Enterprise resource planning giant SAP is offering customers software tools that analyse product data and context to enable the rapid design of products and solutions, thereby significantly improving responsiveness and innovation.

The tools are based on the rapid prototyping and solution development concept of design thinking, which emphasises a structured, holistic and creative way of assessing problems to develop appropriate and efficient strategies.

Human minds do not always recognise context when focusing on detail, but broad analysis, which links diverse inputs and analyses of data to provide contextual patterns, can be included through design tools to help improve product design, says SAP Design Thinking global VP Meeta Patel.

“Design-thinking tools help us find the core problems and solve them by framing the problems in various ways to generate insights that could affect the underlying design or concept,” she notes.

Meeta adds that, although design thinking requires a systematic approach, it does not focus on standardised processes, but on growth, generating ideas and testing them, rapid iterative development cycles and experimentation to solve problems.

Productive work activities tend to be time-bound and procedural, which is important for efficiency. However, ensuring that designs take contextual and circumstantial information into account will help reduce product failure resulting from an oversight.

“Design thinking is meant to complement traditional business planning and product design by providing a formal space for emotional and subjective views of product design to be assessed. It aims to help solve problems not through long planning cycles, but through creative experimenting, rapid prototyping, trial, error and improvement.”

“Long research and development cycles tend to lead to incremental developments that can result in a good product becoming obsolete, owing to changes in the context in which it functions. However, design-thinking product improvement cycles will enable rapid innovation by ensuring that designs are continuously changed to suit the use case,” she explains.

Further, design-thinking processes and tools aim to enable designers to assess potential new functions that should be added to products and which were not suggested by users.

“Design thinking is based on empathy for the user, not just on user input, and this helps to stimulate creativity, as the design cycle not only assesses the product itself, but also its broader use context.”

Design-thinking tools and techniques enable the design of user experiences, rather than just product design, based on emergent trends and behaviour or disruptive technologies, and then doing rapid iterative production cycles to develop a robust and in-demand product quickly.

SAP has embraced design thinking since SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner read about design thinking in a book by design firm Ideo founder David Kelley in 2004. He then introduced design-thinking members onto many boards, spread the concept across the company’s structures and infused the many disciplines in the company with it, Patel says.