SAP AppHaus Network is the next step in SAP’s evolution of innovating with customers and putting the human experience first. It is continuously growing with SAP partners joining the network all around the world. With new members in Switzerland, Belgium, and South Africa, the network is united by the goal to make innovation real, create impactful business outcomes, and help customers transform into intelligent enterprises with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
With years of experience in conducting innovation projects with customers, the global SAP AppHaus team has developed extensive expertise in identifying customers’ and end users’ needs, translating them into UX designs, and finally delivering the solution and helping drive adoption of SAP products and technologies. Together with other customer-focused SAP teams, the SAP AppHaus team has consolidated years of expertise and innovation work with customers into SAP’s human-centered approach to innovation, an approach that combines design thinking, design doing, and architecture thinking methods. What started with design thinking methods has since evolved into an extensive innovation toolkit, a universal innovation guide accessible to everyone.
From Five Locations to a Global Community
There are currently five SAP AppHaus locations in Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Palo Alto, and Seoul. But SAP did not stop here. To extend SAP’s reach across the globe, the company started to leverage the successful concept with SAP partners in selected regions becoming members of SAP AppHaus Network. As of September 2022, this global network is a community of more than 20 innovation teams from handpicked SAP partners and SAP itself. All help ensure that, with SAP Business Technology Platform, innovation gets into the hands of people. The innovative solutions build upon existing SAP standard solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and more.
SAP AppHaus Network works along a human-centered approach to innovation, which has encouraged numerous SAP partners to join the community. The close relationships between the network members allow them to benefit from shared know-how, ideas, and mutual enablement. These values are also what motivated the newest additions, Flexso and AGILITA, to become part of SAP AppHaus Network.
Flexso and SAP Join Forces
Flexso is a full-service SAP partner located in Antwerp, Belgium, that implements smart, powerful SAP solutions for a wide range of lines of business. Flexso is known for its digital innovation and extensive experience with SAP BTP.
To build a close relationship with SAP, Flexso hosted a workshop with colleagues from SAP AppHaus Heidelberg as well as the Belgian SAP market unit. During an interactive workshop in Flexso’s new innovation space, the user experience and technology experts had the opportunity to express their needs and ideas. Together, SAP and Flexso aim to provide SAP customers in Belgium with the full SAP AppHaus experience and seamless support within their transformation towards intelligent enterprises. This workshop was an important first step to lay the groundwork for joint projects and the mutual mission to give SAP customers sufficient support throughout the entire innovation journey.
“During the interactive session, we identified several needs in the SAP customer life cycle. These needs referred to a creative workshop space and a highly skilled UX and SAP technology expert team, such as Flexso, that could help SAP and all local customers,” said Tobias Gollwitzer, customer design engagement manager at SAP AppHaus Heidelberg. “This format is a shared best practice for our SAP AppHaus Network to intensify the local collaboration in different regions.”
AGILITA: The Latest Addition to SAP AppHaus Network
With over 10 years of cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) experience, AGILITA lives agility and innovation to bring customers solutions with passion and responsibility. Located in Zurich, Switzerland, AGILITA joined SAP AppHaus Network in January 2022 and is known for its ‘innovation as a service’ offering powered by SAP Business Technology Platform.
To provide its partners and customers with an environment that helps unfold their creativity, AGILITA recently inaugurated its new SAP AppHaus space in May 2022. The team hosted an opening event with guests from SAP AppHaus and SAP Switzerland.
The event kicked off with opening speeches given by AGILITA CEO Sandra Voeller, SAP Switzerland COO Sabrina Storck, and Global Head of SAP AppHaus Partner Network Birgit Fien-Schmalzbauer. After Thomas Neuhaus, head of Digital Transformation at AGILITA, offered insights into the different design thinking phases, each attendee could join one of the in-depth sessions about SAP’s human-centered approach to innovation and demonstrations of a live implementation of SAP BTP. The multifaceted setup of the opening event allowed partners and customers to get to know each other, exchange valuable knowledge, and learn more about AGILITA and SAP AppHaus Network. After this inspiring opening event, Storck was convinced that the AGILITA SAP AppHaus space “is going to become the innovation hub of Switzerland.”
A Look into the Future
Since its beginnings in 2013, SAP AppHaus Network has been continuously growing and working together virtually. Only recently, in June 2022, partners from all over the world met at SAP AppHaus Heidelberg for an on-site meetup to intensify their collaboration and share best practices. The event provided the chance to meet each other in person, work on developing new methods for customer workshops, define and align mutual goals, and set a course for a successful future.
“Since we established SAP AppHaus Network, our partners and teams have done an amazing job to prove, through many inspiring customer success stories, that human-centered innovation creates faster business value and outcomes for our customers using SAP Business Technology Platform. SAP’s initiative to offer repeatable use cases helps support and accelerate the move to the cloud,” said Andreas Hauser, SVP of SAP AppHaus Network.
22 Members – And Counting
Looking at all the great experiences so far it comes as no surprise that there will be more partners joining the network soon. With partners currently on four continents, SAP AppHaus Network is eager to continue its journey around the world. In fact, scouting for new partners in Africa and Latin America has begun, with the aim of finding candidates that enhance the value of the network and carry forward the joint mission of making innovation real. Stay tuned for the next steps in the evolution of SAP AppHaus Network.
“We are excited to make new connections, continue to grow the community, and work together with SAP partners globally,” said Fien-Schmalzbauer.
Julia Jakob is part of T&I Communications for SAP AppHaus.