Basis Tech – “The SAP One”

SAP is a complex thing. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a technology platform which solves huge logistical challenges – such as how to get all the parts needed to build a car to the factory, in the right quantities, at the right time. Or, how to manage the payroll demands for companies with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees.

This is the second animation we’d created for Basis, and for this one we decided to go full 3D, to enable us to create a more fully-realised environment where we could have concrete things like factories and car assembly lines, alongside abstract ones to represent data flows and upgrades.

The storyboard went through a few iterations before we landed on the idea of a central hub radiating five spokes, each of which would have “landing pad” stages representing the lifecycles of SAP software development: Dev, Test, Pre-Prod and Production. The Basis solution sits in the hub at the centre, pushing updates out to each staging post in turn, until they reach the outer Production pad.

Above: some fake user interface (FUI) tests, animated in After Effects