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It’s a scenario that looks all too familiar, even simple, at first glance: in facetime with a valued customer, you’re keen to provide relevant information, responsive customer service, and an excellent product at a competitive price with ease and efficiency.

With the right applications on your tablet, you’re able to access not only the customer’s current account, but also up-to-date data on production, pricing, quality assurance, and shipping. If all these pieces are in place, the customer signs on the dotted line, happy with the speed, accuracy, and ease of doing business with your organization.

A simple user experience is always quite complex to deliver. Enterprises like yours now recognize that digitizing business processes is crucial – yet may lack the right resources to make it a reality. Let’s look at how to use the SAP Cloud Platform to integrate your business processes and data to bridge siloes across your IT landscape and deliver a seamless customer experience.

Integrating and accelerating business processes

Imagine a large auto manufacturer and the simple step of ordering parts. Even this simple process relies on multiple teams and their ability to collaborate. The teams have different technical competencies, organizational objectives, and operational environments.

For example, the production team would place the order for a part to a set of approved suppliers. The suppliers respond by offering a price and delivery timeline for the part specified. That goes to another team in the finance department of the manufacturer, who would approve the order – as well as a compliance team who would do the same.

The business process continues when the supplier delivers the part and the quality team checks it out – finally, the part moves to the production team to be put to use! As you can see, a simple process of ordering an auto part has multiple dependencies across systems and data – and each team wants to execute this accurately and efficiently.

Diving even deeper we can think about how this translates to the number of IT elements involved. Teams would use:

  • Different devices to place, approve, and supply the order, like phones, tablets, or desktops

  • Different systems to reference data the backend – like ERP, SRM, or CRM systems

  • Different tools to take each action, like mobile or web apps, collaboration tools, or portals


As you can see, we really need to consider devices, systems, and tools to deliver a streamlined user experience that improves experience and creates a far-reaching impact to optimize enterprise processes.



 

Platform-as-a-Service solutions for unified digital experience

Some of the challenges organizations face in delivering a consistent and modern user experience are- ever increasing number of communication channels and technologies, lack of range of developer skills, deficient vision for experience across channels, long development cycles, unmet demand for apps and on the other hand number of abandoned apps.

Considering all types of user interactions and engagements in context with each other while leveraging new technological advancements such as IoT apps, voice controlled systems is key. While stand-alone cloud-based development tools are easily accessible for developers, it’s really an integrated platform solution that addresses the issues.

PaaS solutions not just focuses on more than just developer tools but more importantly brings teams and tools together to streamline the development of user interfaces, applications, and content in an integrated offering. Businesses and IT teams can rapidly develop new apps, functionalities, and interfaces with simplified and accelerated integration with the backend as the market evolves.

 



By starting with consistent design and development across devices, user interaction is simplified and does not also hamper the speed of delivery. They can easily incorporate new communication channels as the technology evolves. Taking collaboration across teams, systems and technologies by embedding it in business apps and simplifying operations. A well-integrated backend ensures there are no dark spots for your users while working across applications or being able to find the right information.

It is more complex than it looks at first glance but a systematic end-to-end approach, simplified with platform delivers the desired digital experience. A platform approach lets you innovate at experience layer while keeping your core business processes intact. Read more about digital experience here. https://cloudplatform.sap.com/capabilities/ux/dx-maker.html