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I’m just returning to the office after hosting our second SAP Fiori Innovation Day in Chicago. The event, held on August 13, 2024; was an exciting opportunity to connect with customers and partners to understand where they are on their user experience journey, as well as show off the latest UX and artificial intelligence innovations from SAP. Colleagues and implementation partners worked together to create a diverse program that included the monetary value of user experience transformation, an introduction to SAP Fiori and the current state of the SAP user experience, the scaling ability of SAP Fiori elements, and AI innovations in app development.
Our day began with an introduction to SAP Fiori with Katja Zoch and Sebastian Steinhauer, chief product owners of SAP UX Engineering. It was a fantastic opportunity to come together with the audience and understand what the modern SAP user experience is. The big takeaway: SAP Fiori is more than just the applications, it’s the entire design system that drives how applications and experiences feel across devices. With these terms set, we could now move into deeper, more technical topics.
After our introduction session, Ioannis Grammatikakis, head of SAP UX Engineering, gave a demo of the current state of the user experience in SAP S/4HANA. It was an overview of how SAP is working to make the experience of using SAP S/4HANA consistent and delightful, collaborative for every user, integrated across devices, and intelligent in all interactions. He demonstrated this by showing how users begin their interactions with SAP in My Home, demonstrated how AI will enhance the experience of using applications by allowing for natural language interactions with the system, and then finished off by showing how SAP integration with Microsoft Teams allows users to work even more collaboratively than ever before.
Our first partner session of the day came from Niklas Winterfeld of Sovanta. His talk The Exponential Costs of Ignoring Users was the first of many sessions that stressed end-user centricity when planning your SAP user experience. It is much cheaper to identify and fix user experiences challenges in the discovery and design stages than after you have deployed your applications.
After the important reminders about the value of a good user experience, Ioannis Grammatikakis turned our attention to extensibility options for SAP S/4HANA in the cloud – demonstrating how it can still be flexible when needed for your use case. He walked through options for both SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. The big takeaway: there are options for extending SAP S/4HANA that allow you to keep your core clean, allowing for easy upgrades. For on-stack extensibility, there are options for key users as well as developers via ABAP Cloud. For side-by-side extensibility using SAP BTP, there are options involving SAP Build Code.
The last session of the morning was a forward-looking demo, using SAP Fiori tools with AI to generate an SAP Fiori elements application from a sketch of business requirements that was created in the room with help from the audience. My colleague Thorsten Lange and I were excited to show this off as many customers and partners ask for the best way to create a quick first draft of an application that they can use to test with users and innovate further. This demo was an extension of the one our team showed at SAP Fiori Innovation Day in Dublin, the big difference being that we showed how you will be able to use SAP Fiori tools to update the application you generated – adding new columns to the list report via SAP Fiori tools and using the Flexible Programming Model to create a custom layout for one of the pages. You’re not limited to the output of SAP Fiori tools AI. If you’re interested in generating an app with SAP Fiori tools AI, the first version – which allows you to generate an app from a written business requirement document – is available.
Attendees returned after lunch to a panel discussion on UX transformation. Gavin Quinn of Mindset, Thomas Bechberger of Sovanta, Dayna Nielsen of ConvergentIS, and SAP’s Ioannis Grammatikakis discussed how to best position and execute UX improvements in an organization. The discussion covered a wide range of topics from the initial change management, to scoping your project, to rolling out the updated experience. The golden thread at the center of it all? You have to take your end-users with you every step of the way. Managing their expectations, understanding their needs as the people actually using your software, and keeping them informed of the changes are key to a successful UX transformation.
The panel discussion was followed by another partner session, this time by Mindset’s Gavin Quinn. He shared the story of how Mindset drove a successful user experience transformation for a utility company; driven by consistent communications with end-users to understand how they could best be upskilled and transitioned to the new experience. He also shared an exciting story of how the company integrated an AI assistant into SAP Fiori to simplify the customer support experience for customer service representatives. It was refreshing to see a real-world example of AI simplifying a business process rather than just being shown off for the sake of showing off the technology.
Our final partner session of the day was hosted by ConvergentIS. Deep Bhandari and Dayna Nielsen shared how SAP Fiori elements can be used to deliver consistent applications quickly; telling a story around how ConvergentIS used the solution at scale to deliver 12 applications in 2.5 months, a 66% time savings over freestyle development.
After all of the content on SAP Fiori development, attendees had a dedicated hour to create an SAP Fiori elements application of their own. Using SAP Business Application Studio and SAP Fiori tools, participants got hands-on with the solution, creating an Incident Management app with SAP Fiori elements for OData V4. Most of the participants were able to complete the exercise in less than one hour. If you would like to try it out yourself, you can follow the tutorial here.
The day wrapped up with some quick demos of planned AI innovations from SAP UX Engineering.
- We showed off how users can automatically populate their new My Home for SAP S/4HANA Cloud pages using AI recommendations. This ensures that users get a good start with applications and insight cards that are relevant to them.
- We also showed how users can generate their own Insight cards using AI by asking Joule for exactly what they need.
- Finally, we gave a quick demo of Collaboration Manager, illustrating how users could directly work together in SAP Fiori applications.
SAP Fiori Innovation Day Chicago was a fantastic opportunity to understand our customers’ and partners’ user experience priorities as well as share some of the most cutting edge solutions coming out of SAP. I look forward to seeing where the next one takes us! Is there somewhere you’d like to see a similar event? What content would you like to see there? Feel free to let us know in the comments.
If you want to learn more about these topics:
- Subscribe to our SAP Fiori development newsletter, which covers most of the topics we discusses at SAP Fiori Innovation Day.
- Join other SAP Fiori developers from a variety of companies in our monthly SAP Fiori elements roundtable.
- Watch the SAP Community and LinkedIn for information about when a SAP Fiori Innovation Day will be in your area.
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