SAP

In a nutshell...

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Project registration is a very manual process for SAP Partners. I brought the process on-platform within SAP for Me, reducing manual efforts for both Partners and internal colleagues alike.

Team

6 developers, 1 designer, Scrum Master, PM/PO

My Role

UX Designer

Timeframe

3 months

Setting the scene...

What are SAP partners? What do I do for them?

SAP Partners are like the middleman between SAP and its customers. Although SAP sells solutions directly to customers, Partners are also able to provide tailored solutions to end customers by selling, hosting, implementing, or building SAP software to end customers.

My org, Partner Engineering, sat at the heart of this relationship, building software to enable SAP Partners in their deals and projects with end customers.

SAP for Me

SAP for Me is a digital companion that aggregates a Partner or Customer’s SAP portfolio into one platform. Throughout my time at SAP, I co-designed several new features for the platform, leading to an increase of 7% in user satisfaction rate.

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This case study focuses on a Customer Cloud Project Registration feature I designed while on the SAP for Me team.

Customer Cloud Projects

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Let’s align on some key vocab!

Projects: an SAP partner’s plan to implement certain SAP solutions for a Customer
Products: which SAP solutions will be implemented within a project
Waves: scheduled “phases” of a given project

Customer Cloud Projects going live are key to customer renewals.

When a project between a Customer and a Partner goes live, it’s indicative of a successful relationship between a Customer and a Partner. This is reflected in whether or not a Customer chooses to renew with said partner, leading to more projects and more revenue down the road.

We looked back at past Partner data, and the renewal rates speak for themselves:

81%

renewal rate from Customers who go live

75%

renewal rate from Customers on a path to go live

50%

renewal rate from Customers without a path to go live

Project registration: creating the path leading to project go-lives

When a Partner registers a project, it informs their SAP representatives of the planned deal between Partner and Customer. By registering a project, they allow all involved parties have the insights they need to ensure successful projects within the SAP for Me platform.

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TL;DR

Registering a project keeps Partners and their SAP representatives in the loop, leading to more successful project outcomes.

The current project registration process...

... was done via email.

Project registration was a pretty lengthy process that was being done mostly via back-and-forth email between the Partner and the SAP representative. This was a frequent pain point for Partners as even the smallest of changes would require an email.

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Our challenge

How might we reduce manual effort and integrate project registration in-platform for SAP Partners?

Some early explorations

While I can’t go into specifics about my design projects here due to my NDA, feel free to reach out for more details and I’d be happy to chat!

Simple Form

The “brute force” solution. The simple form became lengthy and complicated, especially when more data was involved.

Modals

Modals handled dynamic data requirements and broke the process into smaller parts, but lacked a sense of progress.

Wizard

Ultimately, I selected the Wizard pattern as it was best suited to breaking down a complex, multi-step process by giving users a sense of progression.

A bump in the road

I ran into a particularly complex aspect of the project registration process - Wave Scheduling. From what we knew from project requirements and previous customer data, a project could have several waves, which partners might need to add or remove as they create their plan. Additionally, multiple products could be assigned to each wave, while a product could only be assigned to one wave at most. This meant that a simple table wouldn’t really suffice.

Taking a page from Google Forms

In searching for a design pattern that could take this into account while still being feasible with SAP’s design patterns and library, I remembered Google Forms having a multiple choice grid that would fit our needs quite well!

The new and improved project registration process

Addressing edge cases and backtracking

When Partners change data in earlier steps, it affects the data in future steps. (Ex. changing the selected Customer for the project in Step 1 affects what products are selected in Step 2). We mapped these cases out with corresponding warning messages.

Dev 🤝 Design Handoff

To ensure a smooth handoff and collaboration with the developers on my team, designs were annotated with relevant interactions and any specific behaviour.

SAP Cloud Project Registration