Introducing SAP Fiori

When a user initially logs on to SAP S/4HANA using the SAP Fiori launchpad, they are directed to the SAP Fiori launchpad home page. Good home page design is essential to set first impressions and expectations for business users. The home page should be clean, simple and well ordered.

When working with SAP Fiori as the user interface, users in SAP S/4HANA Sales (including its billing functionality) have a number of tiles available to them in their SAP Fiori launchpad. The tiles available depend on the business roles assigned to these users. The available SAP Fiori apps (tiles) can be grouped into tile groups for display in the SAP Fiori launchpad. You can see this on the left side in the figure above.

Another way (and actually the way recommended by SAP!) to structure your SAP Fiori launchpad home page, is by using spaces and pages. A space contains one or more pages. A page contains one or more sections. A section contains one or more SAP Fiori apps or tiles. You can see this on the right side in the figure above.

The apps or tiles themselves belong to one or more catalogs of tiles, also referred to as business catalogs. These catalogs are assigned to a business roles. When setting up the SAP S/4HANA system, catalogs and roles, as well as the tile groups, spaces, pages and sections. all visible to an SAP Fiori launchpad user, can be adapted to suit individual customer requirements. Completely new catalogs, tile groups, roles, spaces, pages, sections, and so on, can also be created if required.

SAP Fiori is SAP’s user experience (UX) design for all SAP products to fully support the Intelligent Enterprise, running on any device. SAP Fiori has been defined jointly with all the various SAP product units. SAP Fiori has a modern look and feel. Natural language interaction and machine intelligence are a key part of the experience, and are integrated into the foundation of the design. SAPUI5 is the technology of choice for these apps. SAPUI5 delivers the SAP Fiori design through the following assets (available as of UI5 1.65) : Theming, Cards & Layouting, and Shell Bar.

A theme called the Horizon theme is also available for various SAP applications. The Horizon theme family comprises a light (Morning Horizon) and a dark version (Evening Horizon) as well as a light and a dark high-contrast theme for supporting visually impaired users.

As stated, SAP recommends that for the SAP Fiori launchpad, you use the concept of spaces, pages and sections. Spaces enable the layout of pages to be defined for entire groups of users, thereby enabling them to consume the content of the launchpad in an easier and more structured way, then when using tile groups.

The SAP Fiori launchpad is a user's single entry point to access all available apps. In the area of Sales, specific SAP Fiori overview apps provide users with a rapid overview of matters requiring their attention, using overview pages, list reports and various work lists. These overview apps often contain drill-down options to identify which activities need to be performed, and with what priority.

For intuitive navigation, users can make use of the enterprise search functionality. There are also various options available to personalize the Fiori launchpad.

'Classical' (i.e. traditional SAP GUI) transactions remain available (in parallel) alongside the SAP Fiori apps. They can also be provided to the user as tiles in the SAP Fiori launchpad (using SAP GUI for HTML). These classical transactions use the SAP Fiori theme for SAP GUI for HTML.

In the following demonstration you will first see the VA01 Create Sales Order transaction being executed using the SAP GUI as the user interface. And then after that, you will see the same transaction (with similar screens) being executed from within the SAP Fiori launchpad home page:

Reasons for still providing these classical transactions to the user in the SAP Fiori launchpad are:

• Use of SAP S/4HANA with the SAP Fiori-themed web-enabled classical transactions enables existing SAP users to rapidly become productive in their use of the system. Expert users waste no time in transitioning to SAP S/4HANA, since they can apply their existing skills and knowledge.
• Existing SAP customers experience a non-disruptive upgrade to SAP S/4HANA without having to change the way in which users perform their day-to-day business.
• The SAP Fiori theme for classical UIs also provides a solution to most of our customers’ custom screens (~60%).
• Customers can easily apply SAP Screen Personas, should they need further simplification on top of SAP Fiori-themed web-enabled classical UIs.

In terms of the SAP Fiori UI and how it is used in SAP S/4HANA Sales (including its billing functionality), the following principles apply:

• New functionality delivered in SAP S/4HANA Sales (including its billing functionality) uses SAP Fiori apps as the default user interface. These SAP Fiori apps are intended to provide intuitive, efficient access to the new functionality, thereby reducing complexity and increasing user productivity.
• SAP Fiori apps are also used to renew some of the classical transactions. Classical transactions are taken and decomposed into several smaller apps, connected by navigation paths. This decomposition offers a new way to consume data from the system and to interact with the system. A further aim of this renewal is to provide more flexibility in terms of the set-up of task-oriented business roles.
• The long-term goal of the SAP UX strategy is to offer SAP Fiori as the unified UI/UX for all business and analytical applications on SAP HANA. However, it will take time to realize this for the thousands of different transactions and applications provided by SAP. As stated above, SAP Fiori 3 has been defined jointly with all of the various SAP product units in order to deliver this single unified UI/UX.