Fiori & UI5 in a Local Government Setting

I wanted to write this blog because I have been working in Local Government IT at BMBC now for seven years, and developing Fiori since last November and i just wanted to share our Fiori Journey and how it’s enabling big changes in the way we work.

Shout Outs

I’d like to start by acknowledging that we aren’t alone in this and just give a shout out to both Surrey and Cardiff Councils who are doing great things too. Surrey have become prize winners, due to their SAP Fiori implementations which can be seen here. SAP success | PublicTechnology.net  Cardiff council have utilised SAP Hana and some Fiori technology to help their customers Delivering digital devolution in local authorities bluefin solution…  both councils along with ourselves presented these developments at an event in Manchester last year hosted by Bluefin Solutions.

I’m sure there are other councils out there doing great things too.

Our Story

So now I want to tell you about some of the work we’ve been doing here at Barnsley.  We have utlised Fiori and UI5 technologies in a number of areas around the authority.  For some of the work we enlisted the help of Bluefin Solutions, and some of the work has been done by our In-House development team.

Commercial Services

First of all we now have a great new commercial services payroll solution for Barnsley Financial Services.  Built by Bluefin it uses both the Fiori Launchpad and SAP C4C to provide schools with a purpose built portal to manage their payroll requirements, and also communicate with commercial services team if there are any issues.

A brand new theme was created using the theme designer, to add branding to portal.

Not only is this making processes more efficient, but it is enabling the authority to generate income.  As it give us the capability to expand our services to other businesses and not just schools.

Tradesman’s App

We also have a brand new Tradesman’s App again built by Bluefin that has completely changed the way our tradesmen and supporting staff work.  The app however is standalone developed using UI5 and can be downloaded from the google app store to work on specifically configured ipads.

Bluefin’s case study can be found here Barnsley Council digitally transforms service operations with SAPUI5 applications

Staff Fiori Portal

Finally, we have another Fiori Launchpad our staff to use which is developed and managed in house.  Currently we have two apps, a customised version of My Leave Request, where staff can only book either a full day or half a day and My Additional Time which handles to processing staff overtime.  However, we are using the tiles for other things, for instance to embed training videos and provide support documentation to staff.

In the future we also have plans to grow our app library in order to make fiori the central hub for staff, where they can manage and interact with data held about them, and in some cases carry out their daily roles via the launchpad.

Fiori has enabled us to make processes more efficient and generate saving and income and an authority.  We have already got rid of some manual paper-based processes and intend to replace some more soon.  Not only this but is has given staff more control over their data and ability to access it from anywhere via their own mobile devices.  Expect to see another blog post in the future when we have achieved even more!

Thanks for reading, I hoped you enjoyed this insight in to where we are.