Workplace Digital Transformation with SAP & Wechat

While it is still the world manufacturing powerhouse, China, for quite some time, has been leading the digital transformation, mobile payment, e-commerce, social media... you name it.

With BYOD as a standard for most of companies in China, the employees have taken their own mobile phones, with their own favourite applications to the workplace and transform it for ever.

Companies must adapt and transform to become digitally attractive, i.e. attract, develop and retain the best talents, same for customers or even suppliers. They must propose new (digital) services coupled with a great user experience, which includes not only UX but also availability over the internet (as opposed to internal network), no downtime and on any device (not only the company's own/approved devices). In addition to that, with the dozens of apps already on their devices, users are not so enthusiastic about having other corporate applications to add to the long list.

WeChat has taken a predominant place (together with Alipay) in the social and monetised digital life of people in China and has created an digital ecosystem which is pretty unique: need to hail a taxi use WeChat, pay the utilities use WeChat, get movie tickets use WeChat, transfer money to a friend use WeChat, just to name a few. An additional functionality offered is for companies to create official accounts, to either communicate to its customers, or employees. But more importantly, it includes an HTML5 JS API (WhatsApp does not) which opens the way for all sorts of micro-services based integration with the SAP Digital Core. Note that WeChat is a starting point any social media with an open API could do, SAP Jam or MS Yammer or Telegram to name a few.

In other words, extending the SAP Digital Core and not through mobile or web app, but by using social media apps as a container, similar to what google does with the "instant app" in the Playstore but for Corporate users. Moving from work-life balance to work-life low-touch integration.

For the users no need to download/install/update the app, seamless user experience on Fiori UI, they access their app, perform the selected tasks, like approve a PO or check if in Item has been delivered on time, from anywhere and on any device. In short it brings the SAP Digital Core closer to the users. It opens also ways for more seamless collaboration between co-workers, suppliers, customers, partners....

For the IT Organization it simplifies everything, only 1 version of the truth, no device management, no version, the good old rule of 1. The micro-service architecture, gives an optimal user experience, limit the risk of broad outages and reduce to mean time to recover. Authorization/Security is also simplified and managed at the micro-service level to give selective access to users, guaranteed with Auth0 2.0.

Finally, for the companies, the workplace digital transformation, will bring the employees and the stakeholders engagement to the next level by connecting the dots of the never-ending dilemma of balancing work and life, professional and social, offline and online, openness and security, these concepts are becoming outdated and the digitalization of the workplace may end these for good by intelligently connecting people, things and businesses (not only in China, ;-)...