Navigating the SAP Fiori Launchpad

SAP Fiori is a design language; when you navigate between applications within SAP S/4HANA Cloud, then move to SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Central Business Configuration, and other systems, we want you to have a consistent user experience and see a common look & feel. The five core principles of the SAP Fiori design concept are to provide a role-based, adaptive, simple, coherent, and delightful user experience. Through SAP Fiori, we provide role-based business processes and task-focused apps that enable users to have the best possible experience across their software solutions at work.

To provide more context, think of how in the past, it was common for an employee to stay at one company for their entire career. This means you would learn the tools to complete your job tasks initially, and continue using most of those same tools for 20-30 years. Today, it's much more common for an employee to switch companies and even job roles within a company several times over the course of their careers. This means the software tools at an organization need to be intuitive and easy to learn so employees can ramp-up quickly on their new job tasks.

A good example of this is an app called Goods Movement (transaction code: MIGO). In this one app, you can make many different types of goods movements to move physical products and raw materials between plants or warehouses within an organization, or to and from third party suppliers or customers. This app is challenging because of just how many different things you can do within it. While this app still exists in all deployments of SAP S/4HANA, we've taken all those individual functions you could do within the original app and separated them into several task-focused apps that follow the Fiori design guidelines. We want to make sure our established experts who've learned to use the original app in previous versions of our enterprise software (SAP R/3, SAP ECC), can continue using the app they're comfortable with in an updated web-based version of the user interface, but we also want to change the experience for future users. For example, employees changing roles within an organization or new hires would not use the Goods Movement app - they would use one of the individual Fiori apps depending on the specific task they need to accomplish. If I need to post a receipt for a delivery of materials we just received from a supplier, I would use the Post Goods Receipt for Inbound Delivery app. If I need to return a delivery to a supplier because the order was incorrect, I would use the Return Delivery app. These individual apps are significantly easier to learn how to use because they only have one primary function. You shouldn't have to learn how to use a complicated app - if it's designed well, the app should teach you how to use it.

The SAP Fiori Launchpad is the single entry point to all apps permissioned to a user on any device. End users will see what has been permissioned for them to access, in the layout structured by the space(s) and page(s) assigned to the business role. The landing page first shows My Home, with an employee's job-specific apps grouped within spaces that display to the right of the My Home title. The majority of apps are supported in both desktop and mobile formats, but the SAP Mobile Start app does need to be set up and configured via SAP Build Work Zone for end users to view and use the relevant apps for their business role.

Since SAP Mobile Start is the mobile companion to the desktop Fiori launchpad, someone from the partner project team needs to work with someone from the customer project team to set up app. We recommend a partner working with a customer project team member to set up the app together, because the customers need to know where to go to maintain the settings for the app in the future and how to access it. The customer IT Contact will need to provide permission for the users to access SAP Build Work Zone, which runs in the SAP Business Technology Platform.

My Home is designed to work across all devices, and enables end users to personalize which sections display, and the information in each section. The sections are:

• To-Dos aggregates tasks (from the My Inbox app) and situations (from the situation handling framework) that require an employee's attention, in one place.
• Pages include two parts: a News tile and Pages.
  • News: The news tile can be configured by an administrator and is turned off by default. It displays information relevant to the user based on their chosen line of business. We recommend enabling the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool-based custom news feed, which then populates release information relevant to the end user to help keep them up-to-date after a release occurs. Learn how to do this in the SAP Help Portal.
  • Pages: The first eight pages display by default and are selected based on the business role(s) assigned to the business user and the spaces/pages assigned to the business role(s). The idea is to make it easier to jump into a page with apps an employee frequently uses, but they can also access these from the space titles displayed toward the top of the screen.
• Apps and Activities aggregate manually-selected "favorite" apps and system-generated recent activities and frequently-used apps based on past history.
• Insights include two parts: Tiles and Cards.
  • Tiles: The tiles subsection is automatically populated based on the monitoring apps a user has access to which is based on their business role. End users can add/remove tiles and change the visual display of the tiles.
  • Cards: End users can manually add analytical cards, list cards, and table cards they have access to through their business role(s) to this subsection.

Spaces and Pages is the default layout for how apps display on the SAP Fiori Launchpad. A business role contains the business catalogs which grant permission for a user to access different apps or data, but there needs to be a launchpad space assigned to the business role to define the structure of how the permissioned apps display on the launchpad. If there is no space assigned to a business role, no apps will display on the launchpad for the end user. The user could use the search to find apps they are permissioned to access, but nothing would display visually, which would be confusing to the end user. For this reason, we always need to make sure a business role has an assigned launchpad space. SAP delivers space templates for each standard business role template, but if you were to create an entirely custom business role (not from a template), you would need to create a custom space and page(s) to define how the permissioned apps should display for an end user and assign it to the custom business role.

Spaces and pages are both containers of information. Typically, there will be one space per business role (although you can have multiple spaces assigned to a single business role), and the space name is similar to that of the business role. For example, the standard template for the Administrator business role has an assigned space template called Administration. A space contains one or more pages. A page contains apps, organized into sections. If a space has multiple pages, it's because each page is grouping together a set of related apps.

For example, the Administration space (assigned to the Administrator business role) includes eleven different pages. This is because an administrator has permission to access many different applications and we don't want to dump them into one long list they have to scroll through. This comes back to the SAP Fiori design concept - you shouldn't have to know what you're looking for in a long list of apps, you should intuitively understand where to find the app you need. As an admin, if I need to assign a business role to a user, it's relatively intuitive that I select the drop-down menu below the Administration space title and choose the Identity and Access Management page. Of all the pages (i.e. Workforce Master Data, Launchpad, Communication Management, etc.), this one fits my task best. Within the Identity and Access Management page, the section Users and Roles is where I see the Maintain Business Roles and Maintain Business Users apps, which I can use to assign permission.

Learn how to navigate the SAP Fiori Launchpad in this tutorial.

An excellent resource for learning more about the functionality of the applications in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system is the SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library. For SAP Fiori apps, you can find information about:

• Standard business role to assign so you can access an app
• Standard business catalog the app is assigned to
• Standard space and page the app is assigned to
• Technical app information (application type, supported SAP S/4HANA deployment(s), release, app ID, desktop/mobile availability)
• Link titled App Documentation pointing to detailed information in the SAP Help Portal about how to use the app, and if extensibility through the Custom Fields and Logic apps is supported, which business contexts and types of extensions are available