Fiori Changes Perception of Campus Life!

[RobJonkers]

Fiori Changes Perception of Campus Life!

As you might know/remember SAP announced in 2013 the release of SAP Fiori and 25-easy-to-use applications for the most frequently used ERP transactions (mostly around HR and Finance). Now a year and a bit later we know that the number of Fiori apps rapidly increased (+300!)  and that the apps are also made available for other (industry) solutions then only Finance and HR.

Beside that a key important message was announced at this year's SAPPHIRE by our CEO Bill McDermott that SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas will be included in SAP software licenses and offered alongside new UX services (for example including design, rapid deployment and custom development) - to improve customer engagement.

You as a (Higher) Education & Research customer, user now have the opportunity thus to benefit from a user experience based on principles of modern design that sets a new standard in the industry.
Bill McDermott quoted at SAPPHIRE: "We want every customer to have a first class user experience which is, at the same time, simple," (*see also SAP FIORI - The Power of Simple - YouTube)

SAP Fiori for (Higher) Education & Research (and thus for SLcM...) 

So what exactly is Fiori and what is Screen Personas and what does it mean for SAP (Higher) Education & Research and specifically for our ‘industry’ solution SAP Student Lifecycle Management.

In a nutshell SAP Fiori:

Fiori is the new user experience (UX) for SAP® software. It applies modern design principles (the 1-1-3 principle):

• 1 user
• 1 main/key process
• 3 process steps (max!)

Along with other key design principles, see in picture below:

These principles are the basis for a completely reimagined user experience. SAP Fiori UX is the new face of SAP to business users in all lines of business across devices and deployment options. SAP Fiori has HTML5-based user interfaces and most apps can be deployed to multiple devices such as desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. The SAP Fiori apps can be categorized into one of three types:

1. Transactional apps
2. Fact Sheet apps
3. Analytic apps (Smart Business)

In a nutshell SAP Screen Personas:

SAP Screen Personas is a tool for customers to improve the usability of desktop SAP GUI screens. It allows users to simplify and personalize the approx. 16,000 distinct SAP GUI transactions, including transactions with customized fields. SAP Screen Personas allows (Higher) Education & Research institutions to improve user productivity by
personalizing their SAP ERP/SLcM screens for specific user roles. SAP Screen Personas lets you simplify the screen, giving each person exactly the information they need, minimizing clicks and maximizing productivity.

Example of SLcM start screen BEFORE:

Example of SLcM start screen AFTER revised with Personas:

Back to Fiori and what SAP is 'cooking' when it comes to Fiori applications for our SAP Student Lifecycle Management (SLcM) solution. In the recent months we have been very busy with Design Thinking workshops with students and customers on the topic of student and faculty/staff apps for SAP SLcM. The Design Thinking workshops were the basis for the design of the SLcM Fiori Apps that we are currently building and testing (June, July 2014).

Based on the feedback from our customers the following roadmap has been launched and recently presented to our customers at our annual user conference HERUG 2014:

The first apps for the students (Course registration & Results) will be released Q3/Q4 this year and the planned ones (Degree Audit overview and Time Table) will follow in Q4 this year/Q1 2015.

To already give you a short sneak preview on how the apps look & feel here below a short demo via a video. Please note that the video is shot from a test system with a lot of typical test data :wink: :

How to start using, testing, etc Fiori

So now the Fiori (and Screen Personas) apps are included within SAP software you of course want to know how to get hold of those apps and start using them.

The steps below outline in a nutshell what you should do to start experience Fiori and Screen Personas:

• Step 1: Log-in to the SAP Service Marketplace using your S user credentials. Another option is to look for SAP Fiori or SAP Screen Personas in the HANA Marketplace and simply click on the "download" button in their respective web pages; it will redirect you to the service market place for the actual software download.
• Step 2: Once in the SAP Service Marketplace, locate SAP Fiori or SAP Screen Personas and download the products.

To run the transactional apps for SAP SLcM we have the following pre-requisites:

• SAP Business Suite with SLcM activated on Ehp7 & SP05
• SAP Fiori for ERP 1.0 SP03
• Database: HANA or any db (please note for some Fiori apps you will need the HANA database)
• Netweaver 7.31 SP04 or 7.40 SP04
• SAP Netweaver Gateway 2.0
• Add on:Business-Suite UI5

Please check the Fiori installation guide for all the latest details!

For an additional fee, SAP offers a portfolio of UXrelated services to support customers during all phases of the adoption of SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas:

• Advisory services help customers identify the most important UX use
       cases and advise customers on an implementation roadmap to realize them
       using SAP Fiori and/or SAP Screen Personas.
• Launch services will quickly get customers up and running with SAP Fiori and SAP
       Screen Personas by installing the necessary infrastructure and deploying
       one Fiori application or Screen Personas scenario.
• Accelerate services help customers get more out of the SAP Fiori or
       SAP Screen Personas installation they are already running by deploying
       additional Fiori apps, creating new or extend existing Fiori apps and
       creating additional SAP Screen Personas scenarios.

Is Fiori along with SAP SLcM also available in the Cloud?

This might be a strange change of topic but we see a clear relationship with delivering great UX and have it available in/via the cloud.

YES you can run the earlier mentioned solutions like SAP Student Lifecycle Management in the Cloud along with the SAP Fiori apps!

With the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud we offer you the possibility to run SAP SLcM in the cloud where you get the best of both worlds: the power of HANA in-memory (db) technology and the flexibility of the Cloud.

Wrap-up

We are very excited to share this story on Fiori apps where we will continue to talk and listen to our customers to deliver beautiful UX (the road ahead is full of flowers (Fiori = flowers in Italian :wink: ). Please stay tuned for more on Fiori for SAP (Higher Education & Research) solutions.

Feel free to share your views, comments, feedback, etc with the Higher Ed team via a reply to this blog or drop us an e-mail, please include our Fiori lead in product management for Higher Ed, Farah Gabriela Gonzales in these mails.

Thanks!

Kind regards

SAP (Higher) Education & Research team