E-commerce meets Fiori

As member of the SAP Fiori Makers’ Community, I would like to introduce you to the e-commerce Fiori app which we have developed for PVH. This blog will explain the project and the app, but eventually you can get all the details in the next SAP Fiori Makers call on Thursday November 9, 2017.

PVH is one of the largest global apparel companies with over $8 billion in revenues. It’s most famous brands are Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. The goal of our project was to improve the e-commerce process, specifically provide the options for customers to order items in the web shop and pick them up in a physical store. The app we developed is used in the stores by the store employees to manage this process.

The functional aspect

The happy flow of the application is the following:

1. 1. The customer orders items in the web shop
   2. The customer requests the items to be sent to a shop
   3. The warehouse picks the items and ships them to the shop
   4. The shop receives the parcel(s)
   5. The manager confirms the arrival at the shop
   6. The customer is informed
   7. The customer collects her/his items

The design aspect

As PVH is all about fashion and design, this was a very important aspect of the project. We started with identifying the personas: store manager, stock room manager, sales assistant. They are all young, busy, tech-savvy with mobile first mindset, keen on design, and have little/no SAP knowledge. The big difference among them is that only store managers and stock room managers and authorized to accept or reject packages. This had to be translated into the Fiori app.

We had weekly design mapping meetings with the participation of a key user, the Fiori retail manager, the designer, developers, and the product owner. In these meetings, we balanced the design requirements with the Fiori guidelines and made constant compromises to reach the high expectations of the business within the budget.

The input from the business was formulated in such high level concepts:

Our designer used invision, which our developers translated into prototypes in SAP Build.

The technical aspect

We created a custom Fiori client, which is basically a hybrid app connecting to SAP Mobile Platform showing the entire Fiori launchpad. We made quite some extensions of the standard Fiori apps. We enabled integration with USB scanners and external laser scanners. Security was a key topic, because we had to establish communication from the stores to the SAP backend.

The result

After many design iterations and scrum sprints, we reached a product. The main lesson learned from a design point of view was to follow the design process very strictly and not try to make jumps. Few times we started to develop features while the requirements were still not clear enough and this resulted in some re-work.  It’s a delicate balance to find the right level of agility.

Come and join the next SAP Fiori Makers call to see the demo of the app and even more importantly, Kai Richter, Chief Designer and Head of SAP Fiori Design Concepts, will join the call to explain how to apply the newest SAP Fiori concepts to our app.