During the last seven years, five customer-facing SAP AppHaus locations have been established worldwide. And with the underlying concept of co-innovation proven to be successful, the company has opened new opportunities for selected partners in strategic regions to establish partner locations.
These partners follow a framework of requirements, such as design thinking coupled with a solid design and development skillset in their team, a dedicated creative space for customer collaboration, and many more. Today, the growing SAP AppHaus Network consists of 13 locations.
BluestoneX, joined February 2020 | Bourne Digital, joined December 2018
ConvergentIS, joined April 2018 | Extentia, joined August 2019
Global TMS, joined October 2017 | Incture, joined September 2019
Invokers, joined February 2020 | Keytree, joined January 2020
LeverX, joined March 2020 | Mindset, joined August 2018
NETCONOMY, joined January 2019 | Sovanta, joined November 2019
Many SAP partners have adapted their service portfolios in response to COVID-19 and the new situation. SAP AppHaus Network members offer much-needed remote support with integrated interactive features to help ensure business continuity. The network of experienced design thinking coaches and business transformation experts also helps customers continue their innovation and digitalization projects to create and design future-ready work scenarios and solutions with them.
With proximity to customers and programmatic flexibility, it comes as no surprise that the SAP AppHaus Network already offers concrete help to find immediate answers to questions arising in the current atmosphere.
“At a time when the whole world is confronted with the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19, I am so proud to see that our network community reacts quickly, stands by the customer, and adapts services to help ensure business continuity,” Kathrin Tarnai-Sindl, lead for the SAP AppHaus Network, shared.
The SAP AppHaus Network
Today, there are 13 SAP AppHaus Network partners that all follow SAP’s human-centered approach to innovation when engaging with customers. In their creative spaces, companies and organizations get help and support to digitalize their business processes and design new, innovative solutions based on the Business Technology Platform.
Anja Schneider is senior vice president and global head of Customer Innovation at SAP. In a recent podcast, she explicitly mentions the Intelligent Enterprise in the experience economy as a field of action for SAP partners, which, according to her, “are really, really important.”
The Business Technology Platform strategy and the aligned human-centered approach to innovation strengthen partners’ argumentation to prospects and customers.
The Underlying Concept
In 2010, SAP started to revolutionize its co-innovation concept by renovating offices worldwide to foster teamwork through establishing several SAP AppHaus locations. These spaces were initially aimed at co-locating software development teams to explore new consumer “apps,” hence the name. But soon it turned out that the locations were needed as customer facing co-innovation spaces where customers, end users, and SAP teams can jointly apply design thinking as a core approach to develop ideas and design solutions.
The credo for all engagements aligned with following values:
- People-Centric: Personal Interaction with partner, customers, and end-users
- Design-Driven: Focus on creative collaboration
- Authentic: Outputs are real solutions for real problems
- Visionary: New way to collaborate with customers
- Networked: Building a network of creative spaces in the SAP ecosystem
- Value-Generating: Building trusted long-term relationships with customers
Today, SAP has five locations in Heidelberg, Palo Alto, Berlin, Seoul, and New York. SAP-wide and across the partner landscape, customer engagements and projects are supported and executed following the human-centered approach to innovation with defined steps and iterations, see central graphic below:
Like-Minded Partners Stand by Their Customers
The SAP AppHaus Network is a community of creative space owners, run by SAP and partners, that help humanize business software and put innovation in the hands of people. In all engagements, members focus on the end user, leveraging SAP products and technologies such as the Business Technology Platform.
The following list offers a glimpse at current network members, along with some crisis-related communications for more information.
BluestoneX: Shropshire, UK
At BluestoneX, the team around the CEOs Dan Barton and Feroz Khan recently restored and refurbished an old church as their new home to craft ideas and solutions in a vibrant workshop space for customers.
With COVID-19, many BluestoneX designers have been facilitating remote design thinking sessions for users working from home for some time now, using a variety of skills and technology to combat obstacles. More information is available on the Bluestonex YouTube channel.
Bourne Digital: Melbourne, Australia
Since joining the network, Bourne Digital has accomplished several diverse projects, the most recent with the Taronga Conservation Society Australia with whom they built an app called “STAX” that improves the staff experience of zookeepers. The project earned an honorable mention in the 2020 SAP Innovation Award. Melissa Voderberg and the Bourne Digital team recently shared valuable tips on how to run effective workshops remotely (read more here).
“At Bourne Digital, we have a very strong philosophy around human-centered design and creating systems for people,” Managing Director Selim Ahmed says.
Find out more about Bourne Digital’s journey here.
ConvergentIS: Calgary, Canada
ConvergentIS helps companies and organizations find user-centric, simple solutions for complex business problems, which is even more critical now with an increasing remote worker population. Applications need to be extremely simple to use where onboarding and support requirements are low. Headquartered in Calgary, the company runs design thinking workshops for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and mobility solutions, off-the-shelf SAP Fiori applications, and process improvement consulting, all under one roof.
With the recent shift to remote work, ConvergentIS has led multiple remote design sessions utilizing skills and training honed from running in-person workshops with modifications for a remote experience. The company describes itself as “an SAP partner offering a design, build, sell, and service focus and have been transforming the enterprise experience since 2002.”
“When designers work together, magic happens,” Shaun Syvertsen, managing partner and CEO of Convergent IS, says in this video. Learn more about how one of ConvergentIS’ latest customers achieved a 70 percent reduction in their reporting time.
Extentia: Pune, India
Extentia’s XEN LAB PNQ was the first member in India. Videos on its YouTube channel cover the idea of creative and open-minded collaboration and design work. Explore the lab and acclaimed Experience Studio in this video and see how the company integrates hardware and software platforms, creative spaces, breakout rooms, and rest areas to enable customers and partners to focus on their customer experience and digital transformation initiatives.
Global TMS: Madrid, Spain
Global TMS’ location is in Majadahonda, near downtown Madrid. The company opened a workshop and creative space that guarantees an open-minded and playful working experience.
Incture: Bangalore, India
Incture’s vision is to enhance people’s lives with digital systems and bring a human-centered approach to solve business challenges and create measurable value for customers. Its Design Mantrai is a creative workspace that embodies this vision. The workspace can be leveraged by customers, employees, and the larger developer community to share experiences, best practices, and values in design thinking and design-led engineering.
Discover more in this video and learn how design thinking workshop defines the organization’s core values, And learn more about the Incture portfolio in this video.
Invokers: Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark
With locations in Aarhus and Copenhagen, Invokers was the first network partner with two certified creative spaces. The company welcomed SAP colleagues from Heidelberg at a launch event in Copenhagen (take a video tour).
“We specialize in the entire process from design, driven by our unique effective design thinking, to development and implementation – always with a special focus on the end user,” Thomas Ove Rasmussen, head of Digital Design, shares. “We create business value through design-led transformation.”
Ove Rasmussen recently argued that the current lockdown is the ultimate usability test for companies around the world: Are your digital solutions and processes helping or hindering your end users while they work remotely?
Keytree Ltd.: London, UK
Headquartered in the heart of London, Keytree Ltd. was the recent recipient of the 2020 SAP Pinnacle Award as the SAP Cloud Platform Partner of the Year. Having successfully applied its Remote Delivery Methodology to projects across the globe for years, Keytree is continuing to harness its expertise in large-scale SAP implementations, innovation, design thinking, and user experience to support its customers and partners.
LeverX: Minsk, Belarus
As the first partner in Eastern Europe, LeverX pursues the mission to help companies leverage investments in SAP solutions with user experience expertise and cross-industry experience, paired with design thinking methods and the human-centered approach to innovation.
Mindset Consulting LLC: Minneapolis, U.S.
Mindset Consulting LLC recently launched a summary of virtual offerings called “Design Thinking in the Age of Coronavirus“ as well as a continuity of operations plan. Utilizing tools like Mural, Zoom, Invision, and Jira, the team creates engaging experiences also in remote workshop setups.
“Think outside the box and step out of your comfort zone” is one of Founder and CEO Gavin Quinn’s key principles. “Too often, people get stuck in their day-to-day work,” Quinn says.
Learn more about Quinn’s motivation to join the network in this video or take a video tour.
NETCONOMY, Vienna, Austria
The member NETCONOMY, located in Vienna, has launched a dedicated package of services in support of all companies and organizations that want to make good use of these times of travel restrictions. With the initiative #GoDigitalNow NETCONOMY supports brands in defining their digital-first strategy by identifying customer needs and challenging the innovation roadmap. \
“Human-centered innovation is the answer for companies to stay on top of competition,” Josef Grabner, chief innovation and growth manager of NETCONOMY, says. “And with the SAP AppHaus Network, SAP created a momentum that we want to be part of.”
Learn more about Grabner’s motivation to join the network in this video.
sovanta AG: Hamburg, Germany
As its second office in Germany, sovanta opened an SAP AppHaus location in Hamburg’s Hafencity. Following its tagline “simplicity first,” the company launched two dedicated services, showing that it stands by its customers and adapts quickly to changing times. First, remote workshops offer support for targeted team collaboration in times of remote work, while experience management sets up remote work pulse checks to get feedback from employees working from home.
Photographs of SAP AppHaus Network locations courtesy of members.