SAP partners gathered in Berlin on November 12^th and 13^th to discuss their cutting-edge innovations — showing how they put customer experience first. Amid colorful light shows and fog machines, I learned about how SAP partnership continues to boost growth for partners and provide a competitive edge, extending the market footprint for the SAP partner ecosystem.

Exponential acceleration towards digitalization is fueling rapid growth for intelligent enterprises, announced Rumyana Trencheva, Senior Vice President GPO & GB MEE, kicking off Connect 2019 – SAP Partner Summit. In fact, IDC predicts the SAP Partner opportunity will double by 2024.

Partnership with SAP supports the creation of engaging experiences through technology, as demonstrated by the partners I spoke with. They discussed how they were able to advance their business by building on and integrating with SAP, as well as through the opportunity for co-innovation within the SAP partner ecosystem.

NUIA Productivity +

4tiitoo’s eye-control platform, NUIA Productivity + dazzled, and swept me away. Granted, it’s not every day that you get the chance to control business applications with your eyes. This might sound sci-fi, but it’s live in the SAP App Center — and my experience felt bizarrely intuitive as I stood in front of the monitor.

Mark Vitorovic, VP Strategic Partners & Channel, told me about the capacity for this technology to impact efficiency in digital workspaces. “Did you know that employees move the mouse up to 6 km every day or perform up to 2,000 keyboard-mouse-keyboard changes? With our technology you can reduce these non-value-adding time wasters by up to 80 percent”.

One specific use case he shared was the opportunity to apply the technology at the shop floor level, for example, when a worker needs to be hands-free while looking up details of the procure on a screen. He also explained how SAP programs and offerings have boosted the company’s success since launching the product, including participation in the SAP.iO accelerator program.

“Through cooperation with SAP.iO, we had the opportunity to present ourselves at CONNECT 2019 and to get in contact with innovative SAP partners in order to discuss common sales approaches or to define common use cases.”

Human Interface Mate (HIM)

Arkite’s Human Interface Mate (HIM), can engage a full sensory interaction for the user, to assist in workplace ease and efficiency. Designed for manufacturing, this technology projects instructions onto a workspace for ease of product assembly. It also senses movement and gives immediate feedback to the operator, to accomplish a manufacturing task. Reach for the wrong tool in a workspace, and a red light will alert to a misstep – guiding the user back to the correct tool.

This technology streamlines work flow by extending manufacturing applications from SAP with Augmented Reality (AR) and quality assurance capabilities. Combining HIM with SAP Manufacturing Execution and SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence makes it faster and easier to pick and assemble the correct product. Live in SAP App Center, this technology helps companies gain real-time process insights while increasing production efficiency and product quality. I left the demo thinking about the clear business impact of this tool on manufacturing and imagining how it could be applied further to assist in other kinds of learning.

metasonic® Process Touch

My last stop was Allgeier, SAP Recognized Expertise Partner for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. There I learned more about the metasonic® Process Touch. This product simplifies business process management (BPM). Users can have a haptic, engaged and collaborative experience while envisioning and reconfiguring their business processes, by moving tangible building blocks on an interactive table.

As underlined across sessions and keynotes during the event, the ability for businesses to thoughtfully re-envision their processes is essential to staying agile in the market. Also critical within that process is the ability to collaborate on ideas within a versatile environment in order to discover out of the box solutions. With metasonic® Process Touch, these capacities are literally at the user’s fingertips.

The Power of Experience

Being leaders of innovation means leveraging the unlimited potential of our ecosystem to put customers on center stage. To succeed in this landscape, organizations need to leverage a spirit of co-petition — cooperation alongside competition — to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Just like the interactive, hands-on experiences described above, the impact of CONNECT 2019 was felt – not just in line graphs and statistics — but through the power of experience. Innovation in technology means more than reaching the strategic goals and calculated expectations of our audiences.

We must sweep customers off their feet.

German version here.

Images thanks to Philipp Reimer