Branding Space(s)
SAP Experience Centers across the world have similar needs and offerings, but keeping the information up to date and on-brand costs a lot of resources. Can we still define elements, which allow us to quickly transform any space into an SAP Experience Center with ease? Can we even use these elements to create temporary centers at events or expos?
As a former civil engineer with a strong passion for architecture, designing physical spaces and interiors are some of my favorite projects. In close collaboration with SAP’s global facility and brand teams, as well as interior-, event-, and design agencies, I helped to develop an award-winning furniture system and design language to create SAP Experience Centers as franchises.
Moreover, I designed, built and programmed global templates that can be customized by each of our 20 focus and over 100 customer facing locations. This helps to maintain a consistent look and feel while minimizing customization efforts.
Content Booth System
Until recently, our over 100 SAP locations managed visits on a local level. Many of them set up executive briefing areas with locally sourced demos and showcases to educate and inspire, and eventually increase sales. It became soon difficult for our 400,000 global customers to understand the difference between the “Custom Experience Center” in Copenhagen or our “Leonardo Center” in Paris and follow a consistent story.
Together with our partner agency Zeichen & Wunder, my colleagues and I developed a furniture system that creates a unique “SAP Experience Center Look” with ease. The standardized modules can be quickly modified for different showcases and customers. By using magnets instead of screws and ceiling rails instead of cables, we minimize the effort and keep a clean look. This was recognized with the prestigious iF Design Award in 2021.
600 Pages of Knowledge
My colleagues and I researched and consolidated the experiences of building, transforming, and maintaining SAP Experience Centers in guidebooks along newly defined quality pillars: Facility & IT, Content, People & Processes, Services, and Transformation.
I oversaw the process, provided design guidance and templates, and focused on the Facility and IT Guide. On over 100 pages, I detailed out user flows, space layouts, furniture, and technology recommendations, and created checklists to help avoid the most common mistakes, such as ill-placed power outlets, noisy machines near board rooms, or insufficient cooling after adding massive screens to former meeting rooms.
During this process, I closely collaborated with the global facility and IT teams, as well as our brand teams and partner agency Zeichen und Wunder, to create a consistent, harmonious, and scalable blueprint for setting up new and transforming existing customer-facing spaces into SAP Experience Centers.
Internal and External Websites
A major milestone on the harmonization journey was my creation of internal and external websites that serve as central hubs for the global center family and all our clients. After developing a design together with brand and IT teams, I onboarded our 20 focus locations. Our internal SharePoint sites provide tools & templates, guidelines, and contacts for more than 100 customer-facing locations. They help to streamline transformations and operations. By now, it has become one of the largest knowledge collections within SAP.
Welcome Screens
I designed and programmed the front-end to SAP’s global welcome screen system, which automatically pulls the agenda of the day from our central visit management system and greets the visitors with industry-specific welcome messages. This automation freed the work of dozens of receptionists and student workers around the world, who would otherwise update the screens manually every morning. The challenge was to program it to work flawlessly on all screens and aspect ratios, which include large-scale matrix displays and narrow LED banners.
Event Booths
At trade shows and events, we need lightweight, cost- and space-efficient elements, that transport the feeling of visiting an SAP Experience Center without hindering the visitor flow across the booth area. I developed a concept that exemplifies our three distinct areas “Meet”, “Inspire”, and “Engage” with context-specific furniture and elements that can be found in the real centers. A central tower serves as storage for staff items and AV equipment, as well as a beacon to attract visitors.
“Dear Thomas, thank you so much for your help in designing this year’s pop-up Experience Center Booth at FKOM Barcelona. Even though you were very busy with other tasks & responsibilities you kept your promise to help! The booth looked amazing and worked exactly as we had hoped for: many attendees were attracted by the design of the booth, so we were able to conduct a large number of meaningful conversations! Again, thank you for the great collaboration, I look forward to working with you in the future!”
Visitor Guides
Our visitor guides contain standard information to provide guests the best possible end-to-end experience. Together with an external agency and our brand teams, I developed a consistent design language for our print format, that can be easily reconfigured and combined for personal invites. The guides contain information about the SAP location, as well as the city it is based in, so that external guests can enjoy the stay.
Moreover, I harmonized and digitized floorplans and maps that can be reused in other documents and websites. For that, I reached legal agreements with mapping providers, created a simplified map style, a tool to easily find centers, PowerPoint templates to add relevant street names and create floorplans, as well as a series of tutorial videos and guides.
History Wall
I designed the SAP History Wall, which is a wallpaper with major tech, global, and SAP events from 1972 (the founding year of SAP) until the present. The first, 17m long wall was set up in a narrow hallway in the Copenhagen office. From there it spread to our centers in South Africa, France, Germany, and Brazil - with local adoptions. Besides global events like the launch of the first space shuttle (which had less than 1MB of memory), local trivia such as Denmark’s world cup win in 1992 create entertaining icebreakers for visitor groups.
Besides the printed wall, I developed prototypes for motion-activated soundscapes (e.g. playing the typical sound of a floppy drive when a visitor stands in front of the exhibit), an augmented-reality app to play videos and display further information on selected content, as well as interactive projections and animated overlays to spice up the experience.
Center Designs
As Creative Lead for the global SAP Experience Center Strategy, I have supported numerous locations around the world in transforming their meeting areas into official SAP Experience Centers. I closely work with local interior design agencies and facility management, to find branded solutions that fit into the existing floor plans and resource constraints. For that, I provide feedback, create designs and 3D renderings to individual rooms, walls, or entire centers.
