SAP Screen Personas and SAP S/4HANA

December 7, 2015  update

SAP Fiori is mentioned a great deal, but we do not hear much about SAP Screen Personas in the context of SAP S/4HANA. Why is that?

SAP Screen Personas is a critical part of the SAP S/4HANA user experience strategy. It is the ideal solution for scenarios not yet covered by Fiori applications or for an organization’s custom transactions. Customers can use SAP Screen Personas to simplify their existing SAP GUI screens or WebDynpro ABAP applications to meet their unique needs and increase productivity. SAP is providing design guides and Fiori-Inspired sample content for SAP Screen Personas.

The Fiori UX strategy aims to transform the transactional operational model to a role-oriented one. Since our focus is on delivering the Fiori User Experience, we do not highlight the underlying technologies that provide this capability to the users.

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original post from August 19. 2015

As customer excitement grows around SAP S/4HANA, we are starting to receive more questions about how SAP Screen Personas fits with SAP S/4HANA. The answer is that they fit together very well, contributing to an amazing, modern, and intuitive user experience. This blog will explain the connection between SAP Screen Personas and SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition, and how you can obtain the Fiori UX today, even if you are not ready to move to SAP S/4HANA immediately.

For the remainder of the blog, when we refer to SAP S/4HANA, we are referring to the on-premise edition, as that is the only version of SAP S/4HANA where you can use SAP Screen Personas.

Last week, I heard the following question from a customer:

We are on SAP Business Suite today. We will move to SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA next year. Our plan is to implement SAP S/4HANA the following year. It is worth investing in SAP Screen Personas now? Will we need to throw this work away when we are on SAP S/4HANA?

To answer this question, we need to examine the S/4HANA user experience. S/4HANA comes with the Fiori UX out of the box. What does this really mean?

1. It means that instead of using traditional transaction codes, people access SAP functionality through the SAP Fiori Launchpad. They have a personalized cockpit that contains only the transactions they need for their specific role. This is part of the shift that SAP (and the rest of the enterprise software industry) from features to user experience.
   
2. All the Fiori apps (currently over 500) run on SAP S/4HANA. These are UI5 applications written specifically for SAP S/4HANA. They are intended to provide the same experience on any device.
3. Customers have the option to access SAP S/4HANA on-premise edition through the traditional user interfaces.

Let’s examine item 3 in more detail. Where we have not yet written a new UI5 application, we are providing a way for customers to obtain the Fiori UX, including for their custom or Z-transactions, through the traditional user interfaces (SAP GUI for Windows or SAP GUI for HTML). For all these transaction screens, you can use SAP Screen Personas to simplify and streamline the underlying business processes. Using SAP Screen Personas with a Fiori theme and Fiori icons you can create a Fiori experience for your users.

The end result is a complete system consisting of a mixture of Fiori applications and Fiori-designed transactions for an overall Fiori user experience. This gives you the power of HANA, the beauty of Fiori, and the flexibility of SAP Screen Personas. SAP S/4HANA on-premise edition, combined with SAP Screen Personas, is a true winning combination.

Try it for yourself with our new SAP S/4HANA on-premise trial offer, which includes a few flavors from our SAP Screen Personas rapid deployment solution.