As SAP continues to embark on its impressive cloud transformation, one major development is how we’re able to serve start-ups, spin-offs and mid-sized enterprises in more agile and innovative ways than ever before. This new generation of SAP customers brings with them a new era of end-users. What they all have in common is that they are seizing the latest market opportunities and driving growth with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

As young 21st century companies often experiencing SAP for the first time, these businesses are reliant on flexible technologies that will allow them to easily adapt and thrive. SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition is a ready-to-run cloud ERP that delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous innovation. As it stands, small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent a significant number of SAP’s public cloud customers.

When it comes to usability, these new users expect simple, intuitive solutions with a modern, consumer-grade user experience. Unlike SAP's large enterprise customers, SMEs usually have quite modest IT departments, sometimes led by a single person. While they depend on SAP’s solutions to keep pushing their businesses forward, this only works if the system runs smoothly and empowers users to make quick and intelligent decisions to improve their business. Everything that slows the end users down ultimately gets in the way of rapid growth.

Fine-tuning the user experience hand-in-hand with SMEs

A dedicated council of small and mid-sized European public cloud customers and end users recently gathered at the SAP AppHaus in Heidelberg for the first annual in-person UX council. The goal of the summit was to exchange ideas, insights, and reactions on their experiences using SAP software thus far. Representing a diverse group of industries, including sports and entertainment, industrial manufacturing, automotive, and public sector, the council has embarked on a mission to shape a best-in-class user experience on the cloud together with SAP.

The council has been meeting virtually for the last year, and many have also been visited in person by SAP’s user experience team. "We want to get the voices of our customers into SAP,” says Christian Stark, Product Manager for SAP S/4HANA User Experience. This means removing the walls that often exist between our customers, their end users, and our own designers and developers. “It’s all about carving a direct tunnel of communication. They are customers that are growing fast and we can learn so much from them," he explains. As they grow their business, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition is expected to grow and evolve as well.

With a focus on improving the user experience, a central tenet of the UX council is to conduct user research with the actual end users of the solutions. Initial activities included gathering user feedback on applications used within two common processes in Finance and Quote-to-Cash. At the same time, the council looks at the overall experience that the users have with the SAP system. "We wanted to get to know our end users by name and really connect with them by visiting them on site,” explains Sinit Foto, Product Manager for SAP S/4HANA. "This helps us to observe them in action and understand their joys and pains at every touchpoint. The goal is to start small, learn, and then accelerate fast."

End user feedback has a big ROI for customers and SAP

Even as SAP’s Design and User Experience community continues to ramp up both in-product telemetry and its user research discipline, it’s clear that there is still a lot of work to be done when it comes to involving end user feedback in product development. One finding from this particular customer and user group has been that SAP’s newest users don’t necessarily feel entitled to provide in-product feedback via Qualtrics. Often, this is because new users feel too unfamiliar with SAP software, with one user explaining: "Who am I to give feedback? There are a lot of things I don’t know [about SAP]".

For SAP, the importance of hearing firsthand from end users cannot be stressed enough. According to SAP’s Chief Design Officer Arin Bhowmick, one of SAP’s main challenges is getting access to the people for whom they are building products. "SAP as a whole is in a transformation phase and we are looking at how we can change our mindset and approach towards building products. Any time end users voice or articulate their needs, that helps us tremendously," he explains.

One of the major action points behind this UX council has been to demonstrate the return on investment for customers engaging so closely with SAP. Carsten Landsberg, Senior SAP Project Manager at Ionity GmbH , Europe’s high-power charging network for electric vehicles, has come to see the value of the exchange clearly:

"Our vision is to place electric charging stations across all highways in Europe, and that’s why it’s really important that we’re able to grow fast," Carsten explains. "That’s why we chose SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, because we could easily take advantage of the standard processes that are available. Not only are the UIs important, but also the processes in the backend. There are certain blockers that are visible to our end users that might not be immediately apparent to SAP. It’s important that we can provide feedback to SAP, exchange with other companies, and hopefully improve processes and our business in the end."

Swapnil Ghule, Engineering Manager at Unzer GmbH , also appreciates the opportunity to actively exchange with SAP: "We feel heard. We are giving active feedback and we’re seeing that we’re not only listened to, but that it’s getting implemented. That’s a win-win for both sides and in the end together we can really structure and make the solution better. As early adopters, we are there to help SAP help us."

Empowering SMEs to succeed and scale

Choosing to go to the cloud means having access to the latest technology, functionality, and user experience. Businesses that opt for the cloud are choosing the path of constant innovation. But to truly empower business to succeed and scale, building a deep, trusted, long-term relationship that encourages open feedback is key.

"The UX council is really listening," says Arjun Prasad, Program Manager for One ERP Transformation at MANN+HUMMEL. "Not just listening but giving us feedback and responding to our problems with solutions...It’s a great platform to work together with SAP to solve not just our problems, but in general find solutions for many other customers."

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