SAP teamed up with adidas, one of its strategic partners, for a four-day boot camp to work on use cases that emerged from their retail business. Twenty-two participants, including developers, UX designers, and managers, came together at the adidas headquarters to work on a co-innovation project in the context of a larger migration project to SAP S4/HANA.
The goal of the boot camp was not only to lay the foundation for the development of the next set of SAP Fiori applications for adidas employees but also to enable SAP S/4HANA developers to focus on UX in the early stages of the development process. Since SAP and adidas have a strong focus on customers, it was highly valued that the work of the designers and developers had been validated by adidas store managers.
Discovering the needs of end users
During the boot camp, SAP applied a design-led development approach that takes advantage of proven design thinking methods and puts the users first. Naturally, the participants of the boot camp talked to end users to identify and understand their pain points and took their requirements into account.
Throughout the co-innovation process, one important aspect for both adidas and SAP was not only to include UX as an integral part of their joint development process but also to find a solution for the use cases. The four-day agenda therefore provided various input sessions on SAP Fiori, UX design, and SAP Fiori elements, while supporting multiple hands-on design and validation sessions. One of the use cases they worked on was a standard SAP S4/HANA application for adidas’s Click & Collect.
Backing it up with some numbers
This approach was already a huge success in last year’s boot camp with adidas. Dominik Meier, Director of Platform Engineering at adidas, was eager to work once again with design experts from SAP to spark a UX innovation and bring their end users closer to an experience that allowed them to work more efficiently and intuitively.“ adidas and SAP designed a fully functional SAP Fiori app that reduced the processing time of handling customer requests on the phone from 11 minutes to just 3 clicks for our call service agents,” Dominik Meier explained. “We have been able to bring the user experience of our call service agents to a new level, so they can serve our customers faster than ever before.” Overall, adidas developed 8 SAP Fiori apps that are used in 150 adidas stores, and 2 more internal apps. Their SAP Fiori community has since grown by more than 5,500 users. “Now, we are even more proud we took this journey. The boot camp boosted our UX visibility and I am confident there is much more to come,” Dominik Meier said.
Designing prototypes based on end users’ requirements
Based on the information that was gathered during the first step, SAP and adidas created a persona and user story for each use case. The boot camp participants were set-up for the design process by introducing them to prototyping tools, such as Scenes and Axure RP with the extended SAP Fiori design stencil set.
Within less than four days but with several extra hours of dedicated hard work, the SAP S/4HANA developers created customer-specific prototypes of SAP Fiori applications that were validated by end users. SAP Fiori elements provide UI patterns and predefined templates for the most common application use cases. That way, both design consistency and compliance with the latest design guidelines can be ensured, while reducing the amount of frontend code needed to build SAP Fiori apps.
“I’m really glad that this year’s boot camp was once again a great success for both adidas and SAP,” Alexander Lingg, Head of SAP User Experience, said. “Within only 4 weeks, together with adidas, we were able to develop and deploy an SAP Fiori app that provided a great user experience for their end users.”
If you want to learn more about SAP Fiori Makers and SAP Fiori, check out https://www.sap.com/products/fiori.html.
The article originally appeared on Medium.
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