A warm welcome to all of you,
in the following blog entry, we’d like to share experiences and learnings we’ve collected in discussions, proof-of-concepts and especially projects along with our MDG/XM integration scenario at our customers. All customer names remain anonymous and won’t be shared.
Upfront, we'd like to give you the chance to browse our official services related portfolio in the XM area, short summary below, full version here --> <<Click here>>
If you'd like to have a short version of this scenario, I'd like to forward you to the blog entry (video/screencam included!) of my colleague Steffen Ulmer: Click
By reading this article, you can get valuable takeaways of this young, cross-domain scenario (for free 😉). It will help you propel the promotion of such kinds of use cases in your own organization. It may also serve as a source of inspiration to better unveil the potential value that end-user feedback in the space of master data (and beyond) is able to create. However, before take-off, let’s set the scene and start with some definitions…
2. What is XM?
The following gives you a crisp and clear definition of XM in general:
With the help of SAP Experience Management, companies get to know their customers and employees in a completely new way. By collecting relevant data from a number of areas, an overall picture emerges from which conclusions can be drawn about customer and employee satisfaction. At the same time, the data collected from SAP Experience Management also gives an impression of the purchasing behavior of customers and which products are particularly popular at what time of the day.
The area of Experience Management (XM) is pervading more and more both our private and daily business life.
The relevance and adoption of Master Data Management keeps growing. Nowadays large and also mid-sized enterprises tend to have quite decent user bases in the area of master data management. Many employees are running their day-to-day business in governing master data objects across their entire lifecycle. Solutions such as SAP Master Data Governance support these kinds of users, offering them different ways to handle all facets relevant to this domain. From the experience management point of view, this provides big potential to incorporate and position XM services and tools.
We did our homework already: Very recently, we have integrated Qualtrics into MDG Central Governance for Material within an implementation project at one of our customers. In the scope of this project, surveys, designed in Qualtrics, can be embedded into MDG process flows in a versatile and controlled way. The project was delivered in a very short time-span and the customer is productively using the solution in a sub-set of its MDG processes.
3. Benefits
Here’s a list of the major benefits we identified
4. Solution Brief
The continuous collection and usage of receiver feedback has to be seen as the main driver of this use case. Amongst others, we have translated this particular requirement into the integration of Qualtrics based surveys (Pop-Ups, Sliders etc.) into common MDG screens. It is mainly used in the MDG Material domain.
The control and customizing of the surveys was underpinned by a light-weight framework, built in ABAP. The framework allows CR-Type/-Step and event based definition when a specific survey becomes relevant and has to be presented to the user. You can stick the survey to an event like pressing “Submit” or onto the load event, when a screen initially renders. As one more example, outlining the high flexibility of it, you could define a survey rule that describes:
“Show survey XYZ in Step 1 of the CR-Type ZTYPE1 not more than once per day per user.”
In addition to the above-mentioned facts controlling occurrence & frequency of surveys, each submission of a survey transfers a part of the MDG context into Qualtrics as well. This has an analytical background. In other words, the survey response is enriched with MDG context attributes, such as the CR-Type, Step, Object Attributes e.g. Material Description, Type, Group etc. (any required attribute is possible). Based on this attribute set and the survey responses, wide-ranging analytical scenarios can be run on top. In our solution, we’ve built Qualtrics XM Dashboards on top to enable an elegant and easy-to-realize way for consuming and understanding results. It has of course more options to consume results. Qualtrics push/pull APIs offer various ways in this regard.
Find below a more detailed example how you can incorporate feedback-loops into your MDG processes. This is just one example which steps should be considered. It may look different in your own context.
5. Technical Background Information
The overall solution can be divided into an MDG UI, as well as a Qualtrics Survey & Website/App Feedback part. The two components play together: Surveys designed in Qualtrics can be made available on webpages/-applications through creatives and moreover so called site intercepts.
As a result of creating Website and App Feedback on top of your survey, you will get some intercept code snippet from Qualtrics. A site intercept can be used in a versatile way. This JavaScript code snippet is integrated into the WebDynpro ABAP side in such a way, that its enabled to be used on MDG WebDynpro FPM OVPs as a UIBB. The below diagram depicts the high-level components and parts involved in the solution.
The survey and the MDG runtime communicate with each other. A key here is the usage of a WebDynpro HTML island object and some adaptations of the intercept code snippet, provided by Qualtrics. In summary, there’s both additional code logic in ABAP WebDynpro as well as JavaScript required to make it run and also exchange data from the MDG context and vice versa. However, it’s working quite stable and smooth. MDG passes data in… and Qualtrics triggers an event back to MDG, in case a survey response was given. Thus, survey responses are also captured on the ABAP side (with minimal information). A record including a timestamp, username, CR-Type/-step and the survey-id are stored onto the DB. The described behavior is visualized in the subsequent diagram.
6. SAP Demo Showcase: Survey and Scenario Example in MDG Business Partner
Beyond the scope of the previously described customer implementation project, SAP has got its own kind of MDG/XM integration showcase in our Demo portfolio (SAP Democloud) available. This can be requested also from your side (further instructions at the end of this article).
The following scenario is an example of two types of surveys embedded into MDG. It represents a very lightweight and rather easy survey flow. There are many more ways how surveys can be built and made intelligent. Qualtrics offers wide-ranging options in realizing exactly the survey structure and logic you need.
1. Survey Title: Collection of CR-Process related Parameters on UI/UX level
Goal: Improve/streamline UIs, increase UX, spot hidden painpoints, understand
Q1: Sample question (Type Matrix Question):
Please give feedback (rate Bad/Fair/Good)
Q2 Sample question (Freetext Entry Question):
(Conditional – display only if previous rating is negative, e.g. only Bad & Fair choices were made):
How does it look from UI level?
We have integrated the above mentioned survey in two different ways in the UI.
Remark: The position and size of the pop-up can easily be changed out of Qualtrics on-the-fly and doesn’t involve any changes on the MDG/ABAP side. If you want to change the event, to which it listens, some minor coding part might be involved (e.g. Submit after 1st WF-Step or Withdrawal).
7. Before & After
We would like to conclude our work, by giving you a view into the world before and after using MDG with and without Experience Management:
8. Outro
You could see & experience our Qualtrics solution approach into MDG. It offers flexibility and enables the provisioning of new communication and feedback channels for your users. Thus it heavily strengthens the User Experience.
We also want to say a very warm and honest thank you to our colleagues in development and pre-sales. A very special and big thanks goes to Sabine Kissner and Simon Hoeg who supported us in the interplay of JavaScript, ABAP and WebDynpro. Moreover there’s some good collaboration to be mentioned with Sven Schuett. Thanks Sven for the fruitful discussions and the initial enablement you gave us.
in the following blog entry, we’d like to share experiences and learnings we’ve collected in discussions, proof-of-concepts and especially projects along with our MDG/XM integration scenario at our customers. All customer names remain anonymous and won’t be shared.
Upfront, we'd like to give you the chance to browse our official services related portfolio in the XM area, short summary below, full version here --> <<Click here>>
Learn how our professional services can help you jump-start, deploy, and gain maximum value from your Experience Management (XM) solutions from SAP. Read how SAP Services and Support can help you define your experience management strategy, accelerate the time to value of your XM solutions, and use them in the most innovative way possible.
If you'd like to have a short version of this scenario, I'd like to forward you to the blog entry (video/screencam included!) of my colleague Steffen Ulmer: Click
- Intro
- What is XM?
- Benefits
- Solution Brief
- Technical Background
- SAP Demo Showcase
- Before & After
- Outro
By reading this article, you can get valuable takeaways of this young, cross-domain scenario (for free 😉). It will help you propel the promotion of such kinds of use cases in your own organization. It may also serve as a source of inspiration to better unveil the potential value that end-user feedback in the space of master data (and beyond) is able to create. However, before take-off, let’s set the scene and start with some definitions…
2. What is XM?
The following gives you a crisp and clear definition of XM in general:
The domain of experience management is about capturing each and every touchpoint of both employees and consumers within and beyond an enterprise.
With the help of SAP Experience Management, companies get to know their customers and employees in a completely new way. By collecting relevant data from a number of areas, an overall picture emerges from which conclusions can be drawn about customer and employee satisfaction. At the same time, the data collected from SAP Experience Management also gives an impression of the purchasing behavior of customers and which products are particularly popular at what time of the day.
The area of Experience Management (XM) is pervading more and more both our private and daily business life.
However, did you come across it in master data management so far?
The relevance and adoption of Master Data Management keeps growing. Nowadays large and also mid-sized enterprises tend to have quite decent user bases in the area of master data management. Many employees are running their day-to-day business in governing master data objects across their entire lifecycle. Solutions such as SAP Master Data Governance support these kinds of users, offering them different ways to handle all facets relevant to this domain. From the experience management point of view, this provides big potential to incorporate and position XM services and tools.
We did our homework already: Very recently, we have integrated Qualtrics into MDG Central Governance for Material within an implementation project at one of our customers. In the scope of this project, surveys, designed in Qualtrics, can be embedded into MDG process flows in a versatile and controlled way. The project was delivered in a very short time-span and the customer is productively using the solution in a sub-set of its MDG processes.
3. Benefits
Here’s a list of the major benefits we identified
- Increase UX: Give a voice to your MDG consumers, your user base
- Better Understanding: Gather first-hand insights into pain points of existing governance processes
- Keep the ´Feedback-Loop´ under Control: Define individual process triggers for surveys to be shown or remain hidden
- Enable Measurement of Master Data/MDG CoE: Through constant feedback given by receivers the MDG Team performance can be measured
4. Solution Brief
The continuous collection and usage of receiver feedback has to be seen as the main driver of this use case. Amongst others, we have translated this particular requirement into the integration of Qualtrics based surveys (Pop-Ups, Sliders etc.) into common MDG screens. It is mainly used in the MDG Material domain.
The control and customizing of the surveys was underpinned by a light-weight framework, built in ABAP. The framework allows CR-Type/-Step and event based definition when a specific survey becomes relevant and has to be presented to the user. You can stick the survey to an event like pressing “Submit” or onto the load event, when a screen initially renders. As one more example, outlining the high flexibility of it, you could define a survey rule that describes:
“Show survey XYZ in Step 1 of the CR-Type ZTYPE1 not more than once per day per user.”
In addition to the above-mentioned facts controlling occurrence & frequency of surveys, each submission of a survey transfers a part of the MDG context into Qualtrics as well. This has an analytical background. In other words, the survey response is enriched with MDG context attributes, such as the CR-Type, Step, Object Attributes e.g. Material Description, Type, Group etc. (any required attribute is possible). Based on this attribute set and the survey responses, wide-ranging analytical scenarios can be run on top. In our solution, we’ve built Qualtrics XM Dashboards on top to enable an elegant and easy-to-realize way for consuming and understanding results. It has of course more options to consume results. Qualtrics push/pull APIs offer various ways in this regard.
Find below a more detailed example how you can incorporate feedback-loops into your MDG processes. This is just one example which steps should be considered. It may look different in your own context.
Cookbook - Establish MDG Feedback-Loop
5. Technical Background Information
The overall solution can be divided into an MDG UI, as well as a Qualtrics Survey & Website/App Feedback part. The two components play together: Surveys designed in Qualtrics can be made available on webpages/-applications through creatives and moreover so called site intercepts.
As a result of creating Website and App Feedback on top of your survey, you will get some intercept code snippet from Qualtrics. A site intercept can be used in a versatile way. This JavaScript code snippet is integrated into the WebDynpro ABAP side in such a way, that its enabled to be used on MDG WebDynpro FPM OVPs as a UIBB. The below diagram depicts the high-level components and parts involved in the solution.
High-level Technical Overview
The survey and the MDG runtime communicate with each other. A key here is the usage of a WebDynpro HTML island object and some adaptations of the intercept code snippet, provided by Qualtrics. In summary, there’s both additional code logic in ABAP WebDynpro as well as JavaScript required to make it run and also exchange data from the MDG context and vice versa. However, it’s working quite stable and smooth. MDG passes data in… and Qualtrics triggers an event back to MDG, in case a survey response was given. Thus, survey responses are also captured on the ABAP side (with minimal information). A record including a timestamp, username, CR-Type/-step and the survey-id are stored onto the DB. The described behavior is visualized in the subsequent diagram.
Glimpse into the runtime
6. SAP Demo Showcase: Survey and Scenario Example in MDG Business Partner
Beyond the scope of the previously described customer implementation project, SAP has got its own kind of MDG/XM integration showcase in our Demo portfolio (SAP Democloud) available. This can be requested also from your side (further instructions at the end of this article).
The following scenario is an example of two types of surveys embedded into MDG. It represents a very lightweight and rather easy survey flow. There are many more ways how surveys can be built and made intelligent. Qualtrics offers wide-ranging options in realizing exactly the survey structure and logic you need.
1. Survey Title: Collection of CR-Process related Parameters on UI/UX level
Goal: Improve/streamline UIs, increase UX, spot hidden painpoints, understand
Q1: Sample question (Type Matrix Question):
Please give feedback (rate Bad/Fair/Good)
- Performance
- User Interface
- Overall Experience
Q2 Sample question (Freetext Entry Question):
(Conditional – display only if previous rating is negative, e.g. only Bad & Fair choices were made):
- Please tell us more about your feedback (Freetext entry)
How does it look from UI level?
We have integrated the above mentioned survey in two different ways in the UI.
- We have incorporated this survey into the MDG BP UI as an optional slider. It only slides in on-demand and is non-intrusive. The user has the choice to use and/or respond to the survey. Remark: The position and size of the slider can easily be changed out of Qualtrics on-the-fly and doesn’t involve any changes on the MDG/ABAP side.
Qualtrics Slider Survey in MDG UI
- Moreover, we have incorporated the same survey into the MDG BP UI as an event based pop-up survey. It pops up after final approval into the middle of the screen. The user has the choice to use and/or respond to the survey or simply close it.
Qualtrics Pop-up Survey in MDG UI (1)
Qualtrics Pop-up Survey in MDG UI (2)
Remark: The position and size of the pop-up can easily be changed out of Qualtrics on-the-fly and doesn’t involve any changes on the MDG/ABAP side. If you want to change the event, to which it listens, some minor coding part might be involved (e.g. Submit after 1st WF-Step or Withdrawal).
7. Before & After
We would like to conclude our work, by giving you a view into the world before and after using MDG with and without Experience Management:
(-) Before using XM in MDG, we...
- rarely had the chance to get first-hand input from our users
- often missed to capture the right point in time to collect information on process level
- sporadically had exchange with the MDG user base
- were always in a "reactive" mode
(+) Now, by using XM in MDG, we...
- are at the forefront right where processes are conducted
- have the ability to inject surveys at any points
- can act more proactive and understand critical situations faster
- gave a voice to our service consumers
8. Outro
You could see & experience our Qualtrics solution approach into MDG. It offers flexibility and enables the provisioning of new communication and feedback channels for your users. Thus it heavily strengthens the User Experience.
If we got your attention, please contact your SAP Account Executive, Pre-Sales or directly reach out to us. The SAP Demo/Showcase outlined in section 6 is now available and can be presented to you in a live demo.
We welcome your feedback & comments and will reply immediately.
Thank You
We also want to say a very warm and honest thank you to our colleagues in development and pre-sales. A very special and big thanks goes to Sabine Kissner and Simon Hoeg who supported us in the interplay of JavaScript, ABAP and WebDynpro. Moreover there’s some good collaboration to be mentioned with Sven Schuett. Thanks Sven for the fruitful discussions and the initial enablement you gave us.
Thanks to all for the support.
Best regards from SAP Services
Steffen Ulmer & Stefan Geiselhart
- SAP Managed Tags:
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