SAP Delivers Mobile for Digital Transformation

At the second SAP Mobile Day, it became clear that mobile is not just a playground for motivating employees with nice devices. Instead, speakers of leading brands showed that coherent mobile concepts are crucial to successfully innovate, deliver, and win the race for talent.

Forty SAP customers, partners, and guests were on hand to discuss and exchange with SAP product development and design. The freshly expanded and refined mobile experience package shown by SAP in Berlin, Germany, seems to have resonated.

SAP has taken major – and partly unexpected – steps toward a well-rounded business offering that includes a fresh and consistent user experience across product lines. Solutions for critical processes such as digital supply chain are included as well as tools and a platform that can allow customers fast in-house development of mobile apps.

“SAP has defined a new way to easily create native apps with the help of not only user-friendly interfaces, but also high-performing applications,” said Michele Biscotti from Audi AG. The German manufacturer of premium cars demonstrated how the company is using new native apps from SAP to improve warehouse processes, for example. Audi also centralizes and simplifies the entry to SAP applications with SAP Mobile Start.

At the same time, Audi AG is developing its own apps based on SAP BTP SDK for iOS and SAP BTP SDK for Android. “Audi decided to use SAP BTP SDK because we are confident that native app development saves time and cost in both operation and development processes,” said Biscotti.

This is a path that Audi AG shares with other renowned manufacturers such as CLAAS. The agricultural machinery manufacturer relies heavily on native app development with SAP for its use cases. Other machinery producers like Kaeser Kompressoren also see the appeal of SAP’s mobile offering in the rapid availability of native apps. Kaeser, for example, uses the brand-new SAP Product Model Viewer mobile app with augmented reality display alongside SAP Enterprise Product Development.

Google: Digital Transformation Needs Mobile

In Berlin, SAP partner Google provided insights into its own trend analyses on mobile and business transformation. According to Google, for many retailers mobile solutions create the link between the physical world, where customers or employees interact, and the world of data. “Mobile is the presentation layer to the digital business. It is how data becomes actionable by people,” said Sean Ginevan, head of Global Strategy & Digital Partnerships for Android Enterprise at Google.

Many employees see mobile devices as a benefit and work more productively with them. At the same time, mobile applications optimize human actions and processes through effective data analysis. However, as of today, the maturity of mobile within organizations is lacking, even within industries where maturity would be expected. “Mobile is often the missing piece in the digital transformation of companies,” stated Ginevan.

This is precisely where SAP comes into play, as its developers and designers showed in Berlin. Like Google, SAP sees mobile not just as a synonym for smartphones. For SAP, it’s about a holistic approach for all devices that are untethered and benefit specifically from native features. Florian Heretsch, head of the Mobile Experience and Engineering unit at SAP, put it this way: “With this ‘one mobile’ offering, as we call it, we create solutions for any kind of mobile technology that helps our customers improve. Whether it’s a phone, watch, or mixed-reality handset, we equip them with pre-built or custom applications. What’s unique to SAP is the comprehensive, cross-industry process knowledge that enables this, together with simplified development options. That’s what you only get with SAP.”

All in all, SAP Mobile Day confirmed that SAP mobile is becoming more and more important for many businesses that want to push the change to digital forward. And it proved that the event series deserves to be continued next year.

Stephan Kamps is a product expert for SAP Mobile Experience.