Starting with SAP HCP Gamification Service

Jeroen Rikhof, 13 May 2015

SAP has announced the SAP HCP Gamification Service and it is publicly available from may 2015 in beta. In this blog I will have a sneak preview at this new service. My interest was caught because last year at our own Acorel Innojam we developed an extension for SAP Cloud 4 Customer with an external gamification platform. With the new SAP Gamification platform we can do the same thing powered by SAP!

So what is that thing called gamification?

“Gamification is used to improve user engagement and it attempts to encourage and harness the natural desire people have to compete, achieve, and win, through providing them structured rewards that are both tangible and status-based in nature in return for participating in the system.” source: Forbes

SAP is using gamification in their community to collect points and badges for helping other community members. By rewarding users the user will be encouraged to help more people solving problems to collect even more points and get the next achievement. Also a leaderboard will encourage people to collect more points then their competitors.

What is SAP HCP Gamification Service?

SAP describes it as follow:

“The HCP gamification service allows to rapidly introduce gamification concepts into applications. The service includes an online development and administration environment for easy implementation and analytics of gamification concepts. The underlying gamification rule management provides support for sophisticated gamification concepts, covering time constraints, complex nested missions and collaborative games. The built-in analytics module allows to perform advanced analytics on the player behavior to enable a continuous improvement of game concepts.”

Key Product Features

Web-based IDE (gamification workbench) for modelling game mechanics and rules
Gamification engine for real-time processing of sophisticated gamification concepts involving time constraints and cooperation
Built-in runtime game analytics for continuous improvement of game designs
Web API for easy integration
Simple SAP UI5 integration based on widgets
Single-Sign-On (SSO) support based on SAP Cloud Identity Service
Enterprise-level performance and scalability

Where to start with SAP HCP Gamification?

SAP has made it easy to start with the gamification platform. You can create a demo application which will create all the points/levels/badges/missions and rules for you. With this demo you will have a good overview what you can do with this platform.

To start with the gamification service follow these steps (assuming you have a hana trial account):

1. Go to SAP HANA cockpit and enable the Gamification service:

2. Go to the Gamification help and follow these steps:

Enable Gamification Service
Enable Gamification Service (Automated)
Configure Destinations (Automated, password must be set manually)
Here you can use the following urls:
https://gamification-<YOUR_SAP_P_NUMBER>trial.hanatrial.ondemand.com/gamification/api/tech/JsonRPC
https://gamification-<YOUR_SAP_P_NUMBER>trial.hanatrial.ondemand.com/gamification/api/user/JsonRPC
Enable Principal Propagation (Automated)
Generate Demo Content for HelpDesk
Use the Gamified HelpDesk Application

If all steps where succesfull you can open the HelpDesk application and starting finishing tickets. When you send a response on a tickets you will receive points:

And watch your progress in the dashboard

Gamification and CRM

Sales people are highly motivated by competition. This will make CRM a good application to implement gamification aspects. When we have a look at the possibilities for gamification on CRM we could earn points for the following

Earn points for creating prospects
Earn points for creating a opportunity
Earn points for logging activities
Earn points for meeting face-to-face
Earn points for completing opportunity information
Earn points for a successful sale!
Etc…

Conclusion

With the new SAP HCP Gamification service SAP provides us a tool to create gamification concepts. The tooling is easy to use and you will see progress immediately. I think gamification can improve user adoption, show an increase in the use of your application and will make working with it more fun!