← Intersection'15 Conference Berlin, April 28-30, 2015

Moritz Gekeler

Conference Session

Mercedes AMG and SAP: An innovation journey

Thursday, April 30
14:00 – 14:45
Gallery

Moritz Gekeler
Design Strategist, SAP


More than an outcome, co-innovation is a journey. The case study shows how design can help companies create more meaningful software solutions that address real user needs. It focuses on the creative process of collaboration across organizational borders. What process did we follow? How did we involve other stakeholders into the project? What methods did we use?

SAP and Mercedes-AMG have started their innovation journey together and are still driving at full speed. Mercedes-AMG is the high performance division of Mercedes-Benz. Their vehicles and motors are known for their great quality, bold looks, and exclusivity. But high performance is not only a characteristic of the vehicles and motors. It is also part of the corporate culture and a life principle for many employees. As part of its business strategy, AMG wants to increase its production drastically while keeping the excellent quality standards that have always characterized its products. This goal has triggered several changes inside the company, one of them being the introduction of a new organizational structure based on cross-functional collaboration. As a consequence, the information required to plan and coordinate the work during different stages of the manufacturing process has become fragmented, and the effort to store it or find it has turned into an overhead that no one has the time to afford.

This brought AMG to work together with the designers and developers at SAP in order to create a customized collaborative planning solution that would increase efficiency during the car production process and support the new organizational structure.

The process is highly collaborative and extremely human-centered and agile. In the case study we jointly want to talk about our learnings in such a complex set-up.