Creating a Mobility Innovation Cooperative

Former Member · ‎07-11-2013

SAP Mobile has been the vanguard of a steep evolution – some would say revolution – in enterprise technology during the past three years. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be so deeply engaged in business transformation, dealing with customers who are genuinely delighted by mobile innovation. Across every industry, mobile technology has taken hold. There are now no physical boundaries to commercial expansion as business processes are enabled outside the confines of traditional offices on ever-evolving devices – not to mention the extension of mobile solutions beyond a company’s “four walls” to its ecosystem.

What businesses need in a mobile solution

If you’re going to run your mission-critical operations from mobile devices, then you’ve got to have apps that suit your unique business strategies and processes. Those apps have to be elegant, rich with features, secure, and – crucially – they must deliver rapid ROI and integrate seamlessly with your existing IT landscape.

A pretty app alone won’t cut it. Ideally, you’ll need someone to work with you, someone who understands mobile technology and can speak your language. In that way, they’ll be able to get under the skin of your business requirements and specific industry practices. And you’ll also need a partner to provide support services, so when the developers are unavailable, you’re not stuck trying to figure out how to navigate the landscape of ever-changing OS updates, new devices, and form factors.

Getting started

Where do you start? Well SAP has opened mobility innovation centers around the world staffed with mobile and industry experts to help craft your mobile journey and solve business challenges in ways never before possible. SAP mobile experts typically collaborate with customers in workshops using “free-thinking spaces” either at our innovation centers or at the customer’s offices. During the workshops, participants explore pain points, business objectives, and the ways in which mobile technology can best be used. We focus on your customers and business users, then apply design thinking methods to draw out the top solutions, and create prototypes to model your ideal solution. The process typically takes three to four weeks. To date, since we started doing these workshops around 18 months ago, we’ve completed about 200 sessions.

Co-innovation produces simple, elegant mobile solutions

SAP Mobile represents a radically new SAP, characterized by simple, elegant solutions designed to make life easier and more profitable for you and your customers.

Check out the following examples from retail, consumer products, engineering and construction, and life sciences customers to learn about the tangible and profitable results from these mobile co-innovation projects.

Hillarys Blinds

Julian Bond, head of Head of Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) at Hillarys Blinds tells Jon Reed about his co-innovation experience with SAP Mobile.

Kiewit Corporation

Kiewit Corporation used design-thinking to sharpen its competitive edge. By partnering with a team of user-experience designers, architects, and developers, it built a game-changing mobile app that empowers field employees to receive inventory and document supply quality, instantly sending the data from the project site to the head office.

http://www.sap.com/asset/index.epx?id=4a360a4f-6a20-4454-8a0b-afb502c53211

Institut Straumann

The Straumann Group today is a global leader in implant, restorative, and regenerative dentistry. They offer products and services to dental professionals and dental laboratories in 70 countries around the world. In this session called “Create Sales Heroes with Mobile Apps", Marcus Jakobi, CIO Straumann Group, explains how his team managed to automate sales processes, increase productivity and enhance customer service helping Straumann’s salesforce to have all the customer-related info they need right at their fingertips.

http://events.sap.com/sapphirenow/en/session/3837

Sysco Foods

Oliver Betz, head of Custom Mobile Business at SAP, highlights the co-innovation between Sysco Foods and SAP to develop a mobile app for chefs to use in their kitchen for order and inventory management.

In this TV ad with Chef Robert Irvine, you can see an example of the app we mentioned – around 16 seconds into the video.

We’ll feature another batch of engaging customer stories in the next blog. In the meantime, tell me about your employee, partner, or customer scenarios.

Visit www.sap.com/mobileinnovation and see how to achieve your business objectives.