SAP Unveiled SAP Business ByDesign™, A New Business Software Solution for the Midsize Market
By Dina Glatzel, SAP, User Experience for Business ByDesign and Gerd Waloszek, SAP User Experience – Updated: September 26, 2007
On September 19th, 2007 a new era started for SAP customers, users of SAP software, and the company itself. At a global press event in New York, USA, SAP's CEO Henning Kagermann unveiled the company's entirely new business software solution SAP Business ByDesign for the midsize market. It complements the existing small and midsize enterprise product portfolio, employs a new business model, also also breaks new grounds with respect to user experience.
Figure 1: Announcing SAP Business ByDesign
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"With SAP Business ByDesign, today we are adding a completely new business model to our successful, established one and are changing the on-demand marketplace," said Henning Kagermann, CEO, SAP AG. "SAP Business ByDesign is designed to dramatically simplify IT for midsize companies by substantially reducing the cost of ownership and combining efficiency with business flexibility. The technical advantages of SOA enter the level of business processes and allow customers to exploit the full potential of new business trends without becoming IT experts. Such an affordable, easy-to-use and complete offering has been missing for midsize companies in the sweet spot until today." |
SAP Business ByDesign has been designed around four key principles—completeness, ease of use, adaptability, and significantly cutting total cost of ownership (TCO). It delivers an on-demand software solution with built-in service and support. Fundamentally different than competitive midmarket solutions, it helps minimize customers' overall IT costs dramatically by reducing the need for user training, hardware investments, service, support and IT staffing. One of its design goals was to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of employees.
Figure 2: The new SAP Business ByDesign Business Center (click image for larger version)
The solution's easy-to-use user interface is characterized by:
- SAP Business byDesign puts users' needs at the center of its design, addressing the "human" side of business software.
- Work Centers are the areas of activity and access to operational data. They are tailored to people's jobs and thus enable people to work efficiently.
- Key innovation of SAP Business byDesign is the "push" driven distribution of work. Exception handling, alerts and approvals are supported by the system as well is ad-hoc support for collaboration between users (for example, inform, escalate). Work may be assigned flexibly to a group of people or individuals. Tasks can be raised either by the application process or by users.
For meeting its ambitious objectives, SAP Business byDesign followed an iterative User-Centered Design Process. 3500 UI Mock-ups were designed before volume development started. Site Visits and UI Validations were conducted with more than 2500 end users before product shipment.
On the technical side, SAP Business ByDesign was built from the ground up on SAP NetWeaver®, fully leveraging enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) and providing a future-proof platform for business that provides for a high degree of flexibility to adapt business processes in order to address evolving market demands.
Figure 3 : The SAP Business ByDesign™ logo
All in all, SAP Business ByDesign is the world's most complete and adaptable on-demand business solution, breaking new grounds in ease-of-use for business software. Complementing the existing portfolio of SAP solutions for small businesses and midsize companies, the solution is designed to liberate midsize companies from the restrictions of traditional IT. SAP Business ByDesign is available today for selected early customers in the United States and Germany, with the opportunity now opening for early customers in China, France and the United Kingdom.
Read more on www.sap.com • Read the SAP Business ByDesign press release
