SAP and adidas recently teamed up for a four-day boot camp to work on use cases that emerged from the retail business.
Twenty-two participants, including developers, user experience (UX) designers, and managers, came together at the adidas headquarters to work on a co-innovation project in the context of a larger SAP S/4HANA migration project.
The goal of the boot camp was not only to lay the foundation for the development of the next set of SAP Fiori apps for adidas employees but also to enable SAP S/4HANA developers to focus on UX in the early stages of the development process.
Because both 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 End User Needs
During the boot camp, SAP applied a design-led development approach that takes advantage of proven design thinking methods and puts users first. Boot camp participants talked to end users to identify and understand their pain points while taking their requirements into account.
SAP’s design-led development approach
Throughout the co-innovation process, both adidas and SAP wanted to include UX as an integral part of their joint development process and find solutions for the use cases. The four-day agenda provided various input sessions on SAP Fiori, UX design, and SAP Fiori elements while also 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’ Click and Collect.
Backing it Up with 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 with design experts from SAP in order to spark a UX innovation and bring end users closer to an experience that allowed both companies 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 three clicks for our call service agents,” Meier said. “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 eight SAP Fiori apps that are used in 150 adidas stores and two additional internal apps. Its SAP Fiori community has since grown by more than 5,500 users.
“Now, we are even more proud we took this journey” Meier remarked. “The boot camp boosted our UX visibility, and I am confident there is much more to come.”
Designing Prototypes Based on End Users’ Requirements
Based on the information gathered during the first step, SAP and adidas created a persona and user story for each use case. 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 apps that were validated by end users. SAP Fiori elements provide user interface (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 evaluated and the amount of frontend code needed to build SAP Fiori apps can decrease.
“I’m really glad that this year’s boot camp was once again a great success for both adidas and SAP,” said Alexander Lingg, head of User Experience at SAP. “Within only four 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.”
Learn more about the SAP Fiori Makers program here and visit the SAP Fiori area of sap.com.
A version of this story originally appeared on the SAP Design area on Medium.
