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SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA - New Rapid Content Activation on SAP S/4HANA releases 1709 to 2023 - Part 1 - Overview

Jocelyn_Dart
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
‎2019 Mar 16 10:57 AM
69,275

Latest Updates:

    • August 2020: Added the link to the latest video of the end-to-end rapid activation for 1909 FPS2.
    • March 2020: Updated the title to reflect that this process is available for SAP S/4HANA solutions 1709 or higher. This was already explained in the body of this blog post, however changing the title just makes it a little easier for people to discover this e.g. via Google Search


As a UX specialist in the S/4HANA Regional Implementation Group team I’m privileged to work with many of our SAP S/4HANA customers.  Many of these SAP S/4HANA customers are looking to drive the business benefits of S/4HANA by implementing Fiori at scale.  It is experiences with those customers that have driven the need for new tooling to make it easier to activate Fiori at scale.  On your S/4HANA project, you can take advantage of a new approach to activating Fiori at scale that can cut activation time from weeks down to hours or days.

TL;DR + video version: If you are technical and would prefer to jump straight to a step by step guide, please refer to this excellent blog by my colleague Mahesh Sardesai: New Installation of SAP S/4HANA 2022 FPS2 – Part 4 – Rapid Activation for Fiori

SAP Fiori is how business users access S/4HANA innovations.  Many SAP S/4HANA customers are keen to make the most of these innovations, whether as a big bang or as a carefully staged journey.  That means they may need to activate 100s and in some cases 1000s of SAP Fiori apps and other Fiori launchpad content, such as Web Dynpro ABAP applications and SAPGUI for HTML transactions. If this is your project, naturally you want an easy way to do this – now you have one!

You can now use the new rapid content activation task lists to dramatically cut the activation effort from days to weeks down to hours to days. You do this by activating delivered SAP Business Roles as a consolidated single unit, complete with ready-to-test business user ids.  This is very different from the app by app by app approach of early alternatives.  The good news is that even if you only intend to activate one business role as a showcase, these new task lists will make things much easier for you too.



A few months ago, these new Rapid Activation for Fiori in SAP S/4HANA task lists were quietly released for customer use for customers on SAP S/4HANA 1809 and SAP S/4HANA 1709.  The feedback so far has been very positive. Not only do they decimate the time needed to activate apps, they also avoid a lot of the common issues, missteps & stumbling points experienced by project teams new to SAP S/4HANA.

You can find these new task lists in the following SAP Notes:

You can now use this central note to find the list of all Rapid content activation notes for all SAP S/4HANA versions

2902673 - Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA - Overview

Direct SAP Notes:

3411022 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01

3336782 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2023

3308535 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2022 FPS02

3282460 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2022 FPS01

3236624 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2022

3166600 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS02

3132689 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS01

3085127 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2021

3045635 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02

3009827 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS01

2947824 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 2020

2924004 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 1909 FPS02

2895644 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 1909 FPS01

SAP Note 2834415 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA 1909

SAP Note 2823926 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for Fiori in S/4HANA 1809 FPS02

SAP Note 2777142 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for Fiori in S/4HANA 1809 FPS01

SAP Note 2704570 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for Fiori in S/4HANA 1809

SAP Note 2695653 - Composite SAP note: Rapid Activation for Fiori in S/4HANA 1709

The rapid activation approach is particularly useful when activating apps in your sandpit and demo systems.  With some care you may be able to use it for activating apps in your development system too (make sure you have also applied 2686456 - Fiori Setup: Content Activation for Business Roles so that you can transport your OData activations).

If you have a little time, before you start using them, you may find it helpful to keep reading further to understand the task lists in more detail.

Part 1: Overview (this blog)

    • Why these Rapid Activation task lists were created
    • What’s in the Rapid Activation task lists


Part 2: Pre-requisites and executing the Fiori Foundation task list

    • Pre-requisites
    • How to execute the Fiori Foundation task list


Part 3: Scoping & Executing the Rapid Activation Task List for your business roles

    • Selecting your business roles
    • How to execute the Rapid Activation task list
    • Testing your activated business roles


Part 4: Customizing & transporting your activated business roles

    • How to customize the business roles you have activated by the task lists
    • Transporting activation and activation alternatives
    • Where to get help

 

Why Rapid Activation for Fiori in SAP S/4HANA


The aim of the rapid activation task lists is to help you get started exploring Fiori in SAP S/4HANA as quickly as possible.  This is particularly important in the early Explore phase of SAP Activate methodology, where you are focused on understanding what apps have been delivered with your SAP S/4HANA system. This is the starting point for deciding which apps you will use, and how these apps fit to your organization’s specific business processes & business users.

In the past, many customers found there are 2 main hurdles to overcome in getting to that starting point: scale and inexperience.

Dealing with the scale of SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA


Five years into the S/4HANA journey, the number of SAP Fiori apps available has grown from around 300 in SAP S/4HANA 1511 to the nearly 3K apps available in the latest version SAP S/4HANA 2022 FPS02. And that is not including the many other types of delivered SAP Fiori launchpad content such as Web Dynpro ABAP applications and SAP GUI for HTML transactions.

While many of the tools and accelerators we used in the early SAP S/4HANA days are still good for some smaller use cases, for customer projects wanting to enable a large SAP Fiori scope there was quite some effort required to activate using even only standard SAP Fiori apps and roles.  With traditional mass maintenance tasks lists, customer experiences over the last 4-5 years have found activating Fiori apps at scale can take days or even weeks of effort, especially for those consultants new to SAP S/4HANA.

Activating apps at such large scale clearly needed some careful rethinking.

IMPORTANT: Activation is not the only area where you will find improved tooling.  Since 2018, you could also decrease a lot of the manual effort of business role maintenance, and gateway service activation, as discussed in these blogs:

Most SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA releases have introduced gradual improvements. For example, in release SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 you can use the Launchpad Content Manager (client-specific) to launch the activation of services directly from any (SAP or custom) business role or business catalog.

Dealing with inexperience (avoiding newbie errors)

One of the common missteps of many early SAP S/4HANA customers was to select and activate SAP Fiori apps one by one. This is a very high effort approach and is NOT recommended.  This approach is also very error prone, as often related apps & dependencies needed to complete the end-to-end app deployment were missed resulting in confusion, frantic troubleshooting, and delays.

SAP Fiori apps are organized very differently to SAP GUI transactions. Compared to SAP GUI transactions, most Fiori apps are not intended to be used standalone or individually. Instead Fiori navigation enables a high degree of reuse & natural app-to-app navigation as the user completes a task.

It's more than just a change in organization: the UX paradigm of Fiori differs fundamentally to the classical SAP GUI transaction pattern. Instead of big multi-purpose transactions which are typically launched individually (often via the TCode field), Fiori offers a navigation network of task-oriented UIs, which are interconnected via Fiori Launchpad Content. This means, there are usually multiple options to launch any app, such as:

    • from the Home page by clicking on a tile or link
    • from the Navigation Menu at the top of the shell bar
    • via a Enterprise Search result
    • by selecting an app in the App Finder 
    • via the Frequently Used or Recent Activity lists 

And once launched users can use forward navigation to reach related apps by

    • using hyperlinks, e.g. via the Smart Link “List of Links” pop-up dialogs
    • buttons or hyperlinks that launch other apps to perform a task


This degree of app-to-app forward navigation in SAP Fiori is much higher than SAP GUI transactions. The whole mechanism is controlled by authorizations, i.e. users see only those apps and links to apps which they are authorized to use. That’s another fundamental difference to SAP GUI transactions.

A selective Fiori implementation by cherry-picking single Fiori apps breaks the user experience and leads to very high implementation costs. Since Fiori apps are not designed to be used individually, to support the end-to-end task this may need even you to (re-)configure the complete app-to-app navigation network, which is defined in SAP’s delivered Fiori Launchpad Content. This is why SAP recommends a role-based approach to implement Fiori, i.e.:

    • Copy the SAP-delivered business roles and catalogs and adjust them to your needs.
    • Implement complete business roles and not just single Fiori apps.

What’s in the Rapid Activation task lists


There are 2 task lists included in Rapid Activation of Fiori in S/4HANA:

    1. A task list for activating the Fiori Foundation named SAP_FIORI_FOUNDATION_S4
    2. A task list for activating Fiori Content by selected business roles, named SAP_FIORI_CONTENT_ACTIVATION

Task List Fiori Foundation (SAP_FIORI_FOUNDATION_S4)

You run this task list initially to set up your Fiori Foundation, that is:

    • Execute basic configuration for Fiori Launchpad, SAP GUI for HTML and Web Dynpro ABAP common services
    • Generate generic user roles for Administrator and End User

IMPORTANT: Since this task list incorporates the latest best practice recommendations for the SAP Fiori launchpad, you can also run this task list again as part of upgrade to the latest SAP S/4HANA release or FPS. When running the task list as part of upgrade, rather than run every task, you should review any new steps or changes from your previous runs of the task list, and select only the tasks that you need to update your launchpad to the latest best practices.  

For example, if in your source SAP S/4HANA release you were using Groups layout mode, in your target SAP S/4HANA release you might choose to run the tasks that activate Spaces and Pages layout mode. 

Task List Fiori Content Activation (SAP_FIORI_CONTENT_ACTIVATION)

Once you have the Fiori Foundation in place, you use the Fiori Content Activation task list to activate all the apps associated with your selected business roles. You can select one business roles or activate multiple business roles together.  You can run the task list as many times as you need to, to complete the activation of all your selected business roles.  The more business roles you select in one run, the bigger the saving in time and effort. For each business role the task list will:

    • Activate all the associated Fiori apps (i.e. activate the related ICF node & OData Service(s))
    • Activate all the associated Web Dynpro for ABAP applications
    • Generate a custom copy of the SAP business role (i.e. the PFCG security role) with default authorizations
    • Optionally, generate (or assign) a Test user per business role


IMPORTANT: Some of the current limitations of these 2 task lists are:

    • Some apps have additional post activation activities. These are typically performed by functional business process consultants. Check the App documentation.
    • Not all activation steps done by the task list can be saved to a transport request – therefore this method should be used to activate SAP Fiori apps in sandbox or demo systems. For Dev, Q and P systems see the separate section Transporting your apps in the blog Part 4: Customizing & transporting your activated business roles


Want to take advantage of this new Rapid Activation approach?

Then read on to Part 2: Pre-requisites and executing the Fiori Foundation task list 

Becoming a SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA guru


This particular blog series has been a collaborative effort between the S/4HANA RIG and the Global Fiori Design team.  I'd like to add my personal thanks to all the contributors - they know who they are!  And especially to my colleague hannes.defloo who has shepherded this initiative on behalf of the S/4HANA RIG, as well as drafting this blog series.

You’ll find much more on the community topic page for SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA

Other helpful links in the SAP Community:

    • Follow our tag SAP S/4HANA RIG for more from the SAP S/4HANA Customer Care and RIG

 

Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA Customer Care and RIG.

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