Fiori is Free – Now what?

There seems to be a lot of confusion on what Fiori is, and what the benefits are.  Since the recent Sapphire announcment that Fiori is free, we have gotten a lot of questions from our customers.   This blog will attempt to clear up any confusion on Fiori, and provide a high level overview on benefits, negatives and why SAP customers should care.

So what is Fiori?

Fiori is a collection of applications, pre-delivered by SAP, that cover the most common business scenarios across multiple modules of SAP.  Some examples of these applications are:

HR: Time Approval, Leave Request

MM: PO Approval, Order from Requisition

CRM: My Accounts, My Contacts

You get the idea.

Fiori is commonly misconceived as a Mobile Solution.  Yes, Fiori can run on Tablet and Mobile Devices, but the applications also run on Desktops.

The Good:

• Finally, a solution that bridges the gap between Desktop and Mobile.  Prior to Fiori, SAP mobile users were forced to use a different User Interface on their Mobile devices and Desktop
• Fiori design is clean, simple and easy to use.  For anyone who has ever been forced to use SAP GUI you will know what I mean.  When building Fiori, SAP took a simplistic approach, and only included the relevant fields and functionality needed to complete the task.
• Customers now have a modern user experience.  There have been a mishmash of UI products released by SAP in the last decade: Web Dynpro, Web UI, Personas; but none of them solved the issue of not having a consistent user experience across devices and creating a UI that does not make users want to pull their hair out.
• The best part of Fiori is the ability to customize it and create applications from scratch that fit business needs.  Customers now have options:

          1) Extend and Enhance the pre-delivered SAP applications to fit business needs

          2) For scenarios not covered by pre-delivered applications we can create fully customized Fiori applications.  These look and  feel the exact same as the SAP delivered ones.

The Bad:

• The initial installation and configuration can be a bit tricky.  SAP documentation seems to reside in multiple places, making it somewhat frustrating to get it up and running.
• The enhancement framework for pre-delivered SAP applications is somewhat limited.  If the customer wants to do anything more than add or remove fields or shift some of the controls around I recommend building a custom Fiori application
• You must complete configuration steps for each individual application.  These do not take too long(depending on the application), but in short; deploying all Fiori applications in a week isn’t going to happen

Wave 2 of Fiori applications is just scratching the surface of the potential.  SAP has made heavy investments in SAPUI5 technology and integrating it with common SAP use cases.  See the Amazon-like shopping cart for SRM and HR Renewal apps and the Fiori River RDE which connects UI5/Fiori to the Hana Cloud Portal.

The bottom line is that Fiori is well worth the time investment to get it installed and running in your landscape.  The capabilities, and functionality will only continue to grow and users are demanding a way to complete business tasks on the go.  SAP has finally caught up to the rest of the world in providing a next generation User Experience with no additional license cost, the verdict: Your users will thank you.