CLOUD MANAGEMENT & GOVERNANCE
PROJECT
CLOUD MIGRATION WORKFLOW
Enhancing SAP Deployments with AWS Launch Wizard: A User-Centric Approach to Cloud Complexity
SUMMARY
I designed a structured, intuitive workflow for users setting up SAP landscapes without needing extensive AWS knowledge.
IMPACT
Deployment Time Reduced
From months to only 2 hours, significantly speeding up the process.
High User Engagement
Over 80% of users saved deployment templates, indicating strong interest in re-use and efficiency.
Customer Growth
135 new user sign-ups within 3 months post-launch, with an additional 120 exploring the service.
Detailed case study
01
BACKGROUND
SAP CUSTOMERS and partners are always looking for an easy way to deploy enterprise applications and optimize costs. Instead of selecting and configuring separate infrastructure services, they are seeking to deploy a plug and play application. One that reduces the time you need to spend on investigating how to provision, cost and configure your application on a cloud platform.
GOAL
To create a ready-to-use experience that helps SAP customers and partners migrate their ERP applications to the cloud more quickly and operate them efficiently.
THE CHALLENGE
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Existing tools and programs were fragmented, lacked integration, and were not user-friendly.
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Customers frequently abandoned deployments due to insufficient documentation and guidance for infrastructure setup and sizing requirements.
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Novice users struggled to provision the correct environments.
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Deployments often took months or even years to complete, resulting in high costs.
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Repeated deployments were time-consuming and inefficient.
Timeline
4 months UX effort
launch
Stakeholders
DESIGN PROCESS
02
DISCOVER
1. User Interviews Goal: Understand the pain points, expectations, and workflows of SAP customers and partners when migrating ERP applications. Focus: Identify challenges in sizing, provisioning, and running service clusters, and gather insights on existing tools and processes. 2. Usability Testing Goal: Test existing tools or prototypes with real users to identify usability issues and inefficiencies. Focus: Assess ease of navigation, integration, and task completion related to sizing, provisioning, and operating service clusters. 3. Journey Mapping Goal: Visualize the end-to-end process of ERP migration, from planning to successful deployment, to pinpoint inefficiencies and friction points. Focus: Highlight key pain points like setup complexity, time delays, and the need for better documentation. 4. Persona Development Goal: Create detailed personas representing various user types (e.g., novice users, expert IT professionals) involved in the migration process. Focus: Understand differing needs, expertise levels, and behaviors to tailor the services to various customer types. 5. A/B Testing for Feature Adoption Goal: Test different designs or features to determine which approach best reduces time and effort in the sizing and provisioning process. Focus: Optimize for user efficiency, reducing the learning curve, and ensuring higher completion rates.
Research Takeaways
Customers are looking for a personalized SAP experience that seamlessly blends SAP with top-notch security and compliance practices. They want everything unified into one easy-to-navigate platform that even beginners can use without a hitch. By cutting down on manual tasks and maintenance, we can simplify processes and offer a one-stop solution for modernizing and efficiently managing SAP workloads.
DEFINE
Understanding the SAP Landscape
Grasping the complexities of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and its integration with business processes.
Understanding User Behavior
EXECUTE
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
I kicked off the creation of the first wireframes with a few design goals in mind. The main idea is to make setting up SAP landscapes a lot easier, so you don’t have be an AWS expert to get it done. I also want to give users the freedom to customize their setups while still sticking to AWS and SAP standards. Plus I’ll make sure follows AWS best practices keep things secure and smoothly.
Tested with select users, allowing the team to refine flow and clarify each deployment step. User feedback emphasized a desire for more configuration details and better cost visibility.
Hi-Fidelity Wireframes
SOME OF THE IMPLEMENTED DESIGNS
The visuals are animated, and user controls are disabled.
Information architecture testing
Ensured the structure of the platform allows users to move intuitively from one workload to another without confusion.
Design milestone reviews
Worked with key stakeholders at every stage of design development and produce designs for the milestone reviews.
Deep dive
Kick-off
To align resources and schedules between a product team and the UXDR team at the start of a new project.
Review product and design direction, key use cases, and target customers.
UX Sign-off
To ensure that the proposed design meets the high quality bar our customers expect.
Fit and Finish
To assess the implemented service console in its near-final form, for overall ‘pixel-perfect’ quality.
Launch
DESIGN MILESTONES
OUTCOME
03
Deployment Time Reduced
From months to only hours, significantly speeding up the process.
High User Engagement
Over 80% of users saved deployment templates, indicating strong interest in re-use and efficiency.
Customer Growth
135 new user sign-ups within 3 months post-launch, with an additional 120 exploring the service.
Customer testimonials
"Lemongrass is an AWS Premier partner specializing in SAP & Automation. From our experience, we understand that most SAP-Centric organizations invest significant time and money in repetitive deployments of core SAP installations. During our preview testing of Launch Wizard, Lemongrass was able to rapidly & consistently deploy multiple best practice production grade SAP HANA & NetWeaver installations though a simple, console enabled, guided process. Any organization considering SAP deployments in should absolutely ensure that Launch Wizard is on their roadmap."
- Ben Lingwood, CTO, Lemongrass Consulting
" Thanks to the AWS Launch Wizard we create workloads in an automated way, speeding up our delivery time by 75% when provisioning SAP environments. Therefore, we can focus on what really matters; The high availability and disaster recovery strategy of our SAP clients, more than just the provision of environments."
- Juan Vargas Sierra, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, 3hold
Reflection and Future Improvements
Ongoing user feedback suggests a demand for additional customization options and extended support for newer SAP modules. Future iterations may include more flexible configurations, deeper insights into performance metrics, and enhanced integration with other AWS management tools.