Red Dot stands for belonging to the best in design and business. Once a year, agencies, designers, and companies from all over the globe are invited to take part in the Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design. This year, SAP took home a win with SAP Road Map Explorer!
For around 65 years, the Red Dot Award has offered designers and companies a platform for the evaluation of design. Following the guiding theme “in search of good design and creativity,” 24 jury experts reviewed and evaluated 6,992 entries individually in an online jury. Only the best-designed brands and communication projects were chosen in the end.
“Design is about solving issues and addressing needs from our users. It’s not just about painting pretty user interfaces (UIs) but understanding the environment and the context of the user. It’s about creating empathy,” said Nikola Freudensprung, user experience design expert for SAP Road Map Explorer. “It’s simply great to work on things that help people and, at the same time, feel and look beautiful. Imagine that, at the end of the day, they feel delighted using our products because of the intuitive experience and beautifully crafted interfaces. That’s pure joy for us.”
A New Way to See the Future
In the SAP portfolio, there are more than 1,000 products and solutions for over 50 industries organized in hundreds of business areas. Usually, a typical customer software landscape does not just consist of one SAP product, but it is built on various integrated products. Big enterprises might even run more than 50 products. For SAP customers, it is essential to have transparency in what features and functions SAP is delivering, so they can plan their software investments thoroughly.
Until recently, SAP provided individual PDF-based road maps for each product and main industry to its customers. So if those running a big business with various products would need to look into multiple PDFs and cut and paste information into a company’s software road map — one size fits all.
With SAP Road Map Explorer, this all has changed.
The new self-service tool allows customers to customize and personalize their road map according to their company’s strategy and business transformation. Using SAP Road Map Explorer helps incrementally reduce effort and increase transparency on this exercise not only for customers but also for customer-facing SAP employees. The web shop-like dynamics allow all users to build and save road maps for whatever criteria, in multiple combinations and granularity.
Even more, based on customer usage data and insights into reference customer data, SAP Road Map Explorer utilizes machine learning capabilities to predict and recommend upcoming innovations that fit the customer’s business.
