Introduction to S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA On-Premise Key-User Extensibility

Blog updated on: 18 August 2023

Introduction to In-App Extensibility and Key-User Tools – Part 1

Target Audience – Business Experts, Key Users, Developers

Extensibility Options for SAP S/4HANA

While S/4HANA provides many extension options, as a S/4HANA customer In-app extensions are the most interesting as they enable your Key Users to make simple adjustments to Fiori apps by themselves. These speeds up the rate of innovation by reducing reliance on your IT team.   It’s also very efficient – letting you redeploy costly designers, developers, and administrators to focus on high expertise innovations such as integration extensions. Bert Schulze introduces the concepts in the following blog

https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/11/sap-s4hana-expert-series-1-new-extensibility-paradigm/

Key User Extensibility is a part of In-App Extensibility in the S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA On-Premise. It is mainly focused towards the needs of Key Users of any organization and is managed through web based Key User Tools.

Let us understand Who is a Key User?

In any organization, a Business Expert is called as Key User in S/4HANA Extensibility paradigm. As you can see from below image, a Business Expert is someone who would only like to see the S/4HANA Extensions on cloud or on-premise for his or her LOB. It is important to note that these extensions should only affect the people under him. To achieve these extensions, SAP provides you Key User tools. It is important to note these tools are restrictive in nature (We will learn more about this little later in the blog). You may think of the Key User as a Team Lead for easy understanding.

So, what distinguishes a Business Expert / Key User from an End User? The answer to this is – the authorization to adapt artifacts like UIs, views on services, processes, etc. to the need of his or her assigned user group

Image 1: Flexibility Services

Learn more about Flexibility services by following this link – https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/#/topic/a8e55aa2f8bc4127923b20685a6d1621

The main functions of such a user is to do simple extensions in the SAP Fiori UIs, add and test simple business logic or add new custom fields to the SAP Fiori UIs. These are all run time adaptations backed by the powerful extensibility framework.

One such example – say the head of any purchasing department would like to add new fields or remove some fields or add some small business logic without needing the full development or developer support and this change should affect the employees or users under his or her line of business only

What advantage does these tools provide to a Key User?

The main advantage of the Key User Tool is to provide easy and friendly access to customize the software without having the need to know what all is going on behind the scenes in the backend. You as a Key User don’t necessarily have to have technical or programming skills. Some of the advantages you as a Key User –

• … can adapt the UI to your company’s naming terminologies by changing the field labels on the fly
• … can adapt the UI on the fly and make it look cleaner by hiding the fields not required
• … can organize the field layout of the UI on the fly to make it look more organized and sequenced per your organizations needs
• … can create new custom fields to the Standard SAP Fiori applications

All this is possible through the web-based Extensibility apps provided with SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP S/4HANA On-Premise

What are these Key User tools then?

Image 2: Key User tools

As you notice from the above image, to a Key User, with Extensibility apps, you get these Web-Based Key User Tools (…which are nothing but SAP Fiori Applications) for end-to-end extensions like – adding custom fields, custom business logic, Custom CDS Views, Custom Business Objects Etc.

For more feature richness and complexities (Towards the right of the above graph) organization wide, a developer role is required and more advanced tools like SAP Business Application Studio, Eclipse based ABAP Development Tool Kit etc. will come into picture and you would need a developer with such expertise. All this will be part of your fit-gap analysis as shown in the image below and based on the same you can decide whether to Adapt, Extend or Build

Image 3: Fit-Gap in SAP Fiori

How to get these Web Based Key User tools in S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA?

For SAP S/4HANA Cloud, you must be assigned to one of the following roles. They are provided as example roles from SAP. You can use these as a template to create your own role.

In addition, you can also verify following Business Catalog’s are assigned to your user by using the tile – Business Catalogs. This tile can be found under Identity and Access Management group.

Note: Make sure that you ignore ‘deprecated catalogs’

Image 4: Business Catalogs tile

What are the Key User tools made available through SAP S/4HANA Extensibility?

When we talk about quick and easy extensions made easy, simple for Business Experts (Key Users), following Tools are made available –

1. General UI adaptions like: Hide Fields, Remove Fields, Move Fields or Groups
2. Create new Groups, Add new fields from list of available standard field list
3. Create new Custom Fields for SAP Fiori Apps
4. Create new Custom Business Logic SAP Fiori Apps
5. Create new Custom Business Objects
6. Create new Custom CDS views ( data model )

Once assigned these apps should appear like below in your SAP Fiori Launchpad

Image 5: Extensibility Apps

 Key User Extensibility – Quick summary

1. These are loosely coupled custom extensions in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA
2. These are not modifications, but restricted extensions in SAP S/4HANA based on stable extension points and APIs
3. Web-based Key User tools
4. Software lifecycle of extensions de-coupled from SAP software updates
5. Make sure you have gone through the SAP Note 2283716 to activate Extensibility for Key Users. This note is applicable for SAP S/4HANA On-premise and PCE

Congratulations you have successfully understood the basics of Key User In-App Extensibility in SAP S/4HAHA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA. Also, you now know how to enable this extension apps.

Brought to you by S/4HANA Regional Implementation Group

Good Links to know more about Extensions

Custom Extensions in SAP S/4HANA Implementations – A Practical Guide for Senior IT Leadership

Extend SAP S/4HANA in the cloud and on premise with ABAP based extensions

Extend and Integrate Your SAP S/4HANA Cloud

S/4HANA Extensibility: Use Case Overview

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Free Trial

Click the below link to visit the Part 2 of this blog series

Part 2: Key User Extensibility on SAP S/4HANA Cloud – UI Adaptions for Key User