DemoJam Experience in Product Innovation Summit

DemoJam Experience in Product Innovation Summit: This project was a co-innovation project that SAP achieved in collaboration with customers (in our case, Asian Paints) in Demo Jam for  Product innovation Summit (PIS 2014). I would like to share my experience and the project in four phases…  ????

Lets Get started ????

Before we read about my experience, lets have a quick glance on the screenshots of the project.

Sites mapped on the map.

Figure 1: site mapped on the map

Enabling the business card for each customers on there sites.

Figure 2: Business card.

List of sites for ease of search.

Figure: 3 List of sites
Firstly the Team: Our team comprised of 2 colleagues from SAP (front end development) and 2 from Asian Paints (oData backend data enablement from CRM). We had a task in hand to solve the problem faced by Asian Paints Sales officers to track and maintain the potential customers/sites they had to deal with.

Secondly, The Project: The project as the name (Site Mapping) suggests was intended to map the sites (locations) of the partners/customers on the map, that will ease the problems of a sales officer. The sites should show the business card on it, that tells you the abstract details of the site (like potential, status, customer type, etc.) . It could make calls or send emails just on the click of the link. The project also should plan the day of a sales officer by enabling him to choose the sites he would like to travel on a given day, and get an optimized route considering the traffic conditions. Is it not fabulous? Of-course it is !!! ????

Third, Our approach: It was exciting time as we got an opportunity to solve a customer problem and present it as a demo jam entry. Our focus was to build a simple solution and easy to use software.
– We explored SAP’s own VBI (visual business intelligence) an open-source map application. This uses MapQuest as data provider and openstreet maps as app provider. It was challenging as VBI was just in its initial stages of development.
–  VBI gave us a platform to use maps and pin-point the locations.

– Then started creating the business cards that could be overlaid on the pins/flags on the map.

– The back-end oData based on a user details came from AsianPaints using CRM backend.

– Then, came the most challenging part were we wanted to add good-to-use features to win this demo jam. We decided to explore and use the routing on map to enable users to select the locations and provide the routing (both optimized and non-optimized). VBI did not have an inbuilt capability to add locations and find the path (since it was immature and was under development).
– We used open source providers to get optimized points and formed paths, then used VBI to render the path on map as poly-lines.

( Our demo performance on Demo Jam Day )

Figure: 4 Live demo ( 6 minutes)

Finally, The winning moment! ????

In the finals, we gave a good demo and towards the last few seconds to go we fired the list of advantages/merits of using the project as below:

1. Open-Source project (low TCO)
2. Mobile first approach of building the UI (UI5)
3. Region wise data mapping (CRM backend)
4. Ability to provide routing
5. Map sites that is under construction ( Google does not give this feature ???? )

We were thrilled when we heard our name as Runners-up for the Demo-Jam Event…

Winning moment captured:

Figure 5: Winning moment.
If You want to know more about the project or how it was implemented, please contact me (Jerin Scariah Abraham – I069216).