SAP Fiori is a tool already well known among SAP professionals; however, SAP Fiori still causes certain doubts in SAP professionals more used to the classic SAP interfaces. SAP Fiori cannot be compared to classic user experience versions (SAP GUI for example). SAP-Fiori is something new that provides a unique user experience. SAP-Fiori is the new way for S/4 HANA users to consume the full value of S / HANA. One cannot think of S/4 HANA implementation without exploring the potential of SAP-Fiori.

Includes:

• The new user experience of SAP Fiori itself, including generic benefits for every user such as Enterprise Search, Notifications, and User Defaults
• New business processes in SAP S/4HANA, such as group reporting, central procurement, and predictive MRP
• Intelligent automation features such as situation handling, machine learning, and robotic process automation
• And the quick win of embedded analytics for operational insights to action.

That said, every customer’s journey is different. So there are often some business roles where you want to pick and choose at a fine detail level which SAP Fiori apps and classic UIs are assigned.  This is particularly necessary when you need to manage the pace of organizational change. By starting with a small number of assigned apps and growing the role over time, you can gradually shift users from old to new processes, and from SAP GUI to SAP Fiori. So if you want to manage the pace of change, creating custom catalogs can be one of the most critical User Experience activities in your project(s).

When to create custom business catalogs

Typical scenarios where this is needed are any of the following:

• You want to manage the pace of change carefully, e.g. by starting with small incremental changes to your User Experience and growing these over time
• You have strict segregation of duties requirements, e.g. due to government regulations
• You want to create a demonstration role with a carefully selected set of SAP Fiori apps and classic UIs to encourage next steps and have a more meaningful discussion with your business
• You want to fine-tune your business roles to meet your specific users’ needs, to maximize user adoption

You can create your business roles before or after your go-live. For example, you might run a small “Continuous Improvement” project to increase SAP Fiori coverage for a new group of users who share the same business role.

Many of us in User Experience would suggest you should really create custom business catalogs for all your business roles, because the better your user adoption, the easier it is to change your business user’s on-system behaviour to achieve the business outcomes you want, which leads us to….

Benefits of creating your own custom business catalogs

There are a few major benefits:

• You control the content of the catalog
• You control the title of the catalog, i.e. the catalog title that is visible to the user in the App Finder and the Home navigation button

Controlling the name can make it a lot easier for business users to find their apps and UIs, particularly where they are assigned to a large number of apps/UIs.

To minimize the effort, you’ll want to take advantage of the large amount of content delivered by SAP to efficiently create your custom business roles. To do this, Wezen focuses on the efficient creation of customized business catalogs, which you will assign to business roles and users.

Learn more about SAP Fiori for SAP S / 4HANA by reading the full note here.