Hola SAP & Apple. ¡Voy a Barcelona!

Mobile World Congress – #MWC17

I can’t wait to get to Barcelona tomorrow. I visited briefly in 2008 and couldn’t get enough of the tapas, paella, Gaudi, and touring around the Barri Gotic. However, this is my first time going to Mobile World Congress. I’ve talked to past attendees about the magnitude of this event – such that I’m sure I won’t be doing any touring. That’s okay, though, another reason to come back!

As fun as it sounds, I’m not going just to gawk at all the upcoming mobile innovations. At the conference, we’ll be showing off our apps for transportation management (SAP TM). I’m thrilled to be sharing our story alongside SAP, Apple, Cargill, and the new SAP Fiori for iOS SDK!

The Story

At Mindset, we’re designing and building hundreds of SAP Fiori mobile apps for some of the world’s biggest companies. These apps do amazing things like sophisticated plant manufacturing, retail warehousing, railway employee functions, analytics, transportation and more. We heard rumors leading up to SAPPHIRE about big SAP + Apple news, and immediately reached out to our contacts and said, “we want in!”

Cargill, one of the world’s largest food companies, has been embarking on a digital transformation (we’ll be sharing this journey at SAPPHIRE). We’re conducting Design Thinking sessions in all sorts of exciting areas, and we came across a transportation scenario that if we could pull it off, would completely disrupt the status quo and lead to an incredible experience. Connect this with the new Apple SDK, and it will really shine.

Here’s the official scoop.

Disclaimer: none of my statements are official for SAP, Apple, or Cargill, and only represent my personal experiences.

The Scenario

Cargill has a lot of trucks moving a lot of food and food ingredients. In our observations, we found that at some plants these trucks just show up in a rough window of time without much warning. The driver has to:

Get out of the truck
Wait in line
Have a nice chat with the shipping clerk
Fill out a bunch of paperwork
Wait for the clerk to fill in this data in dozens of SAP screens
Answer the clerk’s questions
Get directions on which bay to load/drop off
FINALLY move on to his or her next stop

If this scenario isn’t ripe for digital transformation, I don’t know what is.

Transportation Sketch

Eventually, we go through the remainder of Design Thinking, and come up with this high res prototype:

TM Fiori for iOS Screens

How It Works

The truck driver will get a new native iOS Swift app that will let them easily see their deliveries, map out their route, notify the plants about their arrival, and check-in (with geo-fencing to make it 100% accurate)! In the next phase, we plan to go even further and begin preparing the loading docks and drive some incredible efficiencies.

In the weeks between now and SAPPHIRE, we will also be teaming up with the Apple Design team and layer in more of the Fiori for iOS Design Elements, such as this List Report: https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design-ios/article/list-report/

Fiori for iOS List Report

Why Fiori for iOS?

Speed – An unpleasant truth of Fiori, or highly complex HTML5 apps, is that they can sometimes be slow. With Swift and native iOS development, you can gain some incredible speed and responsiveness.
Style – With SAP Fiori for Web, and even with Kapsel & Cordova-based Hybrid app development, you need to design pages responsively for an infinite number of screen and device combinations. The result is often some UI quirkiness that drives me nuts. With SAP Fiori for iOS, you can perfect every screen.
Features – SAP Fiori can do a lot with the Fiori Client, Kapsel, Cordova, and all other variations. We’ve integrated barcode scanners, beacons, and tons of other things. However, it is still difficult to use the latest and greatest SAP iOS features such as Siri, Touch ID, or Force Touch.

FYI

This toolset is actually called SAP Hana Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. (Perhaps changing to SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS soon?) The HCP architecture may be different than people are used to. For our scenario, this is not an issue since we need to get our diverse user group connected. The cloud makes sense for that. However, this includes some new elements for many customers: Gateway, Hana Cloud Connector, Hana Cloud Platform, and Hana Cloud Platform Mobile Services (HCPms).

Hana Cloud Platform Architecture

A little work to get it setup, but after a few years of HCP maturity, it works well. We’re doing a lot with it!

The next step is to polish up these UI’s with some continued reviews, UX studies and more. We’ll be testing some more advanced security measures in the libraries and getting our pilot group started. By May at SAPPHIRE, we’ll have a phenomenal story to tell.