Making SAP AG’s software more accessible to users was the central focus of this year’s keynote at the opening day of the German software giant’s SAPPHIRE user conference in Los Angeles. Hasso Plattner, the company’s co-founder, co-chairman and CEO told the packed crowd of 15,000 attendees that SAP realizes it has to become more user-centric. It’s very important that SAP is much closer to its customers, he said, We’ve got so big now, we have over 4,000 developers, and we have to significantly improve the way we do business with you. Plattner said that in the past SAP concentrated on talking about technical issues; components, performance, business processes and so on. He admitted that the company was a bit afraid of finding out how the end-user felt about using the system. But he said the time of technical talk was over and that SAP was now going to concentrate on selling business solutions to the customer. Although the company didn’t announce any technological innovations to make its software easier to implement or use, the CEO’s words nevertheless represent a significant change in SAP’s mindset. Users and industry pundits alike have long criticized SAP’s flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, R/3, for being too clunky to set up and consequently difficult to use. Alice Greene, president of the analyst firm Industry Directions said the change of tack was significant. SAP is finally trying to find a way to communicate better with its customers than using components and frameworks. Now it’s trying to sell business solutions. It realizes it has to change the way it markets and sells the product. Plattner said it wasn’t enough that the company was focused on specific industries. We have to go through a company, through the IT department, through the managers and reach straight to the end-users of the system. He told ComputerWire: We’re not going to cut ourselves off from the IT boys, that would be suicide, but we are going to have to start addressing the needs of the end-user too. Plattner, who by his own admission hates using keyboards and thinks software should be designed to work for the users, said it was SAP’s aim to simplify the R/3 interface by using intuitive point and click graphics that will allow all users, not just a select technical few, access to the system. He said it was a case of striking the right balance between SAP’s 17,000 R3 implementations and gradually incorporating all the new ideas we have to improve the system. Under a new marketing slogan, EnjoySAP, the company is encouraging its user base and the software development community to come forward with criticisms and ideas of how to make its R/3 system easier to use and operate. As part of the campaign, SAP will send development teams to more than 100 R/3 sites to gather data about what user interface improvements should be made and any changes will appear in the 1999 releases of R/3, the company said. Plattner added that SAP was also embarking on a series of new initiatives – SAP Scope, SAP Business Intelligence and SAP Focus – as a way of better focusing on end-users. Central to these new initiatives is the development of new front-office applications (see related story), that will enable users to better leverage data held in R/3 systems, SAP said. The company also used a press conference here Sunday night to introduce its new solution maps. The software giant says the maps, which it has been working on for around a year and a half, are a series of blueprints targeted at 17 specific industry areas including high- tech, media, oil and gas, public sector and automotive among others. Each map represents a strategy for what SAP and its partners offer in those particular industries today and what they plan to offer tomorrow and in the future, Plattner said.
