The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how people think and behave and accelerated specific demands in user experiences from consumers and employees. They want their user experience to be hyper-personalized, frictionless, and integrated into their daily lives. Companies that combine technology and design to create memorable experiences can become an experience company and gain a competitive advantage, argues Ross Freedman, co-founder and CEO of digital experience company Rightpoint. “An experience company combines technology and design to orchestrate memorable events for everyone who interacts with their brand — from customers and prospects to employees and partners — at every juncture of their journey,” he observes. Freedman says that experiences are not just about the front-end user interface. The middle and back-office experiences need to be exceptional as well. “You can’t deliver impressive front-end customer experiences unless you have the back-end processes, technology, and people to support them,” he adds. Enterprise software firm ServiceNow, which recently acquired Gekkobrain to better serve the unique requirements of modern ERP users, points out that even “having to log into SAP to look up quick info creates friction for the modern workforce.” The Great Resignation, in which millions of Americans quit their jobs, was spurred in part by frustration with their experiences with their former employer. And the connection between customer and employee experiences is growing. Eighty-five percent of respondents to an IDC survey agree that better employee experience and higher employee engagement translate to a better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction, and higher revenues for their organization (Source: IDC Blog, Employee Experience and Customer Experience – What is the Connection? September 2021). How does this trend affect organizations running ERP platforms like SAP? Legacy ERP technology creates friction, decreasing user satisfaction and prompting some employees to look for workarounds that can increase technical debt and security risks. Legacy ERP infrastructure can also increase application development time, slowing innovation and impeding competitiveness. Legacy infrastructure is slow because it requires ad hoc coding to create new functions, adding complexity and time to application development and delivery. This has a negative effect on experiences — for both the employee and the customer. Legacy ERP is purpose-built for power users, making it hard to change because the underlying technology is less agile. Also, the more customizations there are, the harder it is to adapt application behavior to new experiences.

Steps to Improve User Experiences

But there is hope. SAP customers can take several actions to improve user experience, whether for customers or employees. SAP customers can build and deliver agile and innovative experiences today while keeping the core clean. This helps preserve the performance and upgradeability of their SAP ERP implementation long term by meeting users where they are and how they work. They can build experiences that are not limited by the ERP technology. SAP customers can develop a consistent, user-friendly design for their ERP platform. ServiceNow points out that customers and employees want consistent experiences across business functions, with familiar ways of interaction regardless of technology medium (web, mobile, etc.). This can best be accomplished by providing a user-friendly format that acts as a familiar front end for users to meet those needs. They can automate and optimize business processes across SAP and other systems end to end, which will improve business outcomes while boosting user experiences for employees and customers. Best of all, delivering these experiences is increasingly seen as a competitive differentiator. ServiceNow adds that great experiences help create more loyal customers and more engaged and productive employees.

Low-Code Apps

SAP customers can adopt a low-code strategy on a single adaptive platform to eliminate siloed systems and data, create new workflow innovations, and simplify the user experience with more self-serviceability and automation, ServiceNow notes. Low-code app development can lower development costs, increase employee productivity, speed up app design, reduce employee workarounds, and make upgrading apps easier. It can also empower “citizen developers” who are closer to the business than the technology. They have a unique ability to build experiences tuned to their first-hand understanding of the use case and processes. Low-code app development can help companies respond to modern experience demands faster and increase the number of employees who can build apps. ServiceNow’s low-code application platform has a process automation feature that spans systems. Users can complete a process end to end in a single experience, eliminating the need to traverse multiple user interfaces. To further improve user experience, ServiceNow has automation and integration features that can optimize users’ productivity. The platform removes the need for manual data entry, integrates data with high throughput, and automates tasks with robotic process automation (RPA). Best of all, SAP customers can do all of this on a single platform. This increases their ability to deliver new experiences at high speed and lower cost. In particular, low-code app development minimizes the need for ABAP developers, an increasingly scarce resource.

Boosting User Experiences

ServiceNow’s Creator Workflows provide prebuilt templates and low-code tools that help drive new experiences and resolve challenges. ServiceNow explains that its Creator Workflows include quick-start templates, self-service portals, drag-and-drop development environments, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based platforms. The Creator Workflows provides a “powerful, unified app experience across enterprise systems on a single cloud platform” and enables users to have “intelligent, consumer-grade, multichannel experiences,” ServiceNow says. As part of the Now Platform, Creator Workflows employs App Engine and Integration Hub to enable intuitive and intelligent low-code app delivery. “Businesses can go from an abstract idea to an implemented app in about a day,” says ServiceNow. In addition, Integration Hub is being augmented with native RPA capabilities. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), an Atlanta, Georgia-based financial services firm, reduced its app development effort by 50% and consolidated five legacy systems into a single platform using Creator Workflows. ICE chose ServiceNow because it wanted a solution “that would reduce costs and risk, provide modern functionality and user experiences, and facilitate workflow automation and end-to-end visibility,” says Bretlan Fletcher, ICE’s Senior IT Director. ServiceNow advertises that users have frictionless experiences that are intuitive, intelligent, and personalized with Creator Workflows. Processes are simplified through integration, analytics, and built-in automation, resulting in a seamless experience, it notes. Multichannel engagements significantly reduce waiting times through self-service and quick access to the right responses. Users can now increase their productivity because of a single full context view of analytics and AI-assisted recommendations to solve issues quickly. “What we have really focused on is building a product so that our customers … are able to break down silos in their organizations … and build those digital workflows quickly, so that they can rapidly transform their organization,” concludes Josh Kahn, ServiceNow Vice President of Creator Workflow Products.

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

• Build experiences based on user preferences. This will yield user satisfaction, adoption, and productivity, instead of building experiences based on the limitations of legacy technology.
• Develop a consistent, user-friendly design for the broader set of SAP ERP users. This provides a user-friendly format that acts as a familiar front end for all of your SAP ERP users, even the most occasional and infrequent ones. These occasional users are growing and are a critical part of your SAP ERP success.
• Use low-code app development to empower your citizen and professional developers. Citizen developers can create app customizations and configuration changes independently while allowing more experienced developers to work on more complex app requirements. Low-code tools enable companies to quickly respond to modern experience needs.