At our iProConference back in May, there was great interest in the benefits of HR cloud solutions -– improved usability and mobile applications being high up on the agenda. The good news is that SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 (a.k.a. OpenUI5) can help you to bring about mobile user-friendliness to your on-premise solutions -– without having to completely re-invent your processes around the mobile platform.
With SAP Fiori, there already is a large and growing catalog of existing apps that integrate with an SAP on-premise platform. Furthermore, Fiori is built in SAPUI5 (a.k.a. OpenUI5), an open source platform that uses mainstream technologies (JavaScript, jQuery, and LESS); as UI5 apps can securely communicate with a SAP NetWeaver server (usually done via a service medium known as OData), enabling you to pass data between your on-premise system and your UI5 apps, it is quite easy to customise Fiori apps, or build custom apps from scratch; meaning that you can still get apps built to match your processes, rather than having to adapt your processes to the available apps.
This means that pretty much anything that can be done in the back-end, can be now be done via a Fiori/OpenUI app; and the cost for a simple display of data can be reasonably low (some preliminary set-up for the technical infrastructure may also be required).
So filling in your online Time Sheet on the bus may be closer than you think! In case you are not sure how to proceed when wanting to create a mobile enhancement for an existing on-premise process, here are some questions to consider, both from a functional and technical perspective:
- Is your system Gateway ready?
- Will you need to upgrade your SAP on-premise system? If your system has a release of SAP NetWeaver prior to 7.4, it may require an add-on installation to enable the necessary Gateway services.
- Will you need to set-up and configure the relevant Gateway services? If you have not made use of other Gateway services then these will have to be set-up correctly.
- How far does the process you wish to enhance with a mobile app differ from the standard SAP process, and therefore any corresponding Fiori implementation? In an ideal world, you would be able to find an app right out of the box for your process. But in reality, this is not always possible, especially if your processes do not correspond strictly to SAP standard and/or are highly customised.
- In the scenario where you have a close-enough correspondence with SAP standard, it may be possible to enhance an existing Fiori app.
- Alternatively, if your process is too highly customised and/or does not feature a corresponding Fiori app, you will have to build your UI5 app from scratch.
- Think through each step of the process that you wish to enhance to mobile:
- The principle of „Keep It Simple“ applies double for mobile: limited space means less information can be shown comfortably on a mobile screen than on a computer. What is the information that is strictly necessary on any screen at a given time?
- Does your process simply read information from the back-end to display (i.e. Read only)? Or do you also need your process to update information in the back-end (i.e. Create, Update, Delete)?
- If you are updating information, do you need to perform validation in the app? (i.e. before sending the update information to the back-end) Or can you send the data straight to the back-end to deal with it? In-app validation will require more effort, but may be necessary for complex data input.
- If your process is complex, with multiple steps and screens, can it be broken down into smaller, simpler & separate processes? One complex app with many „moving parts“ may be harder to create than a few simpler, more focused apps.
- If your process is a custom one, with an existing config./code base, can the existing implementation be easily mapped to the necessary functions of the app?
- Most apps will interact with the back-end according to the HTTP/OData CRUD operations: Create, Read, Update, Delete. If your custom process can be easily mapped to these functions, then it should be easily implementable as an app.
- If you can not break down your process to those formal CRUD operations, what are the complexities that are preventing this? Is it possible to break down the process, as in step 3d above, so that this level of formality can be achieved?
I hope that these questions will at least provide a starting point for anyone interested in Fiori/UI5 development. We will go into greater detail and explore the possibilities of Fiori and OpenUI5 in forthcoming blog posts. In the meanwhile, if you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us! Or if you are interested in reading more, you can read about a simple SAPUI5 MSS app called Where Is My Team?
