SAP Business ByDesign - SAP's Cloud ERP for the midmarket - has been providing built-in mobility and collaboration capabilities since its very early days. Examples for this are the built-in collaboration, apps for mobile project management or self-service and approval apps which can be used either on iOS or Android smartphones, tablets or on desktop devices.
Since the general availability of the new Fiori HTML5 user interface (which can be also used on tablets) and the enhanced embedded analytics on SAP HANA we have put our focus since 1811 on bringing our smartphone apps on iOS (>=9.3) and Android (>=5.0) to the next level. The new app is available as free download on iTunes, Google Play and Tencent in China. It replaces the old (orange) ByDesign mobile app you might know from the past.
This blog features the following topics regarding mobility on smartphones:
The following videos give you a good overview on the most important mobile apps:
1. Mobile analytics with KPIs, reports and Customer 360 view
Define reports views and key performance indicators (KPIs) on e.g. customer and team key figures on the desktop
Consume KPIs on the smartphone launchpad and with a separate KPI app
Consume any report view on the smartphone by marking them as bookmark in the desktop
Customer 360 view for most important facts, key figures and reports of an account
Directly navigate to the last activity from customer 360 view
This means that managers and employees are able to define custom or to use sample KPIs from SAP and to adapt them to their needs for smartphone or desktop consumption e.g.:
Marketing Generated Sales: Measure Campaign success by value of related sales orders
Lead Quantity and Quality: Aggregates the number of leads for the current and previous years by lead status
Projected Sales: Sales Target Achievement by Incoming Orders
Service Requests Completed and more
2. Customer 360, contact and activity management
See most important address information and trigger actions like calls and mails
Get an overview on open business documents like opportunities, quotes and also the volume of sales orders
See and interact with all contacts
See and create task, call or appointment activities
3. Lead Management with hand-over to sales
SAP Business ByDesign lead management is also covered with our mobile app.
Marketing, sales, service employees and managers are able to
5. Employee self services for shopping cart, expense reporting and leave requests (new in 1902)
Here is a demo of the mobile intelligent expense report scan scenario which is under controlled availability since 21.02:
Personalize access to expense reports on the smartphone launchpad
Create and track expense reports
Approvals can be done by the manager either on the smartphone or on the desktop.
Browse product catalog, create and track shopping carts
Approvals can be done by the manager either on the smartphone or on the desktop. Manager approvals and Time recording are separate smartphone apps.
Employees and managers are able to create and approve leave requests on smartphones. Manager approvals are done with the separate approval app.
6. Mobile approvals for managers and user administration
Since 2005 managers are able to launch the manager approval app inside the ByDesign mobile app and do not need to install the separate app anymore. Features of the stand-alone and embedded app are equal:
Approvals as within ByD mobile app
Approve purchase orders, expenses, quotes and more
Swipe to accept or reject with flexible grouping of approvals e.g. by cost center, project, task or employee
Add comments
Here is the list of approvals which are available on the smartphone:
Customer Invoices and credit memos (new with 2011)
Expenses
Goods & Services Receipts
Leave Requests
Purchase Orders
Purchase Order Items
Purchasing Contracts
Sales Orders
Sales Quotes
Service Orders
Shopping Carts
Supplier Creation Approvals (new with 21.08)
Supplier Invoices
Time Recordings
In addition you can also administer business and technical users using the ByD Mobile app if you have the "Application and User Management" work center assigned:
7. Personalization, configuration and adaptation of apps and KPIs for consumption on smartphones
The ByD mobile app provides access to various capabilities like reports, KPI, account and contact management, self-services and more. Prerequisite to use it is that your company gives you authorization to use those additional work areas in your corporate ByD system. If this is not the case you see only the parts for which you are authorized for per default (e.g. self-services). So please get in touch with your ByD system administrator to give you the right privileges and system credentials.
Managers and employees are able to personalize which apps and KPIs appear on the smartphone launchpad. To do this users have to:
Activate personalization mode
Add or remove a tile by clicking on the plus or x icon
Add or remove an app by tapping on the pin icon
Similarly mashups and KPIs can be added
Save and stop the personalization mode
Apps like Accounts, Field Service etc. only appear if the desktop work centers have also been assigned to the user
Furthermore you can also use the Key User Adaption and Personalization Mode on the Desktop to adapt the mobile screens. With this you can enable e.g. to use extension fields on the mobile user interfaces or introduce custom work center lists.
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To access this you need to logon on your desktop and use a special UI parameter "&sapbyd-agent=MBLHTML" in the URL:
To configure the KPIs in the separate KPI app users have to do the following:
Open the KPI app which can display more KPIs which are not directly embedded into the launchpad
Click the gear icon to select which KPIs are relevant
Check the KPIs needed and confirm with save.
In addition users can configure any report view and selection combination to be shown on the smartphone. To do so users need to do the following steps:
Open the report on the desktop
Show bookmark page
Click on the plus icon and enter name and description which will appear on the mobile
Select “On Mobile” and confirm with Save
Afterwards the bookmark will be displayed in the reports app on the smartphone.
Finally the ByDesign system administrator can decide to activate fingerprint as authorization method in the default or any other security policy.
Administrators can activate in the common task for ”Security Policy” app passwords
Users can enter a local password which enables to use fingerprint for future logins
8. Simulate the mobile app on the desktop
You can also simulate using the mobile app on your desktop. You just need to add the suffix "/mobileClient.html" as extension to your ByD system URL and switch to developer tools in Chrome or Firefox:
In addition to developing freestyle apps using SAP Cloud Platform or any other tool set partners and customers can extend and build own mobile apps using the SAP Cloud Application Studio:
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unfortunately we are not allowed to commit any dates for releases as our plans might be changing at any point in time. Nevertheless I can tell you that we are still on schedule to deliver in 2018 the first version of the app – and there are not so many releases left ;o).
This is a key requirement for the service industry. I have two new customers that are already asking for the date on when the app will be leveraged. I really look forward to this !
I am also excited for the mobile confirmation. I’ve been waiting for this for years. It’s a huge enhancement to really round out the field service capability in ByD without having to leverage a partner. Great work, Jan!!!
Question 1: Orders and quotes are not supported in the app as we want to focus on the lightweight capabilities on the smartphone. Our recommendation would be to use a tablet instead using our desktop UI. With this you get all capabilities of orders and quotes without limitation of the small screen size.
Question 2: You can create a customer improvement request for this to allow other partners and customers to vote for the implementation.
thanks for the overview, it looks like a good implementation! we've just got the announcement internally and for a change I really wanted to like SAP because I think you're finally starting to make innovative partnerships and development.
I'm unable to comprehend how I get a disallowed_useragent error upon login due to your oauth/openid integration. Nobody in Enterprise should be logging in with username and password anymore these days. We shouldn't have to deal with generic my1234567.sapbydesign web adresses anymore either.
Google announced more than two years ago how OAuth interactions should be going forward. We're in 2018 and you've decided to do the OAuth implementation via an embedded browser WebView. Please get it right as we can't roll the mobile version out otherwise. We simply cannot rely on outdated login methods that are jeopardizing security.
on Android you use SAP NetWeaver in an embedded Browser where one is to select the IdP. We authenticate via G Suite against our IdP and WebView is explicitly not supported due to usability and security reasons.
Happy to file a ticket regarding this with more informations as well if you can point me into the right direction. Same applies to iOS and while some SSO providers might allow the behaviour I think you should really aim to make your implementation as secure as possible.
there is nothing specific that we offer with the apps - the apps are normal iOS/Android apps. So if you use Intune to manage your Android and iOS devices I do not see issues in using our apps on those devices but I not an expert on this nor am I aware of customers using it.
Just to finally answer the original question and close this thread: as communicated by jan.matthes in his blog update, the app is available for Android and iOS as free download on iTunes and Google Play now and can be used starting from SAP Business ByDesign 1811 onwards.
we have plans to extend the mobile CRM capabilities but unfortunately I'm not allowed to disclose details and by when we want to deliver it. I will update this blog as soon I can share details.
When I am in the service confirmation and try to do an ad hoc direct goods issue, there is no place for me to select the LOA. Will this be added to the floorplan? If not, I cannot submit and close my ticket.
I really love all of the enhancements to this app.
our proposal would be to use the abilities to extend our predelivered mobile apps using sap cloud application studio. We plan to make this available soon.
there are no plans for a new version of it. Reason is that majority of our customers use either our desktop UI on IPads or use Windows tablets with our standard UI.
I need to know how to develop SAP Business ByDesign custom mobile apps in 2020 because I have already followed to develop like your video but it's not successful. Do you have any suggestions or solutions to develop a mobile app?
I do following your video at the same but it's not working. In the application, the WoC that I set to Mobile HTML tag does not appear on the application. I don't know why.
If I access right the WCF of Mobile, it appears but has the errors. Like this Picture