Welcome to a new mobile entry point to our intelligent enterprise.
How much time do you spend on mobile devices? I bet it’s quite a lot. The power of mobile is not only omnipresent in our personal lives, but also the way people conduct their work — even more so during this time of working at home.
At SAP, we estimate that up to 70% of enterprise interactions this year to-date have occurred on mobile devices. According to the Ericsson Mobility Report June 2021, the annual increase in data traffic through 2026 will be at 25%. As a result, mobile technologies are constantly creating new opportunities for your business to become more innovative and productive. At the same time, organizations need a people-centric user experience across devices to meet their users’ rising expectations.
Today’s workforce is highly mobile already, spanning across industries and generations. Professionals use mobile devices to stay up to date, on top of business activities, and ahead of the competition by being able to take actions immediately — anywhere and anytime. All business content needs to be easily accessible and intuitively positioned. Just as with the apps you use daily to communicate and connect, the user experience for business applications needs to be as smooth, personal, and relevant.
Over the next few years, the sophistication and complexity of end-to-end processes will grow significantly. In this respect, SAP solution integration is an important enabler to create business value. Just as important, it is crucial that people stay at the heart of our business.
With our new mobile experience announced at SAPPHIRE NOW earlier this year, we aim to place the intelligent enterprise at the fingertips of every customer. With the launch of the SAP Mobile Start app, we are taking a major step toward fulfilling that objective.
What Is SAP Mobile Start?
SAP Mobile Start is a native app that serves as the mobile entry point to SAP’s business applications and content, providing users with a consumer-grade experience. Thoughtfully predefined content for typical persona and industry roles allows users to execute mobile-enabled business processes.
Most interactions with your mobile devices are short moments and glances that deliver information. In mere seconds, you can respond to updates and, if needed, take action immediately. We call these situations “micro-experiences.” Over the course of the day, people interact with multiple business processes and access data and applications from various systems.
Take the example of a project manager. People in this role require a great understanding of the many different dependencies needed to successfully deliver on the project goals for their customers. To fulfill this responsibility, they always need access to relevant data — to successfully coordinate a project, update daily reports, or simply validate time sheets. SAP Mobile Start helps them meet these business needs right from their smart devices.
In addition, you can tailor experiences to each role’s habits and tasks using the mobile app. You can adjust it for individual roles and work styles, so that users can optimize their daily tasks. To define the right content for all main mobile personas, we are working closely with customers and partners to identify business needs and priorities.
FRoSTA AG’s digital transformation officer, Lucas Dreger, and innovation manager Fabian von Thun are customers closely involved in providing feedback on the app. They recently shared this: “SAP Mobile Start will support us in our mission to become a digital champion by offering our employees the best possible user experience. It will help us access applications like SAP S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors solutions using a smartphone from anywhere in the world. Our managers can react quickly to approval workflows through push notifications and act on them with the least-possible number of clicks.”
Increase Agility, Boost Productivity, Optimize Workflows
Let’s delve deeper into some of the business benefits SAP Mobile Start can provide:
- Staying ahead of business-critical situations: SAP Mobile Start keeps you up to date with the latest information from your business systems through notifications and widgets. Tapping on either, you can respond to action items immediately and more easily, no matter where you are or what time of the day it is. It is up to you how many and what types of widgets you want to display.
- Enjoying immediate access to your apps: You don’t have to waste another minute looking for the right app. In the application screen of SAP Mobile Start, relevant native apps as well as Web-optimized apps, news feeds, and links are instantly available.
- Exploring relevant information at a glance: With SAP Mobile Start, you can quickly access the business information and apps that are most applicable to you, based on your usage patterns. The app is integrated with your mobile device’s search function, helping you more quickly find the content you are looking for.
Continued Close Collaboration with Customers
“In a world where mobile app proliferation consumes our always-connected lives, SAP Mobile Start provides you with an intuitive, personalized platform from which you can launch your business-relevant experiences,” Vincent Kruse, SAP Innovation Lead at Deloitte, said about our new app.
Successful products can be built only with the support and feedback of the people who use them. Thus our customers and partners were an integral part of the design and development process for SAP Mobile Start, participating in numerous design thinking meetings, user research studies, workshops, and testing sessions to get our user experience right. Their feedback guided us in the prioritization of functions such as single sign-on and notifications, as well as initiated new developments such as an Android version of SAP Mobile Start.
Now that the first version of the app is available, we plan to continue and even extend the close collaboration to make sure our road map and mobile product developments meet our customers’ needs.
It is great to see our customers’ and partners’ passion for the app, and we certainly cannot wait to support them on their continued journey with SAP solutions.
Explore SAP Mobile Start Today
The first version of SAP Mobile Start is now available for iOS for iPhone and iPad. An Android version is planned to be available in the coming months. You can download the app from the Apple App Store and start exploring the functions and features with the built-in demo mode.
For more information about the SAP Mobile Start app, visit the SAP Mobile Start page on the SAP Community.
Philipp Herzig is senior vice president and head of Intelligent Enterprise and Cross Architecture for SAP Product Engineering.
