Fiori and FLP at School or the WIN-WIN-WIN situation

Inspired by the great blog of DJ Adams from Bluefin Solutions about his dedication to running and Fiori and FLP I decided to write this blob. It’s about a prototype I created about one year ago. At this time a good friend of mine worked in the office of a school for pupils with disabilities. To be precise her office war responsible for four or five schools at different locations. Sometimes she told me about her daily work and how hard it is to find the right information in short time, e.g. if parents, teachers, social welfare offices or others call her on the phone and want to know something about a student in short time.

I then some day sat down in my office and thought about her problems. Within a few hours I created a prototype of a bunch of Fiori applications that I gathered in FLP. I presented it to her the next time we met and she was absolutely excited. Unfortunately she wasn’t in the position to give me an order to implement this prototype. Her school decided to use a solution that was also implemented by a lot of other schools and that was much more difficult and not approximately as good as my prototype.

In this blog I want to show you what I prototyped and that Fiori and FLP are not only suitable for displaying business figures, sales order or HCM stuff. As mentioned above this as well as DJ Adams blog is another use case for Fiori and FLP besides the usual SAP business stuff.

Let’s start.

The launchpad

I first created a launchpad with some small apps to manage the schools (locations), the teachers as well as the students. Additionally I thought it would be helpful to have an overview about the cars, as I said it was a school for pupils with disabilities, and for canteen planing.

Of course there are much more areas of interest at such a school as inventory, car driver management and, and, and.

Student Overview

Cause I didn’t want to spend too much time on this prototype that would never come to realization I decided to concentrate on the main topic of a school, the students. I prototyped the student app in more detail. Here I started with a … of course list of students.

Here I used a Worklist Floorplan. Another proposal was the everywhere used Master-Detail-View or Split Screen Layout

Detail View = Tab View

At the detail view I decided to use an Icon Tab Bar. Here are two not very spectacular but informative tabs.

Scanned Documents

Cause at schools a lot of document arrive via regular letters (yes they are still used for communication) I added the possibility to scan these documents and add them to the pupils file.

Transport possibilities

Cause disabled pupils are usually not able to drive to school by bike or come to school by themeselves they often have to be transported. This can be maintained on the transport tab.

Certificates of course

Most important for students of course are certificates. Although many might think the they are not very important at a school for disabled pupils this is not the case. On the contrary they are even more important cause the teachers can see how the child evolved over time. Beside that the certificates are often used when pupils change from one school to another which happens more often than at regular schools. Therefore my prototype was designed to import the certificates that of course are already written with word processing software.

Everything else

Last but not least there are always things that can’t be associated to a special topic. At a school for disabled pupils it’s e.g. more important than at other schools to respect the personal rights of the pupils and their parents. Therefore it is important to get information like “is it allowed to publish photos in newspapers or on the internet” or “is there something special to know about the habits of the child” on a fingertip.

Conclusion

Although this application will probably never be developed by me it was a great experience to create a prototype for a real use case in a few hours with the prototyping tools SAP provides. Additionally I got used to Fiori and FLP this way. If I find a few schools that are interested in such a solution I might implement it. If you school leader are currently not using SAP software don’t worry I’ve written the n-odata-server with which it is possible to write the backend for UI5 / Fiori apps without the need to have SAP backend. To get SAP back into the game my recommendation is to run the app in SAP HCP which is a perfect place for developing and running UI5 apps.

Isn’t this a WIN-WIN-WIN situation?

– I win a customer and can write some great apps.

– The school wins great and useful apps at a reasonable price.

– SAP wins a customer for HCP which they otherwise would never have thought of

Thank you DJ Adams for the inspiration writing this blog.