6.6    User Interface and User Experience

We’ve mentioned that SAP S/4HANA acts as the digital core for your business; one of the premises for being the digital core is to have the processes to be user-centric and accessible through intuitive UIs. This is made possible using SAP Fiori apps, which are SAPUI5 applications built on HTML5 technology (primarily) and can be rendered in any browser on any device—mobile, tablet, or desktop. These applications provide an intuitive UI and a seamless UX for business processes that otherwise would have required clicking through several screens of one or more transactions.

The focus of the SAP Fiori apps is to have improved UX through the following:

SAP provides a standard set of SAP Fiori apps on various platforms, but most require the SAP HANA database. SAP Fiori apps currently have three main business functions:

Consult SAP’s website for a list of all the SAP Fiori apps currently available. SAP has also published a detailed SAP Fiori road map for SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition, and for SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Figure 6.22 shows how SAP Fiori apps can be accessed through the SAP Fiori apps reference library (www.sap.com/fiori-apps-library). The set of SAP Fiori apps can be filtered by different criteria, one of them being for a particular product version. Within the set of SAP Fiori apps for a particular product version, the apps are also grouped by user role, as shown in Figure 6.22.

The product features and details of the technical implementation are provided for each SAP Fiori app selected, as shown in Figure 6.23.

SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library

Figure 6.22    SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library

SAP Fiori App Details

Figure 6.23    SAP Fiori App Details

SAP has created the standard SAP Fiori apps with user-centric designs, and they can all be accessed through the SAP Fiori launchpad. An SAP Fiori app, when accessed from the UI through the SAP Fiori launchpad or through a URL, retrieves data using OData services, which expose the backend data. The OData services are RESTful APIs generated by the SAP Gateway server from the backend Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs) or function modules. A RESTful API is a web service API that follows the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, which follows a few architectural constraints such as stateless, client/server-based, uniform interface, and so on.

Now, with the advent of SAP Fiori, cloud edition, the SAP Fiori launchpad and the frontend components can be hosted in the cloud on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Extension to these standard SAP Fiori apps can be made through the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. The SAP Gateway component can still be on-premise or hosted in the cloud via the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. A subset of SAP Fiori apps are currently available within SAP Fiori, cloud edition.

The architecture of an SAP Fiori app, with SAP S/4HANA as the underlying application layer, is shown in Figure 6.24.

SAP Fiori Architecture

Figure 6.24    SAP Fiori Architecture

With SAP Fiori 2.0, the UX has been improved further. The user can see three areas on the screen after logging in to the SAP Fiori launchpad: