A Happy Worker Is a Productive Worker – Intro to SAP Fiori for HR Managers

Employee or job satisfaction plays a crucial role in the domain of employee retention. A happy worker is a productive worker. Or to put it the other way around, unhappiness among workers in the USA results in a whopping $300 billion loss in productivity per year. Some Western European countries do quite well, especially Denmark, Luxembourg, Finland and the Netherlands, but still, any improvement in this space brings significant business benefits.

This is clear for most HR managers, but what does it have to do with SAP and what is Fiori by the way?

Employee satisfaction is impacted by multiple factors including topics such as compensation, work-life balance, perceptions of management, flexibility, safety, etc. Considering how fast the amount of computer work is expanding in the work force, it is clear that the use of software has an increasing impact on employee satisfaction. This is where SAP Fiori comes into the picture.

Intro to SAP Fiori

One of the key priorities of SAP is to improve the user experience of their software. SAP Fiori is constantly growing collection of applications which have been created with the user experience enhancement in mind. They are simple, they don’t have all the possible buttons and functions on the screen only some users might need, but they focus on what is important for most customers. They are coherent, which makes jumping from one Fiori app to another a fluid experience. They are responsive, so they run on desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone. They follow authentication and authorization principles you expect from SAP, so they can provide content based on user roles.

Investing into SAP Fiori is a smart move. It is estimated that $1 investment in user experience brings a return of $2 to $100. Employees become more productive by intuitive use of SAP anytime and anywhere, making less errors, they need less training and support, etc.

What can Fiori do?

SAP has created 300+ Fiori apps (as of today) across many lines of business and industries, you can find an overview here. Furthermore, the above mention design principles are applied to the whole SAP software portfolio, even to acquired cloud solutions such as SuccessFactors. Very important to know that SAP brings out new Fiori apps few times a year in so called Fiori waves.

Can Fiori be applied to specific business needs?

There many possibilities in this area. The out-of-the-box Fiori apps can be extended. SAP has released the Web IDE, which is a great tool available on the HANA Cloud Platform and soon on premise as well. This tool allows developers to make easy changes with drag&drop and deep and complex changes in a way which is future proof in terms of upgrades.

The Theme Designer tool makes it possible to adjust the look & feel including logos, images, colors, fonts, basically any element of the theme.

Even more important to know that SAP made the Fiori guidelines available and this opened up the possibility for customers to develop their own Fiori-style applications (using SAPUI5 and Gateway/OData) running on the Business Suite and/or on SAP HANA.

An important piece of the Fiori technology is the Fiori Launchpad, which can be seen as a shell around the Fiori apps. It provides navigation, personalization and configuration features. It is basically a central point of access for Fiori (and even some non-Fiori) apps combining transactional and analytical aspects.

Conclusions

Improving user experience of SAP solutions hasn’t been as easy as now. SAP has created Fiori applications for the most common scenarios, among them HR very prominently. In case the out-of-the-box applications are not sufficient, there are brand new web and cloud based tools available to make adjustments and even new developments possible in a future proof way.