Last year’s acquisition of SAP business process technology provider, Sitrion, by enterprise social business specialist NewsGator, aimed to take employee and manager-based processes into a brand new social world.
In October last year, enterprise social business specialist NewsGator took a step towards the company’s strategic vision to ‘Make Work Better’, by acquiring Sitrion – in so doing, becoming the market leader in social business solutions for both the Microsft and SAP ecosystems.
Sitrion made its name as a technology provider to drive the adoption of SAP-based business processes. The company delivers an intuitive user experience with SAP-supported self-services for casual users in SharePoint, on any mobile device or cloud services, and had built a portfolio of more than 100 enterprise customers.
Newsgator had been working in the social space since 2004, primarily with the Microsoft user base on SharePoint, since 2004, counting amongst its local customers Coca Cola, NIB Holdings, NPS, Stockland, Westfield, AMP and BNZ.
On the acquisition, NewsGator CEO Daniel Kraft said, “We are taking the idea of the social workplace to a whole new level by combining the power of social directly with the process backbone of an organisation. Now social collaboration and process execution can happen fully integrated, laying the foundation for improved human productivity in a user experience employees intuitively ‘get’ and love to work in.”
Cuneyt Uysal, vice president of sales and operations – Asia Pacific at Sitrion, says the new age of productivity is moving away from email and traditional collaboration methods, towards social tools often on a mobile device or tablet.
“With the opportunity that we saw moving beyond just collaboration, we found that certain ecosystems were lacking in this improved user experience. SAP was one of those ecosystems we looked at where we could actually extend the success we had in social collaboration into talent management, onboarding employee self-service, and other areas in the human resources portal inside SAP,” Uysal says.
Prior to the acquisition, Newsgator had partnered with Sitrion for the last three years, and worked together on joint customer projects to use Newsgator’s social mechanisms to speed up processes in SAP.
In January, the united company adopted the Sitrion name, and as a Certified SAP and SuccessFactors Partner and Microsoft Gold Partner, is taking its integrated offering to the world.
While collaboration is certainly an enterprise buzzword, many organisations are still resistant to the idea of incorporating social tools into their corporate environments, as they don’t see the business value.
But Uysal says social tools can help to make processes such as leave requests or purchase order approval exceptions more effective.
“Having a process-centric view on how to apply collaboration tools to beef up business outcomes is really the Holy Grail of any productivity solution,” Uysal says, adding that the SAP space offers clear success metrics and a solid return on investment.
“For example, we can speed up your processes in SAP by 20 per cent using our social tools and reduce the error rate of people submitting information back into SAP. Those are all tangible benefits.”
Sitrion 1 is the company’s mobility development platform, which enables any type of SAP process to be accessed on a mobile device, delivered via Sitrion’s cloud platform so no extra infrastructure is required.
One of Sitrion’s recently signed mobile app users is Hershey’s Chocolate.
“From Sitrion 1, they can submit their leave requests and people with certain rights can submit purchase orders by taking a photo of a signed contract. They can also access SharePoint documents all in one app,” Uysal says. “That’s a pretty big game-changer for folks who perhaps don’t find the SAP mobility solutions adequate, or they find the cost of upgrading or adding SAP runtime infrastructure to be a barrier.”
Uysal says another advantage of the Sitrion solution is that it overcomes some of the problems that have bedevilled Duet Enterprise, in seamlessly integrating SAP HR processes to SharePoint – especially as user expectations within the enterprise rise.
“We have clients who say they don’t log into SAP HR enough, because they feel some friction in terms of the user experience. For an IT team which is actually supporting SAP, they not only want to be able to upgrade it fast, they would like to add more,” he says.
“I think that’s one of the big challenges that Sitrion helps address. By being able to leverage best-of-breed interfaces that are quickly updated, and with Microsoft product, we can expose everything in SAP, but you can now do it quite flexibly and get regular updates that don’t depend on two- or three-year SAP projects.”
This article was first published in Inside SAP Autumn 2014.
