Deloitte launches SAP AppHause innovation centre in Sydney

Global enterprise resource planning giant SAP has expanded its network of AppHaus innovation centres to Sydney, with professional services firm Deloitte selected as its local launch partner.

Deloitte has officially launched a SAP AppHaus innovation space in its Sydney office, the 21st location in the ERP giant’s global network of customer-facing co-creation hubs rolled out since 2016.

According to SAP, the AppHaus centres have received some 80,000 visitors and conducted over 3,000 workshops to date, with their multi-disciplinary and human-centred approach to digital and tech innovation the key selling point.

“We are thrilled to be joining the SAP AppHaus Network, and excited about the opportunity to bring the business innovation and creativity of Deloitte together with the power of the SAP ecosystem to solve our clients’ most complex problems,” said Steve Hallam, who took over as Deloitte Consulting’s Enterprise Technology & Performance lead partner last year after leading Deloitte Digital’s global strategy agenda.

In addition to a customer-focused and multi-disciplinary approach – bringing together client and industry expertise with business strategists, UX researchers, designers, engineers, and enterprise architects etc. to tackle new and complex problems – SAP stresses that another factor in successful innovation is in providing a creative space, one which be it physical or remote, “promotes exchange and offers security to open up or even be able to fail.”

“We have long seen the benefits of putting people at the heart of innovation and creativity and the extraordinary outcomes that can be achieved when tackling these ideas collaboratively with partners and customers,” commented SAP’s ANZ managing director Damien Bueno. “By working together, we will be able to help more Australian organisations innovate and grow in a way that really makes sense to their people and customers.”

Beuno also stated that Deloitte’s global industry expertise, customer focus, and SAP knowledge made it an ideal new addition to the SAP AppHaus network, with the professional services firm becoming just the third partner-operator in the Asia Pacific region – alongside the Datacom-hosted AppHaus launched in Auckland last year, and the Melbourne-based centre launched in partnership with local design consultancy Bourne Digital in 2019.

Deloitte Consulting partner Nicola Dorling said that the firm’s new AppHaus has been designed to ensure its clients can develop the right business solutions before building them through a discovery lab-based experience. “The wide-ranging client experience will range from ideation, useability co-design and technical solution workshops, to stakeholder validation sessions, current state architecture, usability observations, and tree jack testing.”

Last year’s AppHaus awards give an insight into the benefits of such an approach. In the best scaling category, Canadian electrical utility FortisAlberta wanted to address its pick-list processes for issuing goods to maintenance field-teams, and so enlisted AppHaus partner ConvergentIS. Together they developed a solution which replaced paper pick-lists with a mobile app on handheld devices, reducing daily administration by 75 percent and picking errors by a third.

Dorling continued; “In such a disrupted and fast-moving world, our clients require us to work collaboratively with them to develop new products and services to uplift experiences. Certainly, the ability to attract and retain customers is more important than ever in this Industry 4.0 environment. Our ability to offer and deliver SAP-driven services via AppHaus will see us help our clients explore innovation opportunities and create lasting business value.”