I have been using HANA Cloud Platform Fiori Launchpad for a while and have always wanted to see KPI tiles on my Fiori Launchpad. SAP Smart Business (SBS) framework has been around for a while and customers were able to visualize their KPIs/OPIs without writing a line a code in their on-premise solutions.

I have been exploring this option for a while and I am excited to share the news that using SMART business services in HCP, it is now possible to create KPI Tiles on your HCP Fiori Launchpad. What is even more interesting is that you can also create rich analytical applications (out-of-the-box) which help you give more information around your KPIs.

I had earlier posted on fundamentals of KPI Modeler and how to use the generic KPI drill-down application which ships along with Smart Business Framework. It’s good to see the same on-premise functionality being ported to the cloud.

In this series of blog post, myself and my colleague Nash Gajic are going to show you how easy it is to enable Smart Business services on HCP and bring up KPI tiles on Fiori Launchpad.

SSB framework on HCP relies on OData services when it comes to consuming business information. As of today, it supports OData services which are either based on HANA XS, CDS or even Apache Olingo. It is important to note that these OData services need to be annotated following OData4SAP standard in order to identify dimensions and measures on each entity.

In this blog, we are going to take a scenario where a customer who has Business Suite on HANA system is looking to create Analytical/Transactional apps on HCP. One of the ways to expose data from a HANA system is via XS OData services.  We are going to show how to expose XS OData services from a HANA system and consume them in Smart Business Services of HCP to create KPI Tiles.

Prerequisites

• Access a trial landscape, you need to have a developer account first. If you still need to create a developer account, you can start from here: Signing Up for a Developer Account.

• For demonstration purposes, we are going to use the HANA MDC database which is available for free on the HCP trial account rather than an on-premise HANA system.

Enable Portal Service

In your HCP trial account, locate your Portal service and enable it. Launch the service to create a fresh Portal.

From the site directory, add a new Portal site of Fiori Launchpad type.

Once the site is created, navigate to the Site settings menu and publish the empty site.

After publishing your site, from the site directory ensure that the new site is made your default site

We have now created an empty Launchpad site. In the next step, we would be leveraging the Smart Business service to publish few apps to this Launchpad site.

Enable Smart Business Services

In your HCP trial account, locate the Smart Business service and enable it.

Navigate back to the Smart Business service and click on “Configure Smart Business Apps”.

In the Smart Business Configuration App, select the Portal site which was created earlier and click on “Import Apps”.

You should get a success message stating that the smart business apps are imported to your site.

Navigate back to the Launchpad site which you created earlier and launch the site. You should be able to see bunch of Smart Business Apps which are available in your Launchpad site. These Apps will allow you as a content administrator to build KPI tiles and make them available to end users.

You will notice there is a Portal role now available directly related to the corresponding Smart Business service groups shown above. As an administrator, you can assign these Smart Business service apps to your portal content developers accordingly.

In the next part of this blog, my colleague Nash Gajic will show you how to setup the data source (HANA Database) on HCP and use the Smart Business services to consume XS OData services in order to create KPI tiles and link them to generic drill down applications.