SAP - Innovation Center Potsdam
Being part of the Real Estate Team, I worked at several products, which support real estate managers at their daily tasks, by providing them the right data in real time.
The Location Management Tool enables companies to understand one of the largest and mostly undermanaged items on their balance sheet and gather more precise information instantly. SAP real estate solutions enables corporate real estate managers to control locations and contracts effortlessly and execute planning and forecasting.
UX Design / Research / Evaluation
Dr. Raja Gumienny - Design Lead
Colin Wernicke - User Interface Design
Corporate Real Estate is usually made of many buildings in a global portfolio. It makes up the second biggest cost for most companies. A real estate manager supervises several locations or whole sites of a company. Better decision-making needs to be based on comparable metrics.
In the beginning of our work, the managers had to demand the reports about certain KPIs from their submanagers, which takes weeks or even months. The challenge was to come up with a solution, that provides the right information to the right level of managers in time, so the different user roles can access the informations for the buildings they are responsible for. No matter if it´s one building or the overview of all facilities world wide.
Starting with interviews with real estate and facility managers we gained important insights about our user group. The vision was to create a „Facebook for buildings“, that allows buildings or Locations to provide it´s relevant data automatically, like an update post on facebook. The ideation phase was feature oriented and design thinking workshops led us to the conclusion, to base the main UI on a map, as the heart of the tool.
Soon sketches were followed by wireframes of the tool, containing the most important features. Retrospectively the product management led us too fast to a screen design phase, without letting the design team evaluating the steps in between with real users.
We got the feedback from business experts who were the SAP sales people, that were in touch with our customers. That indirect contact to the users could have been improved, to reach for a better information flow of what the users really want. Aiming for a broad user group, from local facility managers to international real estate managers, the product had to solve many different needs.
Working with a MVP approach we designed and developed a solution, that first was shipped to SAP´s real estate managers, in order to get first real insights. Continuous calls with our real estate people provided us feedback from real users. Even though they were impressed by the speed the data was provided and the features they had, they got confused by the amount of different features and KPIs that were offered.
Customization was key in this situation, so we came up with a concept of different roles, to see different features and KPIs, so each user is not overwhelmed by too much functionality he doesn’t need or data he’s not responsible for.
UI Design - Sketch
Funktional Prototypes - Axure
On global level, the global facility management has the possibility to navigate through the map or the sidebar, to drill down to the level of interest. On the right side, the user sees notifications on urgent topics. Benchmarks, costs and other KPIs the user needs can be additionally added to the tiles for customization.
On site level, the user sees the area of his buildings and all data adjusted to the level.
On building level the user sees the areas of the building sorted by size in a treemap. Besides the areas, he also has an overview about capacity, costs or related contracts of each building.
The facility manager can easily maintain the data of the buildings he is responsible for, by accessing the edit mode.
SAP Cloud for Real Estate gives corporate real estate managers and CFOs the insights they need to expertly manage their specific operations, utilizing the latest visualization technology to create a digital representation of a building. Smart buildings will provide real-time data. The product is highly flexible and expandable for integration of IoT scenarios and innovative partner solutions.
Our tool C4RE lets the user easily access the location data word wide, depending on his role. A sidebar on the allows him to filter for a country, a city or even drill down to a single location or building until its floor levels, to see eg. the capacity and occupation, the costs or even the related contracts.
For this project, the whole team was honored with a red dot design award.
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