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PeterSpielvogel
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
1,257
We recently crossed the milestone of 1600 live customers on SAP Screen Personas. In addition to celebrating our success, we discussed within the team why this number is not even higher. Follow my logic here: pretty much every SAP ERP customer wants to adopt the Fiori user experience; SAP Screen Personas is a fast and easy way to create Fiori UX; so, why is every ERP customer not using SAP Screen Personas, especially since they already own the license as part of the NetWeaver license?

I believe there are several misperceptions about SAP Screen Personas that cause people to hesitate, rather than building a quick proof of concept application to deliver simpler, more usable, highly intuitive screens to their users. In this blog, I will discuss some of the common reasons customers give as to why they are not yet SAP Screen Personas customers. My goal is to arm you with the information you need to make an informed decision on when to start your UX transformation project with SAP Screen Personas.

I want an all-Fiori solution, so I don’t need SAP Screen Personas.

Yes, SAP Fiori is the user experience for all new SAP applications. You are right to want an all-Fiori UX, as this will provide your users a consistent (along with simple, role-based, adaptive, and delightful) experience.

There are several ways to create Fiori apps for your users. You can develop a Fiori app using the SAP Build / Fiori Elements / Web IDE / SAP UI5 stack. If your focus is strictly mobile, you can use our iOS or Android software development kits or our Mobile Development Kit, which is part of SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services. These are great approaches if you want to create new functionality in your application.

However, if the functionality you want already exists, and is captured in an SAP transaction code, then SAP Screen Personas is probably the fastest, easiest, lowest cost, and lowest risk way to provide the Fiori experience for SAP GUI transactions. This is especially true if you are an ECC customer, with few out-of-the-box Fiori app options.

I want consistency. Everything needs to operate from my single Fiori launchpad.

The SAP Fiori launchpad is supposed to be the single entry point for all SAP applications. The great news is that you can launch any SAP Screen Personas flavor from the Fiori launchpad. It is fast and easy to create tiles that go to simplified transactions that are SAP Screen Personas flavors, personalized for a specific role. So, you deliver a Fiori launchpad to your users and some tiles go to SAP Fiori apps, some go to custom Fiori apps, and some go to SAP Screen Personas flavors. All provide a similar experience, independent of the technology.



My people already know SAP GUI, so I don’t need to simplify it for them.

While your existing employees may have developed the expertise and muscle memory to navigate quickly through complex SAP GUI screens, it is unlikely that new hires will want to make this investment. People you hire now, probably millennials that recently graduated from college, grew up as digital natives. Their expectations for user experience are for a simple and intuitive UX, similar to what they use in their day-to-day life on mobile devices. They need a similar experience for any enterprise system you want them use, and SAP Screen Personas is a simple and cost-effective way to give it to them.

For the SAP veterans, it still may be worth simplifying their transaction screens. Many SAP Screen Personas customers reduce the time on transaction by 50-80%, so you can probably save money through productivity savings with a better user experience.

I’m going to SAP S/4HANA soon, which is all Fiori, so I don’t need SAP Screen Personas.
OR
I just purchased SAP S/4HANA, which is all Fiori, so I don’t need SAP Screen Personas.

Congratulations on moving (or planning to move) to the most intelligent ERP system available. The SAP S4HANA digital core is the foundation of your digital transformation. While there are many amazing new capabilities with modern, intuitive interfaces in SAP S/4HANA, there are also still some SAP GUI screens in S/4HANA too.

While the Belize (Fiori) theme makes them look good, they still retain the original complexity of the SAP GUI, so you need SAP Screen Personas to simplify them. A significant percentage of SAP S/4HANA customers also use SAP Screen Personas to simplify their SAP GUI screens with Fiori theme and run these transactions on mobile devices.

Many partners report that their clients don’t necessarily want to start their S/4HANA transformation project talking about SAP Screen Personas, but they often come back and ask for simpler versions of Fiori-themed SAP GUI screens.

I heard that SAP Screen Personas is being phased out.

Ugh, why does this rumor keep coming back? SAP is continuing to invest in SAP Screen Personas. Our support commitment is aligned with SAP S/4HANA (rolling five years from last service pack release). Our team is innovating and we are all excited to add new functionality aligned with SAP’s priorities. In fact, my next blog post will discuss our roadmap for 2019 and beyond.

Next steps

If you have been waiting to move to SAP Fiori, now is a great time to start. SAP Screen Personas is a fast and easy way to bring the Fiori user experience into your organization.

For the SAP Screen Personas product team, peter.spielvogel.

 
2 Comments
0 Kudos
Hi Peter,

I believe the rumor about Personas being phased out is due to a newsletter send out to customers by SAP (http://www.news-sap.com/what-is-sap-s4hana-13-questions-answered) in May 2015, where question 10 was:



However the wording was later changed to include Screen Personas in the future roadmap instead of dismissing it as a transitional technology.

So - that is one of the reasons why it comes up 🙂

Soren
PeterSpielvogel
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Hi Soren,

Thanks for sharing the source of this rumor that keeps coming back. Yes, the new UX roadmap includes SAP Screen Personas for providing the Fiori experience for existing scenarios (transactions) and SAP Fiori elements for creating new apps, assuming they follow the standard page types.

Regards,
Peter