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It seems like generative AI is on everyone’s mind. This was certainly the case at SAP Sapphire last month. SAP continues to innovate in this area with new AI design patterns appearing across the product portfolio. In my opinion, one factor that’s driving the interest in AI for UX use cases is that people are looking for a fast and easy way to improve the user experience. The good news is that this does not require generative or even “classic” AI. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition includes a simple and powerful feature to adapt the UI for classic apps. This is also available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and on-prem customers as SAP Screen Personas.
In this post, I’ll provide a short background on SAP Screen Personas, discuss its implementation as a standard feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and share some interesting usage patterns we are observing. I’ll conclude with some concrete next steps so you can improve the user experience of your SAP ERP system.
SAP Screen Personas / Adapt UI for classic apps lets you simplify screens and streamline business processes
We introduced the first version of SAP Screen Personas in 2012. Fast forward to today and we are on SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP18. During that time, thousands of customers have simplified their transaction screens. My colleagues and I, along with the customers that attend our monthly practitioner forum calls, have seen a wide variety of UX transformations, ranging from merging content from different tabs or transactions onto a single screen to automating bulk updates that reduce the process time from hours to 30 seconds.
SAP Screen Personas is built into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
SAP Screen Personas was so popular and loved by our customers that we decided to make it a standard feature of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Although there are over 3000 SAP Fiori apps available in SAP S/4HANA, there are still some scenarios that lack SAP Fiori coverage. Several thousand classic apps are available to accomplish these less-common tasks. There was already the ability to adapt SAP Fiori apps using SAPUI5 flexibility so we added the new functionality to adapt classic apps using the same menu.
Explosive growth in Adapt UI for classic apps in the past year
Running our software in the cloud gives us better visibility into how customers are using our solutions, which provides insights into adoption patterns. The team and I were pleasantly surprised to see that roughly 20% of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers are using the Adapt UI functionality. In fact, we have a 300% increase in the number of flavors running in productive systems within the past year. What are all these customers doing?
What we observed is that public cloud customers are simplifying many of the same apps that their on-prem counterparts do. These tend to be some of the more complex SAP GUI transactions in procurement, sales and distribution, and material handling. Looking deeper, we see that there is also the “long tail” of screen simplifications, with around 175 classic apps having 10 or fewer flavors.
From my perspective, the implications for SAP are clear. For the heavily used flavors, we should probably provide an SAP Fiori app. In some cases, this already exists, and we need to explore why customers are choosing to simplify the classic app rather than using the corresponding SAP Fiori app. (If this is you, please reach out; I would love to hear your explanation.)
Another conclusion I reached from this data is that it was a great idea to include Adapt UI for Classic Apps as a standard feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, since so many customers are using it to personalize screens to meet their unique business requirements. It also shows that public cloud customers have lots of flexibility to adapt or extend the user interface and they are using it. SAP Screen Personas is one of several powerful options. Private cloud or on-prem customers have even more extensibility options.
How to improve the user experience of your SAP ERP system
Customers
- If you are an SAP S/4HANA customer, I recommend you use SAP Fiori apps, whenever possible. You can find the comprehensive list in the SAP Fiori app reference library.
- For the classic apps, if there is something you don’t like, change it.
- While SAP Screen Personas is built into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, it’s a free add-on that takes less than an hour* to install into your private cloud or on-prem system. Then, you can simplify your SAP GUI transactions or classic apps, if you prefer that terminology.
* if you know what you are doing.
Partners
Learn how Adapt UI for Classic Apps fits into SAP’s UX portfolio and how to use it strategically as part of an SAP S/4HANA transformation or greenfield implementation. The most comprehensive training course on SAP Screen Personas is now on the SAP Learning platform. This training is still free.
Learn more about SAP Screen Personas
- Online training. The best way to learn the basics about SAP Screen Personas (Adapt UI for classic applications) is to take our course on the SAP Learning platform. https://learning.sap.com/courses/adapting-the-ui-in-sap-s-4hana-cloud-using-sap-screen-personas
- Connect with your peers. Every other month, we have a group of customers that gather online to share best practices, demo their flavors, and answer each other’s questions. Experts from the product team also join to explain how to use the latest functionality. If you are interested in joining, you can sign up online to join the SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum. This will add you to the mailing list for the monthly meeting summaries. Please contact me directly if you want to join the monthly calls.
I hope you start using Adapt UI for Classic Apps or SAP Screen Personas to make your business users happier and more productive.
For the SAP UX Engineering team, Peter Spielvogel.
