Innovation in Customer Experience with SAP Fiori Cloud
This is the era of digital transformation for the companies and many ‘business process automation strategies’ exist nowadays . One of the emerging trend is to build customer-centric web and mobile-first SaaS/micro-services solutions based on cloud platform. In this article, I demonstrate open-source and hybrid architecture for mobile/web app development, and like to share news from recent SAP event : an analysis on SAP latest developments regarding increased customer experience, building intelligent and native mobile applications in a highly productive real-time, cloud-based architecture. Its impressive!
Why CX is important?
Nowadays we talk to systems, more sensors, smart watches, and smart homes. More carefully designed digital touch points improve our life and life of our business. For any tech company, it’s becoming difficult to conquer new customers and retain them longer. They are now struggling to enhance their product’s customer experience, exploiting new opportunities such as subscription/maintenance services, and live chat-bot support. A recent study which aimed at gauging consumer attitudes to online shopping experiences showed that 75% customers failed to find what interests them.
The predictions in Forbes report tells that major transformations would happen for customer service area this year, in which CX would be on the top of the strategic agenda in the company. Development have become easier and lots of choices exists. Competition has increased and therefore, from past few years, SAP has been focusing much on the front-end development capabilities, open-source portal services and native mobile applications.
Why SAP?
From many decades, SAP is leading in developing tools and platforms that help rapid automation of operational businesses globally and now heavily focusing on increasing customer experience. Its main customers belong to: manufacturing industries, banks, commerce, and forestry. If any new or existing SAP customer require to: derive value quickly with standard apps, no in-house native development skill sets, implement a responsive/ multi-device app, require an extendable platform with minimum effort; SAP Fiori Cloud is the best option!
For front-end developers and UX strategy designers there is a good news from SAP new products are here and most of them are open-source: SAP Fiori for iOS, open-source SAPUI5/ OpenUI5, portal services and SDK for mobile services(plugin for android). Moreover, these SAP applications can be built over any cloud environment e.g. Azure or Google cloud. Figure 1 explains an idea of an architecture that is hybrid, open-source, and designed to provide best customer experience. At a high level, it has two layers front-end and a back-end. We’ll see the components of first layer in more detail later in this article.
Figure 2 shows the services available for mobile app development in SAP cloud platform. Users can build new applications based on the customer use-cases, and manage existing ones. I will explain each of them in more detail in coming sections. First, we’ll how Tieto and SAP are working together to build intelligent systems and then we’ll be looking into the summary of the recent CX event held in SAP, Finland. It is important to understand that there is are many customer cases/opportunities of development in Tieto in which SAP UX products may help achieving CX goals.
Tieto and SAP:
Tieto is the leading SAP service providers in the Nordics from decades and it leverages SAP cloud platform intelligent enterprise and products SAP S/4Hana , SAP Hybris , and SAP Leonardo for building ERP solutions, commerce portals, and intelligent businesses using blockchain, machine learning, data intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, and big data. SAP Fiori has been used previously in Tieto’s project for improving in-store customer services.
Tieto recently in the event presented work in data and AI. A POC/demo of intelligent project built with SAP co-innovation lab has sensor-based monitoring use cases in the field of manufacturing, retail, automotive, and forests. Other partnerships include working in the areas of BI and AI, NLP, AI@healthcare, AI@Finance, IoT predictive maintenance, machine vision, AI co-creation, where AI models are deployed as micro-services, with AI model lifecycle management support.
Main agenda of the recent SAP event:
The event covered three main topics SAP Fiori UX, SAP cloud platform and SAP Leonardo. The latest UX Strategy and Roadmap was discussed and main points were:
- consumer user experience is the new standard and empower your employees to serve your customers.
- big example of revolution is: ‘toysrus changed to amazon’. Customers are very savvy these days. if they are not satisfied by your experience, they’ll move to competitors.
- shift from features to Experience. An interesting example would be ‘Why we save the apple product’s box? experience!’
Interesting use cases for SAP Leonardo enterprise machine learning were told as: (1) jewellery producer use image similarity check, (2) car model detector that takes a picture and shows matching models, (3) service ticket intelligence for support tickets.
Also explained SAP S/4 Hana use cases as (1) rainforest connection, in which sensors in forest are placed to get abnormal noise of forest to perform analysing to predict if somebody is doing illegal deforestation, (2) with SAP hybris, sensors in the car are used to detect and reduce speed, and setting up the speed limit remotely, (3) fully personalised shopping experience.
About ML and Blockchain — future trends:
An expert from SAP, discussed SAP Leonardo and business impact of Machine Learning by using open source languages in the framework, i.e., python. The famous open-source projects he discussed were: Sato-cryptobot and Bitcoin.
He also discussed enterprise blockchain technology and explained that blockchain is a reliable record of who owns what, who transacts what. Blockchain is data spread across different nodes i.e. peer to peer connectivity of servers or replicated Who-When tables on different servers (Nodes).
Unlike databases- they are not centralised. It requires Network-based business model. Important properties are sealing of a block so that nobody can change it. It is not suitable for videos and images but can be used to produce and store a hash-key or fingerprint to point to some video or long video stored somewhere else. It helps to create trust and maintaining history of objects e.g., vehicles. There are two blockchain deployment options: public(no permissions)and Consortium(permissioned blockchain).
The use-cases for blockchain technology he explained are quality assurance, trade finance, de-centralised voting compliance and legal documentation, product authenticity validation, farm-to-consumer network cold chain monitoring, and payment fraud prevention.
Customer’s use cases:
Customers who shared their incredible and compelling digital transformation journey were: (1) famous Finnish manufacturing company and other was (2) a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry.
An architect from first company, explained how their unit migrated multivendor identification, authorisation, SaaS hosting, and other processes to SAP cloud platform and on-premise Fiori, by combined launchpad strategy. They required lots of co-ordination, different approaches, and new stuff for developers too, and they learned by doing.
Configuration and platform owner from other company presented use-case for using Sap Fiori applications working in SAP cloud platform. He explained that the requirement for their digital platform is to collect real-time data in a safe and secure manner from other API’s, sensors, the equipments (elevators, escalators, auto-walks, doors and turnstiles), maintenance operations, and people flow. One of the main lessons their team learned by doing SAP solution is to ‘involve users early enough when developing UX’.
Companies are using SAP UX products and have boosted their productivity. Their stance on why Fiori? is SAP Fiori enhances the user experience, improve business efficiency through mobility, automation through digitisation, standard mobile device management and offline capabilities when required, and packaged solutions to help with rollouts.
VP SAP user interfaces, introduced Fiori UX platform. This was the most interesting topic from UX developer perspective! One of his main tips about UX designing was “design any application for mobile first! and then add more features for desktop users”. His main point were:
- developers/architects can create great user experiences with SAP Cloud Platform using experience maker services. For building simple, task-oriented and adaptive interfaces, consistent, personalised omni-channel experiences that are engagement-driven, Faster development with flexible cloud based tooling, and agility to react to evolving UX developments.
- SAP CoPilot and SAP conversational AI, both can be used for a next-generation UX for enterprise software.
- also, new services can be used to best build cross channel and mobile apps with SAP cloud platform
In the next section, we are going see what are the main tools in SAP UX suite and how it fits best for any global company’s requirements.
Open standards based SAP UX products:
From software architecture point-of-view, nowadays primary focus is on using open-source softwares either in cloud-based services that exists at the service/storage layer, or at the frontend tools/applications layers. This combination benefits in price, flexibility, efficient integration, cheap enhancement, mobility, and increased transparency.
For this purpose SAP has launched new products and choices in its Intelligent Enterprise suite few months ago, whose major focus area is innovative user experience. Other features include conversational artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and analytics.
There is an old and lingering perception that SAP is closed and proprietary, but its not! From last year, developers are more interested in simply learning open source SAP UX platform and determining what they need to do to build exceptional, flexible, easy, people-centric, and customer- tailored projects on the web and mobile devices. SAP has given “mix-and-match” platform where developers chose the parts that they need to build applications.
The SAP WEBIDE has made application development rapid task. This Forbes reports tells how intelligent enterprise creates a completely different kind of flexibility. Figure 3 explains that in SAP IDE how user can include other open-source libraries into a project. the library sap.f is the main SAP Fiori library that needs to be added.
Intelligent enterprise suite mainly consists of web apps/ native mobile apps at abstract level as digital touchpoint and the following layers has unique tools associated with it:
- design thinking and process enablement layer, SAP BUILD
- application entry point, SAP portal/Fiori launchpad
- applications layer, Fiori/ mobile cards/ Fiori mobile apps
- technology layer, SAPUI5/ native mobile
- tools layer, UI theme designer/ web IDE, screen personas/ Fiori elements & UI flexibility/ mobile card kit/ mobile development kit/ SDK for iOS / SDK for android
- services layer, cloud platform mobile services
Figure 4 explains how developer very easily can try building a SAP mobile app project in SAP Web IDE. There are built-in templates for creating basic CRUD app. User can specify the environment either a cloud foundry or Neo ABAP, any category, and SAPUI5 version.
After selecting a project type, user gets into the next stage and can start adding new features to the existing template. user can also configure the project properties and if e.g. want to add new plugins, features to project etc. Figure 5 shows the window for project property configurations.
The SAP Fiori launchpad main services are listed below. These are essential ones that need to be implemented in every mobile app nowadays, but if poorly designed or implemented, user might not get the correct idea. Developer can now easily follow the guidelines given here, to provide best look and feel of modern mobile app. Service are:
- Sign Out
- App Finder
- Settings
- App Settings
- Edit Home Page
- Contact Support
- Give Feedback option
- About dialog for launchpad
- About dialog for apps
- Save as Tile is an option you can access from most applications.
Open-source library in SAP Fiori is sap.f which contains SAP Fiori elements. these are part of the SAPUI5 delivery and ensure design consistency while reducing the amount of frontend code needed to build SAP Fiori apps. Figure 6 explains the grid list element, its properties and usages in sap.f API reference. The following floor-plans are available as SAP Fiori elements:
- Analytical list page
- List report
- Object page
- Overview page
- Worklist
Architects can design and implement end-to-end SAP scenarios on Azure and can use the reference architecture for planning. Moreover, this article describes that SCP platform is now generally available on Microsoft azure. An important example of development under the strategic partnership announced between Microsoft and SAP is the Coca-Cola System. For the hybrid architecture using google cloud platform and SAP Fiori, plan in this architecture explains how to run Fiori front-end server (OpenUI5) on GCP.
Conclusion:
In this article we presented
- emerging trend is to build customer centric web and mobile applications.
- summary on SAP recent event on SAP Fiori cloud innovation in UX.
- SAP is actively releasing mature front-end development tools for developers, open-source portal services and native mobile applications
- Intelligent enterprise suite is open source, well-documented, easily customised for customer specific use-cases.
- SAP cloud platform and applications integrates well with all available cloud-based solutions.
Acknowledgements:
I am highly thankful to Ms. Marianne Makinen and Mr. Abhijeet Abhijeet from SAP Finland, for their valuable feedback and comments on this article.
Disclaimer:
This article is purely based on writer’s experience with SCP Fiori and it does not reflect the ideology of any organisation. The information here is authentic to best of writer’s knowledge, it may contain errors and absence of some key information. The content is generated for informative purposes and any action taken upon the information on this article is strictly at your own risk.
About me:
Specialist in providing digital solutions/native mobile applications using various front-end open-source frameworks(backbone, angular, react) also in Microsoft c#.Net, Node.js, and cloud technologies. I have master’s degree in computer sciences and 5+ years of experience in development. Worked for customers in Finland improving their’s business processes including ERP, and developed new key features such as SSO login, FTP export, and meta-data search; for project information management and digital asset management systems.
Also worked as a .Net lecturer and software developer in Pakistan. I moved to Finland in 2012. I like to R&D on system architectures and have published various books, conference/journal papers on real-time data warehousing for business intelligence.
