Anniversary 2023

Elevating the User Experience

In 2013, SAP faces a unique challenge: For years, customers and SAP users have voiced concerns about the complex and sometimes cumbersome user experience (UX) of SAP products. Surprisingly, over half of the software’s interfaces aren’t designed by SAP, but by partners and customers themselves. This underscores the importance customers place on UX for their custom-developed screens.

Recognizing the need to collaborate and co-innovate directly with customers and end-users, SAP establishes the SAP AppHaus team. Consisting of highly skilled designers, Design Thinking coaches, and consultants, the team’s mission is to help SAP customers improve the user experience of their solutions by jointly working on the usability of SAP business software and finding the best possible solutions for the customer’s use cases. To give this new team a space to work, SAP opens its first SAP AppHaus locations in Heidelberg and Palo Alto. These two creative labs are established as vibrant and creative co-innovation spaces where customers, partners, and SAP can collaborate and explore new ways of combining design, development, and customer engagement. The result? An enhanced UX journey for everyone!

The Start of a Long Customer Transformation Journey

In its first year, the SAP AppHaus team assists Nestlé in implementing Design Thinking. This customer transformation journey marks the starting point of a series of Design Thinking enablement and training projects for customers. Interestingly, all these projects start with joint design projects and result in transformation projects to foster an innovation culture.

Growing Demands

As word of the SAP AppHaus team spreads and calls for easy-to-use software interfaces grow louder, more and more organizations and customers seek support. They want the SAP AppHaus to hone their UX skills and help them build custom-developed screens.

Listening to the demands, SAP’s first Chief Design Officer, Sam Yen, accelerates the use of Design Thinking methodologies to drive and improve UX and innovations across customer organizations. This leads to the establishment of the first three innovation pillars needed for sustainable innovation: the right people, who apply an iterative process, and work in a creative environment or place.

SAP Fiori Flourishes

As a result of working closely with end-users and listening to their needs, SAP introduces SAP Fiori – SAP’s first cohesive design system. This reflects a paradigm shift, moving from a focus on features and functions to the actual users and their experience. SAP Fiori helps bring simplicity to complex business scenarios so teams can be more productive and work together better and faster in entirely new ways. Only a year later, the design concept for SAP Fiori 2.0 even wins one of the most prestigious design awards, the Red Dot Award!

Revamping the NHL Statistics

Providing a coherent UX to make the users’ lives easier is also the focus of the SAP AppHaus customer projects that year. In a multi-year research and co-innovation project, SAP partners with the NHL, the National Hockey League of Canada and the USA, to overhaul its statistical offerings for fans on NHL.com/Stats, providing more detailed, user-friendly data and incorporating the league’s complete statistical history.

Humanizing Business Through Design

Thanks to constant use of a design-led innovation process, extensive user research and co-innovation at customer sites, and focus on the end-user, the SAP AppHaus notices the strategic value of this human-centered approach for SAP’s customers. The next logical step is the business process and business model innovation for which the SAP AppHaus team now creates the concept of Design Thinking and Design Doing. Because humanizing business through design isn’t just about reimagining the software interfaces, but the entire business processes and business models, always placing humans at the forefront. The SAP AppHaus team applies user research and design by visualizing ideas to make future business models tangible. Experience shows that most business value for customers lies in applying a human-centered approach to business processes and business models, that is going beyond user experience. The team always bears in mind that innovative solutions need to be desirable and feasible to be successful.

The Innovation Toolkit is Born

Simultaneously, the SAP AppHaus ventures into ‘Innovation Culture’ research. Initial surveys and pilot workshops are conducted, laying the groundwork for what will become a comprehensive Innovation Toolkit, providing essential Design Thinking templates as free downloads. What’s more, as a subset of the toolkit, 2015 also sees the launch of Scenes, a set of pre-defined illustrations to create visual stories just like that. In the first year alone, Scenes is downloaded a whopping 638 times! The takeaway? At SAP, innovation is people-powered!

Revolutionizing Cancer Research

The SAP AppHaus wins its first Red Dot Award in 2015 for a co-innovation with the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) in Heidelberg. Together they develop the SAP Medical Research Insights app, which optimizes cancer research by providing intuitive, real-time analysis of diverse clinical data, improving decision-making and individualized therapy choices. This replaces time-consuming manual processes and enhances workflows. What’s more, it is only one example of how SAP helps the world run better and improve people’s lives.

New Homes for Innovation

The new customer-facing SAP AppHaus Palo Alto opens in June 2016. It’s situated in the heart of Silicon Valley near major tech companies and Stanford University. Located in a space once used by Steve Jobs, it aims to foster innovation and collaboration.

Only a month later, the first SAP AppHaus in Asia is officially inaugurated by the president of the Republic of Korea in Seoul, aiming to boost South Korea’s creative economy and serve as a co-innovation hub for companies, startups, government, and universities. Last but not least, the SAP AppHaus takes another important step, opening a large creative design space in the center of Germany’s capital Berlin.

With “Stella” – a creative lab built in containers of glass – Daimler is one of the first SAP AppHaus customers to open their own creative space to foster innovation culture and drive their company’s transformation from within.

Joining Forces with Partners

Looking at the success of the SAP AppHaus locations, SAP decides to scale this mission globally and launches a franchise model for like-minded partners. The first AppHaus run by an SAP AppHaus Network partner opens in Amsterdam. The creative space can be leveraged by SAP and their customers. Additional carefully curated partners join over the years to become a network of AppHaus locations across the globe, all operating in line with SAP’s co-innovation concept.

Innovation Toolkit Takes the World by Storm

The SAP AppHaus team is all about getting innovation into the hands of people and the Innovation Toolkit embodies just that! The kit is freely available to everyone on the SAP AppHaus website and proves to be a success. Scenes alone reaches over 6,000 downloads in 2017. The basic set is downloaded in 84 countries on all continents by both customers, NGOs, universities, and SAP colleagues. Together with customers, the SAP AppHaus team is working on establishing a community of add-ons.

Scenes is also used as an innovative storytelling tool in the customer co-innovation project with Rolls-Royce this year.

And the team doesn’t stop there, two new tools see the light of day: Mosaic and Spectrum. Mosaic aims at helping teams prototype their future creative spaces. Whereas Spectrum helps organizations to create innovation teams by harnessing diverse talents and skills to drive efficient 21st-century cross-functional teamwork.

SAP AppHaus Debuts in NYC’s Hudson Yards

This year also sees the opening of the SAP AppHaus New York, in the city that never sleeps. It serves as a customer-facing innovation hub located on the 48th floor of the SAP office in Hudson Yards alongside the Hasso Plattner Institute. The new team in the creative space supports east coast customer innovations while consistently prioritizing a human-centered approach and enhancing the overall user experience of SAP software.

Leadership and Technology as New Pillars

Over the years, sustainable innovation becomes more important. Especially in the context of future generations. A culture prone to innovation depends on different factors. Until now the SAP AppHaus team has worked with the three pillars People, Process, and Place. In 2018, Technology and Leadership become two new pillars of the human-centered approach to innovation.
At a time where changes are happening rapidly, a top-down leadership style is not efficient anymore. Such times require a leadership that empowers employees and builds a culture of trust, creativity, and innovation within the team. This involves exploring, designing, developing, and iteratively refining solutions for implementation and enhancement. Only then can digital transformation be successful.

Klitschko Ventures and SAP Join Forces

The SAP AppHaus starts a strategic partnership with Klitschko Ventures. Together they create a collaborative training program that amalgamates SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation using Klitschko’s “F.A.C.E the Challenge” method. F.A.C.E stands for Focus, Agility, Coordination, and Endurance. The pilot launches the following year.

Three additional achievements stand out:

• The launch of the Dot Dot Bot tool for easy chatbot creation as new addition to the Innovation Toolkit.
• The inauguration of a breakfast series to discuss topics related to the future of work at the SAP AppHaus, called “New Work Breakfast”.
• Among the many ongoing customer projects, this article gives a good example how the SAP AppHaus team supported the San Francisco 49ers.

Leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform to Solve Customer Challenges

With the launch of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), the SAP AppHaus team is among the first to introduce the new platform concept to SAP customers and partners. It combines application development, data and analytics, integration, and AI capabilities optimized for SAP applications.

One of the first projects with SAP BTP is with the Saudi Arabian King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST. It starts as an idea of re-imagining the campus dining experience for university members, to become a smart city communication hub across the campus. During this first project, design workshops and thorough user research help develop a consumer-oriented prototype for a dining app on iOS devices.

Integrating Enterprise Architecture in the Innovation Approach

Like any other innovation method, SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation also continues to evolve. In 2019, the SAP AppHaus starts to align its project work early on with the existing and future Enterprise Architecture of the respective customer. Combining Design Thinking with Enterprise Architecture leads to experientially desirable, technologically feasible, and financially viable solutions. Only then can a great user experience also create significant business value. Enterprise Architecture is key to making innovation real in complex customer environments considering that some customers have more than 100 systems running their organization including also non-SAP systems. To be successful with a project, you need to make it real in such complex environments. There were too many projects in the past where a proof-of-concept (POC) was developed, that never went live. With the integrated architecture thinking in mind, our project teams are now able to solve just that!

Exploring New Ways of Working

For the first time in the 21^st century, a global pandemic shuts the world down. Normal activities like going to the supermarket, in-person meetings, business traveling, and so on are no longer possible. No more physical contact, no handshaking. How can we keep working in these times? A whole new situation for everyone across the globe. No one knows how long this phase of isolation will last. An exceptional situation. But work must go on.

Like many other companies and organizations, the SAP AppHaus team switches to fully remote working from home. In record time, the team transforms workshops that were meant to be held in person to a virtual event that all global attendees can attend from home. Experiences with first customers are instantly added to the Innovation Toolkit as a Mural and other templates, such as lessons learned, best practices, and recommendations. All collected as “The Next WoW, the next way of working”.

Challenging Times with COVID-19

In a co-innovation project with a US-American hospital, the SAP AppHaus helps manage the load of inquiries coming in regarding COVID-19 diagnosis by developing a multilingual symptom checker chatbot with SAP Business Technology Platform. In another project with healthcare provider Paul Hartmann AG, the SAP AppHaus team provides support by developing an intelligent dashboard to manage healthcare demand and distribution of critical medical equipment.

Making SAP Business Technology Platform More Tangible

After launching SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) in 2020, it is the team’s mission to help customers leverage the full potential of SAP BTP to solve their business challenges. What exactly are the applications in the different product areas? How can customers benefit? It is the first time the team talks about repeatable use cases to simplify the implementation and usage of SAP BTP. These actionable use cases offer standardized, well-documented processes that can be consistently applied across various scenarios. They ensure efficiency, reduce the need for extensive customization, and make it easier to replicate successful outcomes in different projects and contexts.

Publishing Customer Stories from Across the Global SAP AppHaus Network

Only in the year 2021 alone, around 32 customer stories have been created. This shows how successful SAP BTP helps customers on their journey towards the Cloud.

One of them with Iren, an Italian energy company, has optimized its invoice processing by leveraging SAP BTP. This innovative approach has not only improved operational efficiency, but also enhanced customer satisfaction. SAP BTP allows for seamless integration and automation, simplifying complex processes and ensuring timely and accurate billing, ultimately benefiting both the company and its customers.

From First Locations to a Global Community

By now, the SAP AppHaus Network has grown into a community of like-minded partners working on almost all continents. It includes 22 innovation teams in 2022.

What’s more, several SAP AppHaus Network projects win at the SAP Innovation Awards. One of them, NetzeBW, has made a major contribution to the health and safety of its employees with its NeWa App. And talking about great use cases, the concept of actionable SAP BTP use cases gains momentum. From initial ideas to a first launch at TechEd 2022, sample use cases are featured in more detail during the international event.

Reopening the Spaces in Post-Covid Times

Two years of distancing. All offices had been locked down. After two years, the pandemic slowly comes to an end. Restrictions are lifted. How to deal with this now? Working habits enter a new era marked by increased flexibility, innovation, and inclusivity. To attract, retain, and empower the best talent, companies must rethink future work strategies, creating an environment where individuals can excel at work. This drives the SAP AppHaus and SAP’s global Future of Work organization to develop a Flex Team Workshop, based on learnings from the first stage, “The Next WoW”. The workshop helps teams in effectively managing a hybrid work model and finding the best balance between in-person and remote work.

New SAP AppHaus in Palo Alto To Be Opened Soon

SAP opens a new office in downtown San Francisco, this office is the interim home of the SAP AppHaus Palo Alto team due to reconstruction work in their original building. They will move into their new AppHaus location to be reopened in the first quarter of 2024.

Improving People’s Lives Using Generative AI

With the rise of generative AI (artificial intelligence) applications, SAP enriches more and more of its solutions with this new intelligent technology. As a vanguard when it comes to customer co-innovation, the SAP AppHaus team pilots GenAI exploration workshops to evaluate together with customers their respective opportunities to use this new technology in their business context. As always, these new workshop formats are made available to the public in the Innovation Toolkit.

What’s more, the wheel keeps turning, as demonstrated by interesting and highly diverse customer projects, many of them reflected in the following publications:

• GC Biopharma: Flexible and Integrated HR Portal
• Pif Paf Alimentos Goes Live with SAP Build Apps
• Customers Novo Banco and Pif Paf Alimentos, both featured in time for SAPPHIRE 2023: SAP BTP Use Cases Kick-Start Transformation with Pre-Built Content
• Unipol Digitizes Master Data Management with SAP Business Technology Platform
• SAP Innovation Awards 2023 winner HomeMade supported by SAP AppHaus Network partner Bourne Digital
• SAP AppHaus Network partner Flexso worked with the bank Degroof Petercam’s on an employee mobility app

It seems to be the ability to adapt quickly and be a frontrunner for new methodologies and technologies, that keeps the SAP AppHaus team relevant and successful. As Fraunhofer Institute researcher Harriet Kasper stated in 2020:

”Only few innovation teams are capable to survive and thrive over such a long period of time. The SAP AppHaus’ strategy to succeed is simple: They always put human in the center of their work to drive innovation together with their customers, powered by the latest intelligent technologies.”

It will be exciting to see what the future holds for the SAP AppHaus Network and its powerful ecosystem of creative and open-minded customers and partners across the globe.