SAP SE brings design thinking to hybrid work with MS Teams and Mural
SAP SE is a German multinational software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg. As one of the world’s leading producers of business management software, SAP develops solutions that facilitate effective data processing and information flow across organizations. Operating in 130 countries with 105,000 employees worldwide, SAP relies on innovative, flexible, and inclusive tools and processes that foster collaboration and design thinking.
Even before the pandemic, SAP's global workforce meant distributed teams needed to collaborate effectively and lead customer engagements across regions. At the Walldorf location, that meant meeting rooms with whiteboards were always fully booked.
“
In Walldorf, we have a strong collaboration culture which meant our meeting rooms were always fully booked, so we needed a better and more hybrid approach to meetings.
”
Designing human-centered approaches to problem-solving: Mural in Teams enhances collaboration
To address the shift towards hybrid work that the pandemic accelerated, SAP needed a solution capable of providing employees with tools that support and drive engagement during meetings and workshops. The solution also needed to accommodate and integrate within SAP’s human-centered approach to creative problem-solving so that team members could empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test solutions to complex problems.
Mural for Microsoft Teams allows team members to work together, and plan in real time, regardless of location. Real-time collaboration and problem-solving is a key benefit of using Mural for Microsoft Teams in a global market, making it easy for remote teams to stay on the same page and make decisions quickly. "Having the Mural integration within Teams has made working more streamlined for this simple reason: all my tools are in one place. As a product owner, I drive retrospective meetings and use Teams to collaborate in Mural on calls,” says a product owner at SAP.
A concert of creativity, Mural integrated seamlessly into SAP’s workflow and collaborative work culture. “With Mural in Teams, a facilitator can prepare a mural while keeping it hidden from participants until they’re ready to make it visible. The voting feature gathers quick and easy input from all participants,” exclaims Dana B. Not only did Mural drive SAP’s engagement, but it also helped SAP lighten its environmental footprint. Thanks to the significantly reduced travel needs in a hybrid work environment, the company’s use of Mural and Microsoft Teams contributed to SAP lowering its carbon emission by 1.9 million kg less.
“
Having the Mural integration within Teams has made working more streamlined for this simple reason: all my tools are in one place. As a product owner, I drive retrospective meetings and use Teams to collaborate in Mural on calls.
”
Mural in Teams: The where and how of hybrid work
As part of SAP’s increasingly hybrid work culture, the company began using Mural in 2017, starting with a small pilot on the UX design team. From there, its popularity grew organically across the company expanding to over 30,000 licenses. With the option to use Mural in Teams, SAP was able to solve two problems simultaneously: where to work and how to work. “The Mural integration with Microsoft Teams was a welcomed approach to structured collaboration for everyone involved. It made it easy to have interactive collaboration in remote sessions” says Leitz.
As a digital whiteboard platform, Mural provides corporations and teams with the tools for virtual collaboration. With the integration of Mural into SAP’s workflow, teams can get together and co-create murals during brainstorming sessions. For presentations and workshops, facilitators can create a mural for shared experiences with their participants. Individual participants can interact with each other through ready to use templates, “sticky notes,” and structured activities.
“
With Mural in Teams, you can add murals to Teams channels, chats, and video or audio meetings for more connected teamwork and to make it easy to find all your murals together with other information used in the project. You can also easily share murals with team members for smoother collaboration.
”
Mural in Teams benefits people and the environment
Since SAP’s implementation of Mural into the company’s workflow, the benefits have written themselves on the walls:
- Improved overall efficiency by 10 percent
- Reduced project rework with more asynchronous work which will provide more than $1.4 million in value to SAP
- Improved design-efficiency by 9.6 percent
Mural in Teams allows participants to record, save, and share meetings and any murals created. SAP facilitators no longer spend unnecessary time consolidating important notes. As Mural continues to grow in popularity, SAP began what Leitz calls a “Mural Champions Network” specific to the company to help address the gap in the proficiency levels between users. The Champions Network brings together Mural experts in the company to exchange and learn from one another's’ experiences.
Importantly, the Mural app for Teams passes all the security checks in place at SAP. Because it is embedded within Teams, there is no lag between tasks and there are no clunky third-party permissions from sharing external links within a Teams meeting.
“
The final activation of the Mural app in Teams was a matter of simply enabling it in the backend without any additional configuration.
”
Editor's note: This case study was originally published by Microsoft on March 31, 2023, and was republished with permission.
