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The Fiori Makers call took place on October 11, 2018. Read on for a recap of the presentation and a video overview.
Learn how Freeman, a multi-billion dollar provider of marketing and trade show services with over 75 offices around the world, revolutionized their SAP buying process with design thinking and a simplified purchase requisitioning app for SAP Fiori.
Setting the Stage
Freeman needed a new purchase requisition application to help simplify their buying process and provide a consistent approach across their international offices. With their current solution, they had the following issues:
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Creating hundreds of purchase requisitions daily
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Difficulty generating purchase requisitions in SAP GUI
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A lot of data entry and re-entry
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Business process issues
Freeman was using SAP GUI to enter their purchase requisitions and manage approvals. Our goal was to simplify their entire process with SAP Fiori.
The Process
Due to the complexity of the current process, we quickly realized we needed to start with a design thinking approach. As a result, we headed out on the road to hold workshops across four different locations in North America. Our goals for the workshops were to:
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Understand the entire purchasing process (not just the SAP portion of the process) from the perspective of the end user by conducting user research
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See what was impeding the users from using SAP
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Identify how the process could be simplified
During the design sessions, we created personas and journey maps to gain more insight into the users. We also did a lot of observing to see how they used their current systems and the end-to-end process. We came away from the design workshops with the following key issues identified:
Speed/velocity of UI was not an issue:
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When the required details were in hand, super users were very fast at the actual creation process in SAP
The usability issues were primarily related to:
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Inability to search
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Everyone needing cheat sheets
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Difficulty in determining PR status
- SAP GUI being too complex
After the journey mapping exercise came the fun part: sketching! We created low fidelity mock-ups using markers and whiteboards. This part of the process allows us to gather feedback early on, helping us to identify what may or may not work for the personas. It proved valuable in learning how they might use the actual application we were developing.
From this we moved on to creating mock-ups using Pencil and the feedback tool SAP BUILD. This allowed us to thoroughly test out the key concepts of the application and the process flow with Freeman. This is part of our iterative process we use for designing new applications because it allows us to continually build and improve upon the prototypes.
After the Pencil mock-ups, we moved on to creating a functional prototype in SAP Fiori/SCP using WebIDE. Again, we took screenshots to create a BUILD study to collect feedback. As you can see in the screenshots below, the application is starting to take shape and you can see a few things like individual filter criteria at the top.
After we collected, analyzed, and made changes to the prototypes based on the feedback, we released our next version of our simplified purchase requisition application with SAP Fiori on-premise.
The application was implemented in ECC6 and SAPUI5 1.28 for Freeman.
We had such great success with the Freeman implementation that we turned the application into one of our core products. Since then, it’s been implemented for clients around the world. To learn more about optimizing your own procurement processes, download the free guide below!
