedback - all while learning the design process. Your business users can take an active role in prototyping the applications they need as no coding experience is required.

 

Sun Chemicals developing the right apps using BUILD to increase productivity

Take the example of Sun Chemical Corporation, a world's leading producer of inks pigments and coatings for variety of industries. The company uses SAP for business processes that range from receiving orders to order fulfilment, as well as in supporting administration functions within HR and finance.  Sun Chemical does a lot of custom development and recently has decided to adopt SAP UI5 and use Build as a prototyping application to facilitate the requirements and design with their end-users. This has allowed the company to follow design thinking guidelines and develop application that offer a consistent experience to its users.

As Hennie Perters, leader of Enterprise architectures at Sun Chemical puts it, “SAP BUILD gives the end-users an exact idea of what the final application would look like in addition the collaboration functionality allows us to circulate those design thoughts to all the stakeholders and they can submit their feedback on the design directly within the tool. “BUILD allowed us to significantly increase the productivity of our developers. We were able to turn around applications from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.”



 

BUILD is an integrated cloud-based solution that addresses the critical discovery and design phases of the product lifecycle when user experience changes are the most cost effective. It is easier to adopt, as you can get started by importing mockups or a gallery prototype, and then rapidly overlay UI controls and add your own sample data. Because it includes integrated research and analytic tools, it easy to collect effective user feedback during the design phase, and once the design process is finalized, it generates UI5 starter code to jump start the development process – using either SAP Web IDE or the tool of your choice.

To learn more about the power of a design-centric approach, download the complete copy of Forrester Research's report on Lead With A Scaled Design Thinking Mindset, Embrace Design For Customer Obsession – a May 2017 Forrester report. Also, do not forget to check out BUILD on SAP Cloud Platform to start your journey.