Involving Customer Feedback: New Outage Experience in SAP for Me
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Key Takeaways
⇨ SAP has developed a new Outage Experience within SAP for Me, aiming to streamline decision-making during outages and ensure users stay informed with real-time event handling.
⇨ Customer involvement through bootcamps has been crucial in shaping the Outage Experience, allowing for direct feedback that ensures the final solution meets user expectations and addresses their specific needs.
⇨ The innovative 'Bundles' feature allows customers to customize outage notifications and prioritize communication, ensuring relevant users receive timely updates and can quickly understand the impact of downtimes.
In today’s 24/7 business environment, time is an organization’s most valuable resource, especially when dealing with outages that require immediate resolution to keep systems and applications running. To streamline decision-making during such events and reduce solution time, SAP collaborated with four customers to develop a new Outage Experience within SAP for Me, the personalized central entry point providing quick access to SAP products, support, and services. SAP for Me is an intuitive platform that empowers customers to manage their entire SAP experience from a single point of entry.
Actively involving customers
With the SAP Fiori Makers, SAP offers customer bootcamps to design solutions for specific use cases. Recently, adidas, Boehringer Ingelheim, Endress+Hauser, and BASF participated in a four-day bootcamp, gaining valuable insights into SAP Fiori and their end-user needs.
Customer Sascha Dörner, Head of SAP Cross Applications at Boehringer Ingelheim, highlights the success of these bootcamps and his user experience in a positive vein: “We were extremely surprised on how well the finished solution met our expectations and requirements. The methodology and implementation of the bootcamp deserves a special mention, as both played a key role in ensuring that the solution includes end-user feedback and brings real added value. I came to the workshop with a precise idea of the problem and how it could be solved. The professional approach opened further perspectives and dimensions for us, which ultimately led to an even better result.”
Supporting this view, Judith Schneider, UX Designer and SAP Fiori expert, describes the bootcamp setup and goals stating, “We include customers and users from the very beginning of our development journey. In doing so, new ideas flow and areas for improvement can be identified early on. Following this design-led development approach, our customers help shape the user experience according to their expectations.”
SAP’s design-led development process guarantees a solid and consistent user experience that addresses the needs of end-users across all lines of business, tasks, and devices.
To ensure that the outage solution will meet end-user needs, the main persona—an IT admin—has been defined and SAP’s Scenes tool has been used to visualize the user story during an outage. This collaborative process identified additional personas, key notifications, and communication channels, leading participants to create low-fi mockups and ultimately translate the use case into SAP Fiori for a high-fi mockup and a future software prototype.
With Scenes, storyboards about products and services can be created fast, collaboratively, and iteratively.
Benefits of the new Outage Experience in SAP for Me
The new Outage Experience in SAP for Me ensures that users stay informed with real-time event handling across mobile apps and smartwatches. Nathalie Pardini, SAP Product Owner, emphasizes, “This innovative solution gives customers the ability to customize outage notifications according to their specific business needs. By targeting specific users, businesses can ensure that the right people receive important outage information in a timely manner. Thanks to the valuable input from our representative customers, this solution has been widely embraced since its launch and continues to gain momentum.”
The new feature, Bundles, is a flexible grouping of cloud services and systems that offers three key benefits to SAP customers:
- Customers can give intuitive names to Bundles and mark them with a business criticality, allowing for customized and prioritized notification management.
- Notifications provide clear and accessible information about the specific parts of their business and processes affected by downtime, enabling customers to quickly understand the impact and take appropriate action.
- Only relevant and impacted key users will be notified thanks to subscriptions on Bundles, ensuring that the right individuals receive timely and essential information. A notification history provides ongoing updates and post-incident summaries, complete with root cause analysis, helping prevent future outages.
Martin Buselmeier, Solution Architect Integration and Platform at Endress+Hauser, highlights the way this new solution meets their organization’s expectations: “Bundles are the perfect opportunity for us to group various SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP services that relate in various ways. By freely choosing the names, we can use Endress+Hauser’s own terminology for recognition and quickly establish the context. Through the subscription, it is now also possible for us to automatically inform stakeholders outside SAP for Me, such as key users or project managers, about downtimes without having to involve an interpreter.”
The new Outage Experience now offers all the user-desired information to handle future outages most efficiently.
Optimizing products with user research – be part of it!
Engaging customers and end-users with their feedback early in the development of the Outage Experience was pivotal in creating a solution that genuinely met their needs. By gaining both a deep understanding of their pain points and needs, SAP successfully developed a product that resonated with users. As one end-user noted, “This is a very user-friendly and functional solution that truly helps customers adapt to specific scenarios or events.”
This underscores the critical role user research plays in driving successful product development. In 2023, SAP introduced the SAP User Research Panel, a user research initiative that invites end-users to participate in remote research activities. They can share their product and design experiences, help shape SAP products to better align with their needs, while also offering them a preview of new features or products.
Make your voice heard! Join the SAP User Research Panel. Registration is unbinding and easy, taking part in research studies is convenient, taking ten to sixty minutes.
To learn more about the SAP Fiori Makers bootcamp offering, which includes a few days long physical workshop following the design-led development process, please visit their webpage.
SAP for Me is an intuitive platform that empowers customers to manage their entire SAP experience from a single point of entry. For more information, have a look here.