The last months gave many organizations the opportunity to accelerate their digitalization – probably more by necessity than by choice. At SAP Innovate to Win, we also looked at digital strategies and tools to empower our customers to re-invent their business models and drive digital transformation.
Here are some of the SAP tools, that we identified within SAP’s ‘Discover Design Deliver/Develop’ framework, to help scale innovation within organizations. While all the tools presented are SAP tools, most can be applied in technology agnostic scenarios too.
DISCOVERY TOOLS
When running our innovation programs, we have taken inspiration from agile development principles. We like to run our programs in 4 – 6 weeks design sprints. As part of the discovery phase, we may need to:
- Establish cross-functional teams with representation from various departments and specific roles and responsibilities. As an example for Scrum, there may be a product owner, a scrum master and scrum teams sourced across the enterprise.
- Provide sprint teams with simple agile project management tools for the sprint team to self-organize, assign tasks, document, monitor and adjust the weekly progress.
- Communicate and collaborate at an enterprise level to create internal awareness and provide team support.
Beyond conferencing tools like Microsoft teams, below are some of the tools which, can help to kick off your innovation journey and scale at an enterprise level.
|
SAP Work Zone
|
Link here |
With SAP Work Zone, you will easily create an enterprise communication workspace to onboard, connect and align stakeholders internally and externally in one place. This is especially useful if you are running an enterprise-wide ideation campaign or innovation initiative (e.g. an internal incubator), which includes a high number of stakeholders across the organization. |
|
SAP Ruum
|
Link here |
With SAP Ruum, Sprint teams can easily manage their work, tasks and collaborate in real time. For example, we have created templates for teams to easily be onboarded, with a timeline, task view and key content relevant to the different steps of the innovation journey. |
EMPATHY tools
Once the Sprint teams are established and the program or campaign kicked off, teams typically proceed with user research. At SAP Innovate to Win, we heavily promote qualitative research through ethnography, user interviews, observation and immersive experiences to drive a better understanding of behaviors, motivations, pain-points, needs, goals and gains.
As the world goes digital and huge amounts of data are collected, new methods can complement the traditional research methods to drive insights at a massive scale. Process mining, data mining, social analytical and user experience tools can help to validate or eliminate some of the initial assumptions and hypothesis on extremely large sample sizes within the timeline of the design sprint. Here are some of the tools that can help you:
| SAP Value Lifecycle Manager (VLM) |
Link here |
During our discovery phase , we try to get our customers to identify one to two metrics that need to be tested to measure the expected outcome of the business challenge, that we are trying to solve.
SAP VLM can help your sprint teams to quickly identify those metrics that matter for better business outcomes. Leveraging an extensive Industry data bank, you will be able to establish a baseline to measure, monitor, and optimize value for the challenge, that you are trying to solve:
· Assess your Process Maturity
· Benchmark with Industry Peers
· Build your Business Case
|
|
Spotlight by SAP
|
Link here |
Spotlight by SAP provides a data driven analysis of your ERP usage and helps to identify the most relevant opportunities for improvement – based on your data. The following insights will be provided across 300+ ERP processes:
· How many users are involved in a process,
· How much manual effort is required,
· How much support is happening,
· process complexity
Extra tip: You can also compare yourself to others through industry benchmarks.
|
|
SAP User Experience Management (UEM) by KNOA
|
Link here |
With SAP UEM by Knoa, the sprint teams benefit from Data-driven understanding of how employees interact with enterprise applications.
The sprint teams are able to measure user experience with real user data.
|
|
SAP Business Process Intelligence (BPI)
|
Link here |
With Signavio and the newly created RISE with SAP offering, build data validated User Journey maps and identify opportunities to improve the user experiences and processes. BPI can help understand user interactions and process data for better user research.
Spotlight, SAP UEM Knoa and SAP BPI complement the interview and observation process at scale to understand how users are interacting with the system. All are very powerful tools to validate user assumptions.
|
|
Qualtrics
|
Link here |
At SAP Innovate to Win, we recommend the survey capability of Qualtrics only as an insights validation tool. Because the effectiveness of digital surveys is lower for qualitative open-ended queries, we encourage our design sprints teams, to use Qualtrics as a way to validate the insights they have already collected during the discovery phase.
The Qualtrics platform on the other hand has a very powerful listening capability with a predictive intelligence engine for the masses (Qualtrics IQ).
With key partnerships such as Brandwatch, Medallia Living Lens, Voxpopme, Callminer, Tethr the platform can integrate and process the following:
· Social Media Data
· Video data
· Speech and Text Data
(Allowing to drive insights and correlations which was previously challenging to collect through pure ethnography, observations and interviews.)
|
IDEATION tools
As we move from Discovery to Design phase, we look at tools that help the sprints teams to explore solutions to solve the Design challenge they are trying to solve. We are going to specifically look at tools that can be scaled at an enterprise and organizational level.
|
SAP Innovation Management
|
Link here |
SAP Innovation Management is very useful for an enterprise innovation and strategy department that wants to set up a process to make sure that ideas are not lost within an organization.
It’s a great starting point for running ideation campaigns across the organization around business challenges and areas that are relevant to the organizational strategy. Not only does it empower employees to be engaged and to become problem solvers, but it also helps the innovation and strategy department funnel, evaluating and prioritizing the pipelines of ideas.
|
|
SAP Transformation Navigator
|
Link here |
SAP Transformation Navigator can be very useful to support the ideation process to:
· Help spark team ideation sessions exploring industry, line of business and technology use cases.
· Help prioritize and document roadmaps.
|
When collaborating remotely we use MURAL as the digital workplace not just for ideation but for the entire design sprint. We also tap into resources such as Gamestorming for example. We consider tools like MURAL or Gamestorming as very valuable ‘delivery tools’ to support the team’s entire journey, not just the ideation phase.
PROTOTYPING & TESTING tools
This is a key phase for design sprint teams to have a conversation with their users to:
- Assess desirability, feasibility and viability of their ideas
- Eliminate what does not work and focus on what does
- Validate initial hypothesis and metrics with users
There is of course an array of prototyping and testing tools:
| SAP Enable Now |
Link here |
While SAP Enable Now was originally designed as an enterprise e-learning content development tool, it can easily serve as a Lo-fidelity clickable prototyping tool. It has the added benefit of:
· Allowing software simulations
· Recording videos and animations
that can be tested across the enterprise through the platform itself. The SAP Enable Now channel allows therefore for very efficient user feedback.
|
|
SAP Build
|
Link here |
SAP Build is SAP’s primary prototyping and testing tool. Especially powerful for designing business applications with great user experiences. SAP Build follows SAP’s ‘Discover – Design – Develop’ framework and supports all levels of prototyping from lo-fidelity sketches to hi-fidelity clickable FIORI UI enabled prototypes.
More importantly, it provides valuable quantitative data and heatmaps resulting from user tests.
|
DELIVERY TOOLS
As some of the ideas resulting from the design sprint get selected for implementation, organizations need to look at how they are going to scale those ideas into products, services and processes within the enterprise:
|
SAP Portfolio & Project Management (PPM)
|
Link here |
SAP PPM helps to transition prototypes to enterprise projects by developing new solutions profitably through optimization of resources and time to market. You can integrate financial and logistic information seamlessly.
SAP PPM takes over from SAP RUUM as governed at an enterprise level and has strong integration capabilities with SAP JAM and SAP Innovation Management for accelerating the transition of ideas into enterprise projects:
· Portfolio management to submit project proposals, prioritize them with current projects, and monitor and review their progress.
· Project Management to manage projects, tasks, and timelines, while identifying critical paths, assigning resources, and tracking progress.
· Resource Management to identify the right resources, check availability, optimize utilization and avoid project bottlenecks.
|
Learn more about SAP Innovate to Win
- We are keen to hear your feedback on what other tools drive digital strategies to support your innovation journey. Please comment below.
- SAP Innovate to Win is an innovation enablement and coaching service that blends proven frameworks like Design Thinking and Business Modeling, powerful technology and a global network of expert coaches to help organizations and their teams solve complex problems and get the confidence to innovate. Get in touch and start your innovation journey sapinnovatetowin@sap.com.’
- Follow my profile for future blogs (or reach out Thomas BENAROYA)
