When SAP Fiori was first announced during the early concept phase it was widely recognized as little more than a group package of HTML5 applications. These would be available at an additional cost and as such wasn’t readily embraced by businesses and professionals within the SAP community.
Fast forward to 2014 and the announcement that Fiori would be available for free with an existing SAP license had countless companies implementing and onboarding. As a result, brands were quickly discovering the benefits of SAP Fiori implementation.
Mainly boosts to productivity, rapid adoption due to ease of use, reduce costs related to training and more.
What does SAP Fiori offer to customers?
Fiori has become a catalyst for digital transformation with a focus on simplifying the experience for your users. It does so with a suite of more than 900 apps that offer a better user experience from a personalized launchpad, role-based applications, customization to fit business requirements and access to extensive analytics and metrics to make goal-tracking and identification of KPIs as simple as possible.
The benefits are tremendous with countless examples of how brands have been able to improve productivity and mobility such as Hampshire County Council rolling out a SAP Fiori implementation for over 50k users across schools and libraries.
Fiori has grown in popularity primarily because of its core strengths:
- Derive value quickly with any of the available standard apps (choose from hundreds)li>
- Requires no native developers on-site to support your efforts
- Multi-device responsive design makes it highly versatile
- Zero requirements around app submission
- Designed to make platform extension a breeze with minimal effort
Here are the key benefits of a SAP Fiori implementation:
Fiori Simplifies Use and Deployment of SAP Apps
SAP is fairly easy to use overall but getting to the point of usability has been a hefty challenge for organizations. Traditionally, brands see implementation with business process setup to require somewhere in the range of 60-90 days for setup before going live… sometimes more.
Fiori, on the other hand, is typically completed in just a few weeks. When business processes are costing you time and money, a smooth-but-rapid deployment can be immensely beneficial.
Intuitive Design and Ease of Use
Design and ease of use is likely what people talk about the most (and first) when discussing the advantages of SAP Fiori. Where users once had to deal with complex menus and running numerous windows, Fiori helps reduce the activities and clicks that add up to a significant amount of wasted time.
With a clean design and consistency among how apps are designed overall, it’s not just easy to use it’s also far easier for employees to learn and adapt to new projects or tasks.
Traditionally, enterprise software interfaces in business have been somewhat complex and cumbersome. The simplified user experience brought by Fiori provides multichannel access to common SAP software essential business functions over a multitude of devices.
Employees are now demanding a user-friendly multichannel experience as mobile tech and eCommerce have made that a norm. Fiori’s USP revolved specifically around ease-of-use and provides a comfortable, simple-to-operate environment for launching and managing business applications.
Tighter Control of Training Costs
The minimalistic design that offers such simplified ease-of-use also contributes to a reduction in training costs. The core functions essential to individual job roles become glaringly obvious. Less time is spent onboarding which expedites the cost-to-completion cycle for employees to adopt the apps.
Traditional SAP was transaction-oriented, like SAP GUI. Fiori is role-based in functionality which gives it a very user-centric design that focuses on being goal-oriented and helping individuals roles do their jobs faster and more effectively.
Essentially, your navigation and business function access are based on the needs of the employee as well as how they operate in their environment. Because of these role-based screens there is a significant reduction in clutter. That contributes the reduction in training costs with SAP.
Improved Data Quality
Manually data entry is responsible for a tremendous amount of data errors. The most common challenges with data entry that plague businesses are:
- High error rates
- Slower turnaround time
- Unclear formatting and data fields
Errors in data entry can come with significant cost. For example, the time an Amazon AWS employee entered data incorrectly and caused a massive server crash that took out sites like Netflix, Tinder and Airbnb for more than 5 hours. The cost? An estimated $150 million in revenue.
SAP Fiori increases compliance and data quality by making it extremely easy to enter the right information into your system of record. Rather than basic manual entry, workers access labeled pull-down menus and radio buttons to greatly reduce data entry errors.
Boosting Productivity
Companies have been finding ways to optimize the consumer buyer journey online for years based on the idea that fewer clicks reduces friction. If you reduce friction the consumer is more likely to complete the checkout, or their “task”.
These same user-centric design qualities are applied to SAP Fiori and are responsible for boost in employee productivity. For example, during one study by SAP Simple Finance of a common accounts receivable task they noted a 64% drop in duration and 71% fewer clicks when subjects used Fiori as opposed to UX.
It’s not just the reduction in clicks that bump productivity. With the responsive, mobile-friendly, multichannel access employees can get their work done at any time, from any place they have an internet connection.
PanAust, a Australian mining group, saw similar boosts to productivity across the whole of its organization thanks to the ease-of-use. What initially began as a project to assist the work of users with English as a second language turned into a company-wide initiative.
Add in a level of personalization uncommon with SAP where employees can personalize the layout by rearranging tiles, add, delete, rename and reorder groups on the fly and you have a recipe for boosting productivity.
Conclusion
Fiori has promised to consistently provide the best user experience across all SAP through simplified workflows, role-based processes, and a more interactive environment that reduces common complexities and superfluous tasks.
The result is a highly beneficial launchpad that significantly boosts productivity and user adoptions while reducing operating costs. Fiori brings together automation, work-life-integration and data to help you and your team make faster, smarter business decisions – and that kind of value is priceless.
Discover how SAP Fiori can practically eliminate training time while substantially improving productivity in your business. Contact us today for a free consultation with a Gentackle expert.