An Overview Page is a special type of SAP Fiori application that provides an entry-level view of all the key information for a line of business, such as sales or finance. The objective is to quickly provide the business user with the big picture relating to the performance of one line-of-business. There is enough information to get an overview of performance without drowning in details.
By comparison, the Fiori Launchpad home page of a business user contains a cross-departmental view made up of many tiles which present KPIs on the tile surface from multiple lines of business. This higher-level view would be regarded as the ‘bird’s eye view’ and is the first thing the business user sees when they log on to SAP S/4HANA. Think of the Overview Page as the next level of detail, which we could call the 'street view'.
From each Overview Page there is an option to drill down for a deeper investigation, and even the possibility to take action on any individual issue found. This is how Overview Pages support the insight to action approach of SAP S/4HANA embedded analytics.
SAP provide many ready-made Overview Pages to support most lines of business. Customers can also develop Overview Pages to suite their own requirements.
The basic layout of an Overview Page is consistent and always includes a filter toolbar at the top of the page and multiple cards in the body of the page.
Cards
An Overview Page presents the KPIs that relate to a line of business using cards. On each card a KPI is presented using either charts or lists.
An Overview Page provides many cards and each business user decides which cards are of interest. They can hide the cards they don't need and adjust the position of the ones they do need. Administrators can decide if some cards are mandatory and cannot be hidden.
Launch the video below to learn how to select cards in Overview Pages:
Filter Toolbar
A filter toolbar is provided to enable the business user to apply filters. The filters affect all cards on the Overview Page simultaneously.
You can save multiple filter selections so that you can quickly recall them. Each Overview Page provides many filters. A business user can customize the filter toolbar so that it displays only the filters they are interested in. They can set a filter value and then hide the filter selector if they don't plan to change it.
Launch the video below to learn how to apply filters to Overview Pages:
Drilling Down
To drill down to the detail from a card, you can either choose to click the card header - in which case the drill-down is less granular - or you can click on a detail within the card, such as a single bar in a bar chart, to focus on a particular value, such as a month or a country.
You can also navigate to any related analytical or transactional app directly from the cards. For example, from a card that presents a summary of late deliveries, you could jump into an individual sales order to check, and even change the delivery document. Each Overview Page provides a standard set of jump targets, but more can be added by the developers.
Launch the video below to learn how to drill-down in an Overview Page:
Overview Pages are not created by business users. Overview Pages are created by developers who use expert tools to generate the underlying data connections, design the cards and the filter toolbar.
However, as you have seen, an Overview Page is configurable by the business user. They can choose which cards they want to display, how they want them to appear and apply preset filters to give the Overview Page a specific business context.