SAP Community - User Experience

Save the Date for Our Exclusive SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series!

2024-05-31T17:20:45.505000+02:00

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, we offer a fully-fledged cloud ERP that optimizes processes and helps your business to run smoothly. We as the Cloud ERP PSCC organization strive to enable our valued customers and partners to take full advantage of the benefits our solution brings for the intelligent, sustainable enterprise.

Therefore, we offer a variety of enablement assets to explain the features and functions of each new release and make sure that you get the maximum value out of your investment.

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Early Release Series is a series of compelling live product expert sessions that takes place twice a year and is designed by product experts for product experts to give customers, partners, and colleagues a special insider’s preview into the highlights for selected lines of business and industries, 1-2 weeks before the actual release. In a span of multiple days, we give you the opportunity to see the latest demos, ask your questions, and get answers straight from the product experts before everyone else.

In July 2024, we will be back with 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you.

️ Don't miss this chance and register now!

Monday, July 8, 2024

12:30 pm - 2:00 pm	Artificial Intelligence and Technologies	Register here
2:00 pm - 2:45 pm	Two-Tier ERP	Register here
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm	Manufacturing	Register here
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm	SAP Activate, SAP Cloud ALM, Test Automation Tool	Register here

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

1:00 pm - 1:30 pm	Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management	Register here
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm	Cross Technology Topics	Register here
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm	Professional Services	Register here
4:00 pm - 4:45 pm	Product Compliance	Register here

Wednesday, July 10, 2024

1:00 pm - 1:45 pm	Sourcing and Procurement	Register here
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm	Asset Management	Register here
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm	SAP User Experience	Register here
4:00 pm - 4:45 pm	Public Sector Management	Register here

Thursday, July 11, 2024

1:00 pm - 1:45 pm	Service	Register here
2:00 pm - 2:45 pm	Extensibility	Register here
3:00 pm - 3:45 pm	Sales	Register here
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm	Solution Orders and Subscription Billing	Register here

Friday, July 12, 2024

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm	Finance	Register here
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm	Supply Chain Management	Register here
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm	Governance, Risk, and Compliance	Register here
4:00 pm - 4:45 pm	Environment, Health, and Safety	Register here

Find the recordings of previous live sessions here, here, and here.

How to Sign Up for the SAP Enterprise Support Edition as a Customer/Partner

In order to sign up for the online sessions, you will need to have an active SAP Learning Hub license. While the series is available across all editions, you can find the steps below how to register for the SAP Enterprise Support edition in case you don’t already have access to any of the editions yet.

Navigate to the sign up page
Click the Sign up button. Authenticate yourself with your s-user ID and password. Upon first access, the system will check your eligibility, create a new SAP Learning Hub user, and populate your learning catalog respectively. Within two hours, you will then receive a registration confirmation via e-mail.
After you have received the confirmation e-mail, the registration process is complete.

How to Sign Up for the Internal Edition as an SAP Employee

In order to sign up for the online sessions, you will need to have an SAP Learning Hub license. In case you have no edition assigned to your profile, please register here for the Internal Edition which is free of charge.

Make sure to be logged onto the SAP Learning Hub before opening the URL. In case the link doesn't open, copy and paste it into your browser. If you face any other issues with your login, please contact the help center.

Follow the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition tag and the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with the latest blog posts.

🎙️ Inside SAP S/4HANA Cloud

There is no customer success without project success and product success! Leverage the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA Cloud experts, partners, and customers, sharing their SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation project best practices and lessons learned – anywhere, anytime. In this podcast, we give you all ingredients to get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA Cloud project a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge!

💻openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Our openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA Cloud offer an exciting new learning opportunity. What began with a small batch of 20 videos, has now become a channel with more than 50 microlearnings that have generated over 20,000 views. Today, we cover multiple lines of business such as finance, manufacturing, and supply chain management, and key technology topics like Master Data Management, extensibility, SAP User Experience, and upgrade management. We are continuously adding new microlearnings to our channel, so make sure you check them out.

🗣️ Your Voice Matters

You want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud topics? We have just the right place for you! Join our interactive community where we bring together customers, partners, and SAP experts with a clear mission: To engage with one another about best practices and product solutions. We invite you to explore the ‘one-stop shop’ as the central place for all resources, tools, content questions, answers and to connect with experts who will guide you through your journey to the intelligent, sustainable enterprise.

🔎Find All Our Assets

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the foundation of the intelligent, sustainable enterprise and is an innovative, robust, and scalable ERP. We at Cloud ERP Product Success and Cloud Co-Innovation offer a service as versatile as our product itself. Check out the numerous offerings our team has created for you below:

🎯Where to Find More Information:

Explore the ready-to-run cloud ERP here: https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html
Watch our SAP S/4HANA Cloud product update videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWV533hWWvDnnyN2j-CcUheNN-GaNCb3H
Check out our digital enablement wheel here: https://chart-bdmaicr0au.dispatcher.eu2.hana.ondemand.com/index.html?hc_reset
Listen to our podcast here: https://podcast.opensap.info/inside-sap/
Watch our openSAP microlearnings to learn about SAP S/4HANA Cloud topics at your own pace here: https://microlearning.opensap.com/
Find best practices on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition here: https://me.sap.com/processnavigator/SolS/EARL_SolS-013/latest?region=DE
Check out what’s new here: https://help.sap.com/doc/ce01d82756b947a1a043a5d5a3204226
Find help here: https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_S4HANA_CLOUD
Read the feature scope description here: https://help.sap.com/doc/7c9e0bbbd1664c2581b2038a1c7ae4b3

Preliminary What’s New Information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402.4

2024-06-06T09:20:15.384000+02:00

Preliminary versions of What’s New information and of the Product Assistance are now available for customers and partners to get a preview on the upcoming new and changed features of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402.4.

You can find this preview on the current Help Portal page SAP S/4HANA Cloud (see What’s New section “Preview of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2402.4”). To access the Preliminary What’s New information, please use the What’s New Viewer or the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool.

The RASD tool provides you with a personalized and tailored view on What’s New information based on the activated and used scope within your system. The preliminary information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2402.4 will be available in RASD within the next few days. We recommend using RASD to prepare for upgrades and updates of your system and to focus on the new and changed features that are relevant for you.

A valid S-User ID is needed to use the RASD tool and to view all the preliminary content stated above.

SAPUI5 Tables: Maximizing efficiency through advanced Copy & Paste

2024-06-06T14:37:45.850000+02:00

SAP Fiori provides a modern, intelligent, and consistent user experience for SAP solutions. The technologies & tools of SAP Fiori, such as SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori elements, offer extensive capabilities for building, extending and running SAP's business applications. When using SAP Fiori, you'll tap into a whole world of generic features of SAP's technologies, that make your life easier. From Joule, SAP’s AI Copilot down to clever copy & paste capabilities, you'll be amazed at how you survived without them.

Advanced Copy & Paste and cell selection

SAPUI5 1.124 improves copy & paste operations in tables, letting business users work even more in a natural way with improved productivity. See these common scenarios:

1. Copy data from a table
Copy data from a table by selecting rows or a group of cells ('lasso select') and paste to a MS Excel sheet or other applications. Play with the sample application Table - CellSelector, CopyProvider.

Picture 1: Row selection

Picture 2: Cell selection

2. Paste data to a table
Paste tabular data from some source to a table in an SAPUI5 application. This typically initiates a handling of new entries, depending on the application. Use the sample application Cell Selection, Copy & Paste to test. In this context see Streamlining data entry: Exploring the new 'Paste' feature in Fiori Elements V4 tables.

3. Copy a set of values from a table to another field such as a filter field
Use sample app Smart (Responsive) Table with Criticality to try this.

Picture 3: Copy from a cell selection

Picture 4: Paste copied cells

4. Handling split cells with multiple values
In the pictures above you see a column with combined product name and its ID. To handle this, the MS Excel export offers a 'Split cells with multiple values' option. You can achieve a similar behavior for copying data by using 'Paste Special… -> As Unicode Text' when pasting into MS Excel. (See details in Copying and Pasting from External Applications to Tables and CopyProvider.extractDataHandler.)

Picture 5: Paste Special in MS Excel

For application developers

To enable the Copy and Cell Selection features for a table in your custom application, see the details in:

Please note: While these features are built into the Smart Table as well as the Responsive Table and Grid Table control, the availability in individual applications might depend on whether the application enabled the feature. This is the case for applications based on SAP Fiori elements and many other SAPUI5 apps.

In this context, please see details on the Spreadsheet Export. Also note that the Responsive Table received a comprehensive update of its keyboard handling.

SAP Sapphire 2024 highlights on UX, application development, and AI

2024-06-06T23:35:53.798000+02:00

SAP Sapphire 2024 was amazing. It was definitely the year of AI. In addition to the usual executive keynotes, customer presentations, and inspirational speakers, every product-focused session I attended included some discussion on how artificial intelligence will make the product experience better. Since my focus was on meeting customers and partners to explain our UX strategy and how to implement the SAP Fiori user experience as they transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, this summary will focus on those dimensions. You can see the full session catalog if you want to see what else was at the event, which also includes the ASUG Annual Conference.

UX Engineering solutions appeared across SAP Sapphire

It was extremely gratifying to see the solutions that our Cloud ERP UX Engineering team develops in so many sessions. My Home was in several keynotes, along with examples of SAP Fiori elements apps. The new SAP Fiori tools AI was in the SAP Build Code sessions and in the public cloud roadmap session. One of the most satisfying parts of the conference was having a gentleman introduce himself during one of the ASUG sessions on SAP S/4HANA migration. We had met at Sapphire around eight years ago and as a result of our conversation, he implemented SAP Screen Personas at his gourmet food company and it now runs in 15 factories, saving them lots of money every year.

The theme of SAP Sapphire 2024 was “Bring out your best.”

Unlock business agility with cloud ERP by adopting innovation more quickly

The first session I attended after the AI-heavy keynote was “Unlock business agility with cloud ERP”. Jan Gilg and Eric van Rossum discussed the evolution of ERP over the past decade. It continued the AI theme with examples of AI-driven insights and predictions of how they will change how customers use ERP to deliver new experiences to create new revenue streams. Eric also talked about different kinds of risk and how the risk of doing nothing is getting more expensive, as early adopters of AI will generate an insurmountable lead over their competitors.

One of the highlights was the demo of a new integration with Microsoft Copilot. They showed an intelligent, AI-based assistant that you can interact with via chat to locate any information in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system. Ask questions in natural language and receive answers as text or charts, along with the ability to open the relevant app that contains the source data. It builds on the existing integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud and Microsoft Teams that enables our collaborative ERP. This enhancement adds Microsoft Teams chat with an AI assistant in addition to the ability to chat with your human colleagues.

One topic in the unlock business agility session was how much the user experience improved in the last ten years.

Watch ERP169 “Unlock business agility with cloud ERP” on-demand.

The new ERP mindset is based on using standard processes everywhere you can

Another great SAP S/4HANA session was a panel discussion in which experts talked about “The new ERP mindset.” The mix of customer (Daniel Schumacher from Toyota Material Handling), partner (Rich Sernyak from PwC), and SAP (Eric van Rossum) vantage points provided a diverse perspective on what ERP means today. Maura Hameroff moderated.

The new ERP mindset means moving to standard processes and a more modular approach instead of using extensive customizations just because you can. Here are the key recommendations from the panelists”

PwC: define a clear business outcome, implement a scalable and agile platform to integrate new technologies such as AI, focus on predictability of time and cost.
Toyota: move from thinking about ERP for managing your current business to focusing on ERP as the platform to drive business transformation over next decade.
SAP: Focus on “opportunity readiness” to give your business the agility to adopt new business models and consume continuous innovation from SAP.

As both a customer of SAP S/4HANA and implementation partner, for a successful project, PwC also recommended considering which of your business processes are standard and which give you differentiated capabilities. For the former, use standard SAP; for the latter, follow clean core processes and extend your core system.

Toyota advised that you should not be afraid to disrupt your own business. Embrace disruptive technologies and try them out to understand the impact. One point Daniel made about the new ERP mindset is that what you used before successfully might not work for you tomorrow. He recommended having an open mind when you evaluate your processes. Fit to standard works in most cases. 80% of what most companies do is a commoditized process. Save your customization for what defines and differentiates your business.

Watch TRE321 “The new ERP mindset” on-demand.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition roadmap session

Wow. This was a very fast-paced session, delivered by Arpan Shah, head of product management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. He shared planned innovations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition that are likely to ship by the end of the year. Each topic included a short demo. Sorry if I missed any; they came pretty quickly. Usual roadmap disclaimer - all of these are planned and might not make it into the product.

My Home will make it easier access to the applications you use most with some AI-generated recommendations.
Microsoft Copilot integration brings the next step of collaborative ERP with easier access to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition through Microsoft Copilot.
Joule copilot makes your experience easier within the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition solution by offering context-based instructions of how to complete your work more effectively.
Easy filter lets you intuitively filter data in SAP Fiori elements list report applications using natural language.
Smart summarization makes information in object pages easier to share through email or the collaboration tool of your choice.
Financial business insights uses AI to discover what’s meaningful within selected review booklets.
A new version toggle for the Manage Journal Entries app simplifies change management for new apps by letting people try out new applications without risk and the ability to switch back to the original app.
Intelligent recommendations for advanced returns management reduces manual effort and facilitates faster returns order creation by prefilling fields using most common scenarios and history.
Intelligent project recommendations for employees give you higher confidence in matching employees with projects.
Hands-free production order management uses natural language through voice with Joule. This is useful in environments where there are typically no keyboards.
AI-driven back order processing execution lets you change prioritization through the Joule natural language interface.

Watch ERP127 “SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: Find out what’s next” on-demand.

Arpan Shah preparing to run through a rapid-fire stream of planned innovations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

The ASUG Hub was a focal point of conversations about SAP S/4HANA migration

As the SAP Point of contact for user experience within ASUG, I spent much of my time in the ASUG Hub, speaking with customers about UX issues, generally in the context of moving to SAP S/4HANA or bringing the SAP Fiori user experience to a larger percentage of their organization.

ASUG hosted several customer roundtables and community alliance meet-ups where ASUG members could learn from peers and interact with SAP experts about how to generate more value from their investments in SAP. Todd Lutz, Michael Giessner, and Peter Keller hosted a great discussion on best practices for migrating to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Mohammed Siddiqui, Cristin Charbonneau, and Todd Lutz held a live town hall to understand what issues are most important to the ASUG community.

It was great to meet so many old friends and people who I knew only from online encounters in various ASUG calls or the various user groups that I host for SAP Fiori developers or business analysts that want to adapt classic UI screens using SAP Screen Personas.

Thank you to everyone that attended my session, ASUG301 in the ASUG Hub. I talked about the state of SAP Fiori today, how we got here, and where we are going by adding AI to further accelerate application development and streamline the user experience. The audience was a good mix, some customers that are using SAP Fiori throughout their enterprise, many with some SAP Fiori deployed, and a few who have not yet started their SAP Fiori journey. If you missed it, you can download the slides.

My ASUG session covered the past, present, and future of SAP Fiori

Leadership lessons have a longer lifetime than technology

Another great session was a panel discussion on “Commonalities, not differences: Insights in military leadership.” Daria Wick moderated the conversation with Doug Melville, and a senior military leader. Melville is author of “Invisible Generals”, where he shares his family history that includes America’s first Black generals, father and son Benjamin O. Davis Sr. and Jr., who helped integrate America’s military and create the Tuskegee Airmen.

Peter with Doug Melville, author of Invisible Generals

The panelists talked about a variety of leadership topics including teamwork, empowerment, diversity, inclusion, and how to leave a lasting legacy. The recommendation to lead with inspiration rather than intimidation moved the conversation to some funny sports references about which players you would want to coach. The take away was even the difficult players can help a team win championships. Watch The Last Dance to see what they talked about.

In another session on inclusion, Julia White, SAP’s Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer, Ada Agrait, SAP’s SVP and Global Head of Corporate Marketing, and Margot Goodson, VP, Head of North America Diversity & Inclusion, had a panel discussion about “Strengthening underrepresented communities: partnerships and best practices.” They talked about how to bring in under-represented groups to match your organization to the market it serves. Their top recommendations:

Julia: rely on diverse teams or risk bringing a product to market that serves the needs of only the people on the design team
Ada: follow the online conversations of the people you want to recruit so you learn what’s important to them and the language they use
Margot: Make DEI part of your DNA so you naturally recruit diverse and inclusive teams rather than having to fill gaps later

These were some highlights. My full list of UX and Application Development sessions at Sapphire 2024was in my preview blog post.

My colleague, Paul Saunders, wrote an excellent summary of Sapphire on LinkedIn.

It was also great to meet so many SAP colleagues in person for the first time, including Paul, Sinit, Daria, Christian, Marco, Eric, Maura, Sid, Mark, Sibylle, Margot, Tracy, Steve, and more (apologies if your name doesn’t appear).

We are taking the conversation deeper at our next SAP Fiori Innovation Day

If you want to go deeper on SAP Fiori and adjacent topics, we have our next SAP Fiori Innovation Day in Chicago on Tuesday, August 13. Speakers from SAP, Mindset Consulting, Convergent IS, and Sovanta will cover what’s new in SAP’s UX portfolio, how to get started with SAP Fiori, AI innovations, the design process, and an optional hands-on workshop in which you will exercise all our tools and technologies to build an SAP Fiori app. Registration is now open.

On behalf of the SAP Cloud ERP UX Engineering team, Peter Spielvogel.

Adapt your app to SAPUI5 2.x - Make an impact by joining our CEI project

2024-06-10T08:00:49.636000+02:00

SAP Customer Engagement Initiatives (CEI) on https://influence.sap.com allow you, as an SAP customer or partner, to gain early insights into SAP's product developments and work directly with SAP teams to shape future product directions. This project presents a unique opportunity to work with SAPUI5 product owners and engineering teams, leveraging your expertise to directly address real-world challenges from your custom development projects.

Join the upcoming CEI project to make an impact on how applications are adapted to SAPUI5 2.x

SAPUI5 is SAP’s JavaScript framework and UI library for building cross-platform, enterprise-grade Web applications. SAPUI5 has been a solid foundation for enterprise apps for more than a decade and is still in its first major version. Despite its continuous evolution and the dedicated SAPUI5 modularization project from a few years ago, SAPUI5 has remained backward compatible. However, with new requirements, such as the demand for strict Content Security Policy, as well as the evolution of major browsers (e.g. the introduction of new technologies), SAPUI5 needs to adapt. SAPUI5 is preparing for the future by leaving behind outdated concepts like synchronous network requests.

You now have the chance to understand the impact of SAPUI5 2.x on SAP’s applications, on your own applications, and on the system landscape. In this CEI project you will receive guidance, best practices, and tool support to adapt your own custom apps to SAPUI5 2.x. (If you like you can already have a look at similar details for OpenUI5 in Introducing OpenUI5 2.x.)

Project Goals and Activities

Validate concepts for moving existing SAPUI5 1.x apps to SAPUI5 2.x such as the necessary code changes and tool support & documentation on the code adaptation
Identify existing pain points
Gather prioritized requirements for the SAPUI5 road map with regards to new major versions

Format of Activities, Estimated Effort

Participants need to be available in the August/September 2024 timeframe for virtual sessions. Estimated effort: approx. 10h for own development activities + 6h for virtual calls:

Initial call (1h) in mid-August 2024 to outline the project and explain the transition to SAPUI5 2.x
3 weekly calls (1h) for Q&A and feedback in August / early September
A final feedback call (1h) mid September to collect & prioritize feedback
Closing call (1h) in September

Prerequisites

This is your chance to give feedback on all aspects of moving to SAPUI5 2.x and influence the direction of the SAPUI5 road map. Join this project if

you are working in development projects and are familiar with SAPUI5 code
you have custom SAPUI5 1.x apps with freestyle SAPUI5 code, which you can adapt to SAPUI5 2.x. (This can be freestyle SAPUI5 apps or SAP Fiori elements apps with extensions / custom page.)
you are using your SAP Business Application Studio / VS Code environment with SAP Fiori tools.

Register for the CEI project 'SAPUI5 2.x' from June 10 - July 11, 2024.

Once the registration process is finalized, the project team invites participants for the initial call to go through the project scope and timelines.

Celebrating Horizon! The new look and feel for SAP turns three

2024-06-12T11:01:57.537000+02:00

Happy Anniversary Horizon!

Time passed quickly and we are thrilled to celebrate the third anniversary of the Horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori - an integral part of our User Experience (UX) design. Over these years, Horizon has evolved and seamlessly integrated into SAP's product portfolio, providing our users with a simplified, personalized, and engaging user experience.

How did it start?

Born out of rigorous testing and research, Horizon has tremendously transformed how millions of users interact with SAP software. Its introduction marked a significant paradigm shift in SAP's design model and marks the entry of a revolutionary user experience across all products. Chris Allen, Head of SAP Design Systems and Language, focused on many design trends and led the core team to explore several directions. UX Designers Gerard Keane and Simone Daiber were co-leading the team of designers working on the creation of Horizon visual language foundations for web applications, including visual design specifications for UI components. The core design team worked closely with product designers representing every line of business to contribute ideas and iterate on them together. A close alignment and iterative approach with technology ensured a seamless implementation of the new Horizon visual theme – a truly collaborative effort across the entire company.

“While the core team focused on the visual design for Horizon to achieve a more, inclusive and accessible look and feel, the idea was also to give more power and flexibility to the different product areas so they could develop their own product-specific innovations as well.” (Gerard Keane, UX Designer at SAP)

Building an identity

With Horizon, the design team followed a joint vision to not only create a new face for SAP Fiori, but to connect themes and how they are set up technically. The team around Gerard and Simone worked hard to create a theming system with design tokens that enable a simple and consistent way to implement the styles adhering to the latest accessibility standards for all supported themes across all of the SAP UI technologies. The Horizon theme family consists of not only light and dark theme variants, but also high-contrast black and white to that ensure a fully inclusive user experience for all SAP customers. Check out the design token and theming design guidelines for more details.

“We were no longer handing over mockups and started to create tokens a developer could actually use.” (Gerard Keane, UX Designer at SAP)

Early design explorations for the Horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori

Additional 72 font styles introduced and new SAP icon styleWhile creating Horizon, the team of designers explored many design style variations and techniques to create an appealing visual theme The bespoke 72 font was expanded to include new styles to help improve typographic visual hierarchy and icons were redesigned with a bolder and more contemporary appearance matching to weights of the text used for actions.

Trial and error, disruptive ideas plus lots of feedback and iterations were involved in the process. Grey input fields seemed to be neat and tidy, however they had to go: users didn’t recognize they could actually write into those input fields, they appeared to be greyed out. Another first with Horizon was the “switch”. When Horizon was introduced, users could switch the new theme on or off again with a toggle in the header bar. This was a great way for users to get a glimpse of and get used to the new theme at their own pace.

Switching from the old theme to the new Horizon theme made easy for end users

“The best thing about Horizon is, that it could strike a spark to inspire SAP design leadership in both brand and product design to work together towards a more inclusive, shared company visual identity.” (Gerard Keane)

The Horizon was specially created to be compliant with web accessibility standards and heavily influenced SAP’s corporate branding and members of the project have been working closely with SAP Branding ever since Horizon was introduced to ensure a consistent experience for our customers and users.

Light and dark theme variation of Horizon with their color palettes

Horizon’s impact and evolution:

Our commitment to putting our users front and center, coupled with the beauty of Horizon, has ensured it’s not just about aesthetic appeal, but also about enhancing the overall efficiency and inclusivity of businesses.

To understand Horizon's impact, let's recap its innovative features and how they've brought about significant changes.

Improved visualization: The Horizon visual theme offers a clean, modern interface with appealing visuals, increasing software usability.
Personalization: Horizon allows users to personalize their SAP Fiori applications, a step towards shaping applications per the user's role, tasks, and preference, thus, enhancing productivity.
Responsive design: In our digitally-driven world, being device agnostic is critical. With Horizon's responsive and adaptive design, users can access SAP Fiori applications from any device – smartphone, tablet, or desktop – keeping businesses connected and agile.

With SAP S/4HANA being a frontrunner and leading example, Horizon has been at the forefront, making tasks simpler and more streamlined for users. The evolution has not stopped; instead, it continues to build on its earlier successes, contributing significantly to SAP's vision of a user-centric design approach. And our customers and users agree:

“It’s just easier to navigate what you want to see.”

“New (theme) is visually better, the colors are more friendly – (I) can imagine to use it on the iPad.”

“(The theme) is leading edge – it is modern, interesting, easy to navigate, and supportive.”

After: The Horizon theme in the latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud

The Future begins today

As we step into the fourth year of Horizon's life, our aim remains unchanged – to create intuitive, business-oriented, and visually appealing software experiences. With new technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, our commitment to enhancing our users’ experience is unwavering.

While we celebrate Horizon's third anniversary, our teams are already at work, using user feedback to further refine this ever-evolving visual theme. In fact, you can check out some of the Improvements to the Horizon Visual Theme from last year based on feedback and insights from our users. We continually aim to bridge the gap between functionality and inclusive usability, providing our users with software experiences that are as enriching as they are productive.

Finally, we’d like to express our deepest gratitude to our customers, partners, and team members who have been pivotal in making this journey successful. Here's to creating more experiences, solving more challenges, and revolutionizing more processes with Horizon.

Happy Birthday, Horizon!

The CEI Project:Your Opportunity to Influence Availability Check in Two-Tier ERP Subsidiary Business

2024-06-18T11:16:00.908000+02:00

SAP's Customer Engagement Initiatives (CEI) platform, found at https://influence.sap.com, empowers SAP customers and partners by offering early access to SAP product developments. As a participant, you have the opportunity to interact directly with SAP product experts to influence future product direction.

This CEI project's focus is on improving real-time availability checks across a dispersed landscape, such as in Two-Tier ERP, where you have the power to influence the product.

With Availability Check in Two-Tier ERP Subsidiary Business (we call it as External Availability Check or EAC), a subsidiary can request product availability from the company's headquarters to fulfil customer demands, which can be directly confirmed to the end customers.

Participating in this project presents a unique opportunity for you to liaise with product specialists and make a significant impact on the project's outcomes.

Project objectives and activities include:

Evaluating ideas
Brainstorming use-cases
Discussing existing challenges and bottlenecks
Identifying potential alternative solutions
Prioritizing features and processes

The format and efforts involved in project activities are as follows:

Initial Calls
Visits to customer sites (shadowing), subject to availability
Workshop discussions
Scheduled video/teleconferences
End User Usability testing
Early prototype testing
Wrapping up with a closing call

To participate, you should meet the following prerequisites:

You are planning to, or have already implemented, a Cloud ERP for your subsidiaries
You are an expert or influencer, actively engaged with a dispersed landscape
You are a business leader well-versed in the dynamics of this process

Here is the link to register yourselves: CEI Project - EAC June 10 - July 11, 2024

Once the registration process is finalized, the project team invites participants for the initial call to go through the project scope and timelines.

To know more about Two-Tier ERP, kindly go through below collection of blogs:

https://community.sap.com/t5/enterprise-resource-planning-blogs-by-sap/offerings-in-two-tier-erp-the-collection/ba-p/13522207

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402.4: Final What's New & Product Assistance available

2024-06-20T14:46:39.410000+02:00

With immediate effect, the final What's New information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402.4 is now available. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is based on the technical product SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

To access the Final What’s New information, please use the What’s New Viewer.

For further formats and languages of the What's New information, as well as pre-filtered views, please use the following SAP S/4HANA Cloud Help Portal page.

In addition, the final Product Assistance (aka Application Help) for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402.4 is available. Please use the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Help Portal page to access the Product Assistance in multiple languages.

For you as a customers, we recommend to also use the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool.

The Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool provides you with a personalized and tailored view on What’s New information based on the activated and used scope within your system. The information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402.4 will be available in RASD within the next few days. A valid Customer S-user ID is required for login. We recommend to use RASD to prepare for upgrades and updates of your system and to focus on the new and changed features that are relevant for you as a customer.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408 What’s New: Leave us your Feedback!

2024-06-21T13:11:04.466000+02:00

We want to get your feedback on What’s New for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to make the information provided more useful for you. To do this, we are making a new commenting feature available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408 in a pilot phase that starts now and will end on August 21, 2024.

There is a new commenting feature available for the What’s New in the release SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408. The feature is now available for this release as part of a pilot that will end on August 21, 2024. With this commenting feature you can leave your direct feedback to the What’s New document authors. During the pilot, authors will evaluate your feedback and incorporate it into the documentation, if needed. We hope that by opening this channel of communication, we can learn how to further improve our What’s New content for you. For this, your feedback is essential!

To use this feature, you need to be logged into the Help Portal. The feature will only be available in the English version of the documents. To learn more about how the feedback process works in SAP Help Portal, see Giving Documentation Feedback.

Preliminary What’s New Information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

2024-06-21T13:11:33.177000+02:00

Preliminary versions of What’s New information and of the Product Assistance are now available for customers and partners to get a preview on the upcoming new and changed features of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408.

You can find this preview on the current Help Portal page SAP S/4HANA Cloud (see What’s New section “Preview of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408”). To access the Preliminary What’s New information, please use the What’s New Viewer or the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool.

The RASD tool provides you with a personalized and tailored view on What’s New information based on the activated and used scope within your system. The preliminary information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408 will be available in RASD within the next few days. We recommend using RASD to prepare for upgrades and updates of your system and to focus on the new and changed features that are relevant for you. A valid S-User ID is needed to use the RASD tool and to view all the preliminary content stated above.

In this release, we will be piloting the new Commenting Feature for What's New documentation. See this blog for more information.

Analyze License Consumption Consolidated Data with the SAM4U Solution from SAP

2024-06-27T01:06:33.396000+02:00

Are you still paying for license analysis consultancy services that use their proprietary tools, marketed as miracle solutions? Forget about it! Now you can leverage an SAP solution that offers beautifully designed Fiori views to analyze user, engine, and even HANA Enterprise Edition license consumption.

Introducing SAM4U: The SAP Solution for License Analysis

Meet SAM4U, the innovative solution designed by SAP to streamline your license analysis. You can explore the demo version right from our website.

Today’s post is about consolidated data analysis and how you can create a consolidation corresponding to your measurement plan in just a few minutes.

When you install the SAM4U extractor to your backend system (read more about it in our previous blogs), you can start piping data to SAM4U, for instance, via a ZIPped file.

Pic. 01. Uploading ZIP File Produced by SAM4U Extractor

If you're uploading a file for the first time, it will also create system metadata from the extracted dataset. Each subsequent upload is grouped at the system level, allowing you to drill down and see all datasets you’ve uploaded:

Pic. 02. Datasets Overview for a Certain System

Once you’ve uploaded data for all systems for your consolidation, navigate to the “Consolidation” view. Click the create button to join all the systems you’d like to consolidate. You can even add HANA EE systems, ensuring that HANA EE license consumption KPIs in the SAM4U tool are also populated:

Pic. 03. Creation of Consolidation

That’s it! You’ve done it yourself 😊 Now SAM4U KPIs are filled, and you can enjoy the detailed analysis of your license consumption. In our example, we noticed we're using more licenses than we're entitled to 😉

Pic. 04. Users’ Licenses Consumption Analysis

Install and enjoy the SAM4U tool, or get it hosted by us to keep your costs under control.

P.S. Check out our entire blog series about the SAM4U tool at this link: SAM4U as a Service.

Use SAM4U Tool to Optimize Consolidated User Classification and Avoid License Compliance Gaps

2024-06-28T15:40:49.930000+02:00

Haven't heard about the SAM4U tool from SAP that helps manage and optimize your license adoption and consumption? This tool provides clarity and eliminates the need for costly professional services you might be hiring now. The only numbers you can trust when discussing licenses are those from SAP. SAM4U, recently released to SAP customers, answers all your license consumption questions. See it in action on our website: Skybuffer!

Streamline Your License Management with SAM4U

Today, we'll explore a simple use case of analyzing consolidated data from your SAP backend system to provide insights into the number of users classified automatically during system metering or audit. These users are often assigned to the most expensive professional metric of your price list, generating high costs for the company. Manual user classification for on-premise systems is the key to proper SAP license entitlement consumption.

Preparation Steps:

Install SAM4U Extractor: Install the SAM4U extractor in all SAP backend systems that are part of the consolidation (measurement plan).
Extract and Upload Data: Extract data from the SAP backend and upload it to the SAM4U tool.

Once these steps are completed, you can examine the Classified/Dialog Users KPI:

Pic.01. SAM4U Users Analytics - Classified/Dialog Users KPI

The Classified/Dialog Users KPI shows you:

Licensed Users: The number of “seats” of different types purchased from SAP to cover SAP user IDs in your landscape. If the Licensed number is smaller than the Dialog number, as in our example, you have a license compliance gap. You can either clean your SAP backend systems (discussed in future blog posts) or purchase additional SAP licenses.
Dialog Users: The consolidated number of SAP user IDs across all systems in your SAP landscape.
Classified Users: The consolidated number of SAP user IDs manually classified in SAP backend systems. This means your SAP Basis team has set user classification via the SU01 transaction during user ID creation or mass classified users via the USMM2 transaction, for example.

Important: If the number of Classified users is smaller than Dialog users, it indicates that some users (the delta between Dialog and Classified 😊) are automatically classified and assigned the maximum license type, potentially leading to extra license costs. Manual classification of these users can result in significant savings!

By clicking on the Classified bar, you can view the list of all user IDs that are automatically classified, re-classify them, and improve your SAP license consumption.

Pic.02. SAM4U Users Analytics – A List of Automatically Classified Users

Simple and valuable, isn’t it? If you'd like to see SAM4U in action, the demo instance is available on our website: Skybuffer, where you can also get your private SAM4U instance for productive use.

P.S. Check out our entire blog series about the SAM4U tool here: SAM4U as a Service.

Blast Off! UI5 Web Components 2.0 is Now Live!

2024-07-04T12:15:37.669000+02:00

A Journey of Innovation and Growth

Since the release of UI5 Web Components 1.0 in 2021, our journey has been marked by unwavering innovation and a commitment to excellence. Over the past three years, we have listened to our community, refined our technologies, and expanded our capabilities. Today, we stand at a pivotal moment in our evolution with the launch of UI5 Web Components 2.0.

Picture 1: UI5 Web Components timeline

The Evolution of UI5 Web Components

Our project has continuously evolved, embracing new web standards, eliminating legacy code, and integrating invaluable user feedback from our community to enhance our APIs. This journey culminated in April with the unveiling of the first Release Candidate for UI5 Web Components 2.0.

Announcing UI5 Web Components 2.0! 🎉

Today, we are thrilled to officially launch UI5 Web Components 2.0. This major release signifies our commitment to providing cutting-edge tools for web development. Version 2.0 not only enhances performance and reliability but also sets the stage for future innovations.

Key Benefits of UI5 Web Components 2.0

UI5 Web Components 2.0 introduces several substantial improvements:

Embracing New Standards: Future-proofing UI5 Web Components.

Consistent APIs: Streamlined and more intuitive, albeit with some breaking changes.

Elimination of Legacy Code: Reducing footprint and enhancing quality by minimizing bugs.

Looking ahead, we will adhere to Semantic Versioning and release major updates more frequently to keep pace with technological advancements.

What's New in UI5 Web Components 2.0?

Revolutionary Popover API: Experience a standardized, consistent, and flexible mechanism for displaying popover content across all relevant components.

This API allows popups to display correctly above all other content, eliminating the need for the "static area" used in version 1.x. Previously, popups were placed in a static area within the body to ensure correct positioning despite various CSS rules. In version 2.x, the popover API simplifies the DOM structure by incorporating the popover directly within the component. This results in easier development, maintenance, and enhanced styling capabilities. It also allows components with popups to have physical children, supporting custom content and simplifying testing. The popover API is fully supported by all major browsers.

Form-Associated Custom Elements: Harness the power of native input behavior within HTML forms. This enhancement makes the features/InputElementsFormSupport.js feature redundant, simplifying form handling and enhancing the developer experience. Refer to the ElementInternals API documentation for more details.

Seamless Time Zone Support: Seamlessly manage time zones within your applications for a more personalized user experience. The date and time components are adapted to the time zone feature, allowing the components to present dates in different time zones. The time zone identifiers format is the one used in the IANA time zone database.

New Components: Expand your UI toolkit with new components such as Dynamic Page, Form, Table, Text, Tokenizer, AI Button, AI Prompt Input, Custom Option and Custom Suggestion Item.

Picture 2: Preview of UI5 Web Components 2.0 new components

Enhanced Existing Components: Benefit from improvements in List Drag and Drop, Tree Drag and Drop, Tab Container Drag and Drop, and a revamped Notifications Experience.

Picture 3: Preview of UI5 Web Components 2.0 new features

Revamped Documentation Site: Explore our new documentation site featuring a live editor, playground, dark mode, and an intuitive icons view.

Picture 4: UI5 Web Components 2.0 new website

New logo: We are excited to introduce our new logo and branding, reflecting the modern and dynamic nature of our project. Our new design incorporates defining elements of the feather and the flame. The feather symbolizes being lightweight, while the flame forms a connection to the phoenix, embodying the spirit of rebirth and continuous improvement.

Explore the Full-Screen Playground: Our new full-screen playground offers a range of features designed to enhance your development experience:

Live code editing

TypeScript support

Code completion for components in HTML

Sample download

Easy sharing

Theming options

Predefined examples

Picture 5: UI5 Web Components 2.0 full-screen playground

Adoption and Breaking Changes

UI5 Web Components 2.0 is a major version and introduces breaking changes that may require updates to your code. Our comprehensive Migration Guide will assist you in making a smooth transition from UI5 Web Components v1.x to v2.0. Note: The majority of the breaking changes can be achieved with find and replace.

Notable Breaking Changes:

The Belize theme has been removed and is no longer available.
CSP (Content Security Policy) will be ensured via the adoptedStyleSheets only, which are CSP-compliant by design.
The static area has been removed since the browser now ensures the correct positioning of popups thanks to the popover API that is fully adopted by the UI5 Web Components.
The Badge component (ui5-badge) has been renamed to Tag (ui5-tag).
The old Table (ui5-table) has been moved to @ui5/webcomponents-compat; new Table is available with better API and accessibility.
Public methods for opening popovers are replaced with the open property for declarative APIs.
Components like Label, Text, Link, and Title now wrap by default (wrappingType="Normal" by default, wrappingType="None" optionally).
SelectMenu and SelectMenuOption components have been removed; standard options with the popover API make them obsolete.
Renaming of properties, events, and enumeration values.
Removed APIs without alternatives:
- Progress Indicator (ui5-progress-indicator): Disabled property removed.
- Select Option (ui5-option): Disabled property removed for UX and accessibility alignment.
- Token (ui5-token): Readonly property removed; logic now within the Tokenizer.
- The Device#isIE method has been removed and is no longer available - the IE browser is not supported anymore.
- Notification List Group (ui5-li-notification-group): The properties showClose, showCounter, priority, the event close and the slot actions are removed due to the new better notification list design concept.

Ongoing Support for Version 1.x

We will continue to support version 1.x until the end of the year, focusing on bug fixes to ensure continuity for our existing users.

Get Help and Engage with the Community

Encountering issues? Reach out for support or report bugs on our GitHub project: Submit a bug or ask a question here.

Call to Action

UI5 Web Components 2.0 is a testament to our dedication to innovation, quality, and community engagement. We are particularly excited about the groundbreaking features such as the Popover API, Form-Associated Custom Elements, and seamless time zone support.

We invite you to preview the new version and migrate to UI5 Web Components 2.0 to fully leverage these advancements. Together, we are entering a new era of web development, and the possibilities are endless. Thank you for being part of this exciting journey with us! 🙌

Watch the Replays of Our Exclusive SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series

2024-07-12T17:15:51.644000+02:00

Therefore, we offer a variety of enablement assets to explain the features and functions of each new release and make sure that you get the maximum value out of your investment.

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Early Release Series is a series of compelling live product expert sessions that takes place twice a year and is designed by product experts for product experts to give customers, partners, and colleagues a special insider’s preview into the highlights for selected lines of business and industries, 1-2 weeks before the actual release. In a span of multiple days, we give you the opportunity to see the latest demos, ask your questions, and get answers straight from the product experts before everyone else.

From July 8 to July 12, we hosted a series of 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Missed the live sessions? We've got you covered! Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you.

Don't miss this chance and watch them on demand – anywhere, anytime.

Artificial Intelligence and Technologies	Watch here
Two-Tier ERP	Watch here
Manufacturing	Watch here
SAP Activate, SAP Cloud ALM, Test Automation Tool	Watch here
Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management	Watch here
Cross Technology Topics	Watch here
Professional Services	Watch here
Product Compliance	Watch here
Sourcing and Procurement	Watch here
Asset Management	Watch here
SAP User Experience	Watch here
Public Sector Management	Watch here
Service	Watch here
Extensibility	Watch here
Sales	Watch here
Solution Orders and Subscription Billing	Watch here
Finance	Watch here
Supply Chain Management	Watch here
Governance, Risk, and Compliance	Watch here
Environment, Health, and Safety	Watch here

Find the recordings of previous live sessions here, here, and here.

How to Sign Up for the SAP Enterprise Support Edition as a Customer/Partner

In order to watch the recordings, you will need to have an active SAP Learning Hub license with at least the SAP Enterprise Support Edition. Find out how to register for the SAP Enterprise Support edition in case you don’t already have access to any of the editions yet:

Navigate to the sign up page
Click the Sign up button. Authenticate yourself with your s-user ID and password. Upon first access, the system will check your eligibility, create a new SAP Learning Hub user, and populate your learning catalog respectively. Within two hours, you will then receive a registration confirmation via e-mail.
After you have received the confirmation e-mail, the registration process is complete.

Partners can access the recordings through an SAP Partner Edge Edition.

How to Sign Up for the Internal Edition as an SAP Employee

In order to watch the recordings, you will need to have an SAP Learning Hub license. In case you have no edition assigned to your profile, please register here for the Internal Edition which is free of charge.

Follow the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition tag and the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with the latest blog posts.

🎙️ Inside SAP S/4HANA Cloud

💻openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA Cloud

🗣️ Your Voice Matters

🔎Find All of Our Assets

🎯Where to Find More Information:

Explore the ready-to-run cloud ERP here: https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html
Watch our SAP S/4HANA Cloud product update videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWV533hWWvDnnyN2j-CcUheNN-GaNCb3H
Check out our digital enablement wheel here: https://chart-bdmaicr0au.dispatcher.eu2.hana.ondemand.com/index.html?hc_reset
Listen to our podcast here: https://podcast.opensap.info/inside-sap/
Watch our openSAP microlearnings to learn about SAP S/4HANA Cloud topics at your own pace here: https://microlearning.opensap.com/
Find best practices on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition here: https://me.sap.com/processnavigator/SolS/EARL_SolS-013/latest?region=DE
Check out what’s new here: https://help.sap.com/doc/ce01d82756b947a1a043a5d5a3204226
Find help here: https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_S4HANA_CLOUD
Read the feature scope description here: https://help.sap.com/doc/7c9e0bbbd1664c2581b2038a1c7ae4b3

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408亮点前瞻：用户体验（User Experience）

2024-07-17T07:49:55.438000+02:00

从2408版本开始，空间和页面（Spaces and Pages）将正式成为全新的UI界面展示方式，旧的分组（Group）模式将推出历史舞台。

非生产系统：目前已经全面运行在空间和页面模式中，旧的分组模式已不可用。

生产系统：在2408版本升级之前，允许用户切换回旧的分组模式。

如果还想了解如何做具体的空间和页面的切换步骤，请参考以下文章：

How to Efficiently Switch from Groups to Spaces an... - SAP Community

其他更多信息，请参考最新KBA文档：

2970113 - SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: Replacement of SAP Fiori launchpad home page (Outdated) by Spaces and Pages / Final Removal - SAP for Me

SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Upgrade Faster – How to amend Roles with Obsolete or Deprecated Apps

2024-07-23T05:10:02.833000+02:00

Executing a SAP S/4HANA upgrade means dealing with UX lifecycle changes, as explained in blog post SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Upgrade Faster – Managing app lifecycle impacts on users. To shorten your technical upgrade project, you will want to deal with these lifecycle changes as efficiently as possible. Especially when replacing obsolete or deprecated apps with their successors.

In the previous blog post SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Upgrade Faster – Why & When amend Roles with Obsolete or Deprecated Apps, you learned why and when replace obsolete or deprecated apps with successors. You also learned:

You need to amend your business roles in your target SAP S/4HANA release, where the successor apps exist;
What prerequisite steps in your source SAP S/4HANA release will shorten your upgrade time; and
Subsequent activities to complete in your target SAP S/4HANA release before you start regression testing.

In this blog post you will find a step-by-step example of HOW to amend your business roles. This answers another important question for upgrades:

What is the most efficient way to amend our custom business roles that have obsolete or deprecated apps?

Keep in mind that obsolete and deprecated apps includes both:

SAP Fiori apps ***and***
classic UIs such as GUI transaction codes, Web Dynpro ABAP applications, and Web Client UIs.

IMPORTANT: This blog post is relevant for customers running SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. For example customers running RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, or SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition tailored option. This blog post is also relevant for customers running the SAP S/4HANA product on other infrastructure such as on-premise server or hyperscaler.

Below is a quick diagram showing the 6 main steps for amending roles and the tooling needed.

You will find below:

Overview of the process to amend business roles
Tools you will need
Use case explanation for the step-by-step example
Step 1 - Find custom Business Roles that need to be amended
Step 2 - Find and add direct successors
Step 3 - Resolve and add indirect successors
Step 4 - Adjust impacted layouts
Step 5 - Remove references to obsolete and deprecated apps
Step 6 - Activate any additional services needed for successor apps
FAQ

IMPORTANT: Since you are most likely moving to SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 or higher, the example is focused on the latest tools available with SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01. Most of these tools have been available since SAP S/4HANA 2020 and some since SAP S/4HANA 1709, so if you are currently upgrading to SAP S/4HANA 2022, you can still follow much the same process.

Overview of the process to amend business roles

This is actually quite a straightforward process with the tools in your target SAP S/4HANA system. As you can see in the below diagram, the main tool you will need to do this efficiently is the Launchpad Content Manager Client-Specific – transaction /UI2/FLPCM_CUST.

IMPORTANT: You only need to amend custom business roles and custom business catalogs. Only SAP can amend business roles and business catalogs in the SAP namespace.

Tools you will need

These tools are part of the Fiori Foundation Administration role.

Launchpad Content Manager Client-Specific - Transaction /UI2/FLPCM_CUST

This is the primary tool for all business role and business catalog maintenance.
All role assignments are client-specific so you must use the client-specific tool.

SAP Fiori app F4512 Manage launchpad pages

This is the primary tool for editing launchpad layouts.
Hint: If you are still using Groups layout mode you can use the Launchpad Designer to edit your layouts. To reduce ongoing maintenance effort, as soon as practicable after upgrade, you should move to spaces and pages. Refer to Info Package: Making the Move from Launchpad Groups to Spaces (In SAP S/4HANA and in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition)

Launchpad App Manager – Transaction /UI2/FLPAM

This is the primary tool for technical catalogs where original entries for content are created cross-client.
These entries are referenced from cross-client technical catalogs

IMPORTANT: While Launchpad Designer is also part of the Fiori Foundation Administration role, this tool is deprecated should be avoided. Only use this tool if in your source release:

You created custom technical catalogs or custom groups using Launchpad Designer, that need to be amended for obsolete/deprecated content.
To reduce ongoing maintenance effort, as soon as practicable after upgrade, migrate technical catalogs and move to spaces and pages. Refer to: SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA - Technical Catalog Migration – Why and Getting Ready for Migration

You will also need:

Task List Execution – Transactions STC01 and STC02

Using transaction STC01, you execute task lists to activate services needed for successor apps.
You use transaction STC02 to review previously run task lists.

IMPORTANT: Based on customers experiences and feedback, using transaction PFCG as your primary tool to amend business roles during an upgrade can result in high efforts. The focus of transaction PFCG is maintaining role authorizations. The focus of Launchpad Content Manager Client-Specific is maintaining launchpad content. You should use the best tool for the upgrade task you are executing.

Use case explanation for the step-by-step example

You have created a custom business role Z_BR_GL_ACCOUNTANT_SIMPL and some related custom business catalogs and layouts in your source SAP S/4HANA release.

Hint: This custom role was created by copying the SAP-delivered SAP Business Role SAP_BR_GL_ACCOUNTANT and refining the copy to reduce the content and adjust the layout to meet business needs.

When you ran the Upgrade Impact Analysis you noticed that several of the apps in this custom role are deprecated or obsolete in your target release.

In your target S/4HANA release, after your SAP S/4HANA software components have been upgraded, you need to adjust your custom role. You need to amend your custom role and custom catalogs to remove references to obsolete/deprecated content (apps and UIs) and replace them with their successors.

In the below screenshot you can see the role as it appears in the Launchpad Content Manager Client-Specific showing the Transaction Status indicating deprecated and obsolete apps exist in the assigned business catalogs.

Step 1 - Find custom Business Roles that need to be amended

Tool: Launchpad Content Manager client-specific

Within your custom business roles, you need to find the assigned custom business catalogs with obsolete and/or deprecated content.

Procedure:

In the Roles tab, search for your custom roles.
Filter on column Transaction Status to find all custom roles with obsolete and/or deprecated content
Review the business catalogs assigned to these custom roles. Here again the column Transaction Status shows you which catalogs contain obsolete and/or deprecated content.
When you find a catalog that needs to be amended, select the catalog and go to the Catalog View to review the details.

Even Faster Hint: You can download the list of roles and/or catalogs that need to be amended to share the work among your team.

Step 2 - Find and add direct successors

Tool: Launchpad Content Manager client-specific

Procedure:

In the Catalogs tab, in the Content in Catalogs pane, review the column Transaction Status to find apps that are deprecated or obsolete.
Select the app row and then Other Functions > Show/Add Successors to find direct successors
If a direct successor is found, use the Add Tile/TM Reference option to add the successor to the current business catalog.
If no direct successor is found, go to Step 3 – Resolve and add indirect successors.

The screenshot below shows selecting an app in the Content in Catalog pane and then selecting the toolbar menu option Other Functions > Show/Add Successors.

The screenshot below shows selecting the successor app that was found, and using the Add Tile/TM Reference button to add it to the catalog.

The screenshot below shows that the successor app has been successfully added to the business catalog. At this point, both the deprecated and the successor app are in the same business catalog.

If all successors have been resolved and added to the catalog, you can go directly to Step 4 – Adjust Impacted Layouts. If there are apps without a direct successor, you need to resolve those in Step 3 - Resolve and add indirect successors.

Step 3 - Resolve and add indirect successors

Tool: Launchpad Content Manager client-specific + Upgrade Impact Analysis

If no direct successor was found, you need to check for indirect successors.

Hint: This is the step where you will need to call on the Upgrade Impact Analysis results that you ran against your source SAP S/4HANA release as explained in SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Upgrade Faster – Why & When amend Roles with Obsolete or Deprecated Apps.

Some typical reasons why there might not be a direct successor:

The app is no longer required due to process changes
You must choose between different successors depending on your process use case
The successor app is currently only documented in a SAP Note (please note SAP is working to include these as direct successors over time)

Example 1: An error message is shown when using Show/Add Successors for app F2741 in SAP S/4HANA 2023

The indirect was resolved by searching on keyword F2741 to find SAP Note 3081996 - Deprecation of SAP Design Studio Apps in SAP S/4HANA 2021 In the SAP Note, the successors are listed.

Example 2: When selecting obsolete app F1444 in SAP S/4HANA 2023, there is no option to Show/Add Successors

The below screenshot shows that when the obsolete app is selected, and the Content in Catalog toolbar button Other Functions is chosen, the Show/Add Successors feature is greyed out, i.e. not available.

This successor was resolved by reading SAP Note 2855790 - Release Information: Changes in SAP Fiori Content for Finance in SAP S/4HANA 2020 The SAP Note clarifies the successor app.

Procedure:

Check your Upgrade Impact Analysis results for advice on indirect successors., especially the Additional Information column with related SAP Notes explaining the successors. You will need to read the related SAP Note about the successors to decide what action to take.
If there is no SAP Note recommended by the Upgrade Impact Analysis, check the Simplification List of your SAP S/4HANA target release for further advice.
If needed, manually add indirect successors using feature Add Tiles/Target Mappings to selected catalog. Search for the successor, select it, and use Add Tile/TM Reference to add the reference to the current business catalog.

The screenshot below shows selecting the business catalog and then using the Content in Catalog toolbar button Add Tile/TM Reference to start adding the successor app.

In the screenshot example below, you can see the dialog Add Tiles/Target Mappings as References to Catalog <business catalog id> where you search for your successor app by id or name. Once you find your successor, you select the app then use button Add Tile/TM Reference to add it to the business catalog.

Even Faster Hint: You can resolve indirect successors in advance by working through the Upgrade Impact Analysis results.

When all successors have been resolved and added to the business catalog, you are ready to go on to Step 4 – Adjust Impacted Layouts.

Step 4 - Adjust impacted layouts

Tool: Launchpad Content Manager client-specific + Manage Launchpad Pages

IMPORTANT: If you were using Groups layout mode in your source release, you will adjust the layouts using the Launchpad Designer tool. As Groups layout mode is deprecated, you should aim to move to spaces and pages layouts as soon as possible after your upgrade project. In SAP S/4HANA 2021 to 2023, you can move to spaces and pages progressively role by role. Refer to blog post: Info Package: Making the Move from Launchpad Groups to Spaces (In SAP S/4HANA and in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition)

Procedure:

Select the obsolete/deprecated app then Display Usages in Pages (or for groups layouts use Display Usages in Groups).
If a layout is found, select the layout and open the layout editor. For example, Open in Manage Launchpad Pages.
Edit the layout to add tiles/links for successors; remove tiles/links for obsolete apps; and remove tiles/links for deprecated apps.

The screenshot below shows how you select the app in the Content in Catalog pane and use the toolbar button Display Usages in Pages to check where it is used.

Hint: If you are still using groups layout you would use the button Display Usages in Groups to check where the app is referenced in your groups.

The screenshot below shows the Usages in Pages dialog where you can see listed all pages in which the deprecated or obsolete apps is referenced. You select the tile and then choose the button Open in Manage Launchpad Pages.

Hint: If you are using Groups mode the Usages in Groups dialog is similar. You select the tile and then choose the button Open in Designer.

This screenshot shows an example of the age before adjusting the layout. The deprecated tile can be seen.

This screenshot shows the page in Edit mode to show how you adjust the layout. The successor apps are dragged and dropped from the recently updated business catalog assigned to the business role. Where tile names are very similar use the "i" information icon in Derived from Roles or the "..." icon on tiles on the page to confirm details. Use the "x" icon on the tile to remove tiles.

Considerations to keep in mind:

Optionally, you can keep the references to deprecated apps temporarily to ease the transition of users from the deprecated app to its successor. You can then remove the deprecated apps after your upgrade project.

If you choose this option, you need to make sure users can clearly distinguish which is the deprecated app versus the successor. There are a few easy ways to do this:

You can use different tile sizes to indicate which is the preferred app. You do this in the layout editor.
You can use different icons to indicate which is the preferred app. You do this in the technical catalog.
You can adjust the tile texts to keep users informed. For example, by adding to the deprecated app a tile information text “Retiring soon!”. You do this in the technical catalog.

In the screenshot below the obsolete app has been removed, the successor app has been added as a full tile, and the deprecated app has been reduced to a flat wide tile.

Even Better Hint:

Where you are referencing content from SAP technical catalogs you can use the Launchpad App Manager > Adaptation mode to safely override the tile texts and icons.

Refer to:

The below screenshot is of the Launchpad App Manager showing the Adaptation tab in Adaptation mode:

This below screenshot shows an example of the tile AFTER adjusting the information text:

You can also adjust the original tile texts/icons in custom technical catalogs in the Launchpad App Manager tool. You use this tool if in your source SAP S/4HANA release:

You created custom technical catalogs in the Launchpad App Manager
You created custom technical catalogs in the Launchpad Designer which you have migrated your technical catalogs in your target SAP S/4HANA release using the Technical Catalog Migration tool.

Hint: If you created custom technical catalogs in the Launchpad Designer, and have NOT yet migrated your technical catalogs, you should prioritize the technical migration for immediately after upgrade to reduce ongoing maintenance effort.

Refer to:

Step 5 - Remove references to obsolete and deprecated apps

Tool: Launchpad Content Manager client-specific

Once you have:

added successors to your custom roles, and
have replaced obsolete/deprecated apps with their successors in your layouts

You can safely remove references to obsolete and deprecated apps from your custom business roles.

Procedure:

On the Catalogs tab, in the Content in Catalog pane, select and remove references to obsolete and deprecated apps using feature Remove Tile/Target Mappings.
You will need to confirm the removal of each reference.
After removing the obsolete/deprecated content, check the Transaction Status of the catalog. If there is no more obsolete or deprecated content to resolve, the Transaction Status will be empty (blank).

The below screenshot shows an example of selecting an obsolete app and then, in the Content in Catalog pane, pressing the button Remove Tiles/Target Mappings to remove the app from the business catalog.

In the dialog Remove References from Catalog, you confirm that you want to remove the tile and target mapping of the obsolete app.

You should then see a success message confirming the tile(s) and target mapping(s) were removed from the catalog, similar to the example below.

Once all obsolete and deprecated apps are removed the Transaction Status of the business catalog will be empty.

Considerations to keep in mind:

If you have chosen to keep references to deprecated apps to ease the transition of users from the deprecated app to its successor, you must still remove any obsolete content during your technical upgrade. This is because obsolete content causes errors during role regeneration and user regression testing. Once you have transitioned to the successor app, you can use the same procedure to remove your deprecated apps after upgrade.

Step 6 - Activate any additional services needed for successor apps

Tool: Launchpad Content Manager Client-Specific and Tasks lists for Activating Roles and/or Catalogs

You use transaction STC01 to execute new task list runs, and transaction STC02 to review/restart previous task list runs.

You can use:

task list SAP_FIORI_FCM_CONTENT_ACTIVATION to activate the delta services for business roles, or
task list SAP_FIORI_FCM_CATALOG_ACTIVATION to activate the delta services for business catalogs.

IMPORTANT:

There is no preference for activating by roles or by catalogs – the service activation is the same.
Only delta services will be activated.
Executing the task list for business roles, will activate all delta services for all business catalogs within the business role.
Optionally, in the task list for business roles you can ask to update the application groups.

Task: Activate services needed for successor apps

Procedure:

In tool Launchpad Content Manager Client-Specific, check the service activation status of custom business catalogs and/or custom business roles. From the Roles tab or the Catalogs tab, you can use the feature Check and Show Services to review the detailed services needed.
Review the ICF services, ODataV4 services, and ODataV2 services to check if there are any services NOT active – i.e. red circle icon
If needed, activate the delta of new OData services and ICF services for successor apps.
- From the Roles tab or Catalogs tab, you can select the role or catalog and then Activate Services to open the relevant task list.
- Alternatively, you can go directly to transaction STC01, select the relevant task list and manually enter the list of roles or catalogs you need to activate.

IMPORTANT: BEFORE executing the task list, refer to SAP Note 2902673 - Rapid Activation for SAP Fiori in SAP S/4HANA – Overview. Within this note, find and review the Composite Note for Rapid Activation for your SAP S/4HANA release and FPS. Scroll down through the note to check for any known errors/resolutions for related SAP business roles. You may need these to resolve any issues uncovered when running the task list.

Within the task list, select the package that will be used to capture and transport the activations across your system landscape.
Then execute the task list and check the log to ensure everything was activated successfully.
You can run Check and Show Services again to confirm everything is resolved.

The below screenshot shows the Services feature in the Catalogs toolbar where, for the selected catalog, you can select Check and Show Services and Activate Services. Selecting Activate Services will generate a new run of the relevant task list for the selected catalog or role.

Once your successors are activated, you are ready to move to subsequent activities a as explained in blog post SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Upgrade Faster – Why & When amend Roles with Obsolete or Deprecated Apps.

FAQ

My role is referencing a SAP business catalog that contains a deprecated or obsolete app – what do I do?

Copy the SAP business catalog to the customer namespace.
Replace the deprecated and obsolete apps as above.

Can I compare my custom business role or custom business catalog to a related SAP Business Catalog or SAP Business Catalog ?

Yes! Refer to SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Upgrade Faster - More use cases for Launchpad Content Aggregator

How can I check if a successor app has dependencies, such as reuse apps, that need to be included in the catalog?

In the SAP Fiori apps library, find the app and check the tab Related Apps for any apps with Relation Type = Required apps.

Becoming a SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA guru

You’ll find much more on our SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA topic page

Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Release

2024-07-24T11:36:16.508000+02:00

The second major release of the year 2024 is here! The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release is filled with innovations that boost your productivity and support your everyday work life.

I am thrilled to give you further insights on our fully-fledged cloud ERP, supporting your journey to the intelligent, sustainable enterprise in this blog post.

If you prefer rather watching than reading, you are welcome to check out my product update video:

Figure 1: Check out my top highlights of the release in this video.

Before I start with feature-based innovations, I am proud to announce that we have generally uplifted our system availability service level agreement for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and Integrated Business Planning from 99.7% to 99.9% for all our customers. This leap signals our reliability and the investments into technology, hardware, procedures, and automation that we continuously make to deliver a world-class SaaS ERP service to you. This marks another superior level of service availability and helps customers to plan business operations with greater precision at less risks. To put it into context: This cuts the upgrade downtimes by another 66%.

The new service level agreement sets a high standard for our cloud operations moving forward.

And there’s more: Since mid-July, GROW with SAP premium subscription has expanded to include SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense solutions. Both enhances our Cloud ERP and gives it more horizontal width to allow customers bring more use cases onboard our solution.

And we keep the good news coming! While delivering more functional and technical based value to our public cloud customers, we reduce the complexity of monetizing digital business models by bringing contract accounting and invoicing capabilities into the core SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition offering. With the 2408 release, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for contract and accounting will be part of GROW with SAP. We are giving our customers full access to the high volume, high performance and high automation invoicing, and subledger solution that focuses on service, subscriptions, pay-per-use, and multi-sided business models, without extra metering based on revenue and expenses. No action required for our existing GROW customers, the expanded functionality is included up to their licensed GROW FUEs and will automatically become available from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 for all customers.

Learn more about GROW here: https://www.sap.com/products/erp/grow.html

Figure 2: Discover the value of GROW with SAP.

We offer you even more room to GROW: Constantly updating our methodology stays important! For this release, we are excited to announce significant updates to our GROW Adoption Plan, designed to streamline and enhance the adoption process for customers and partners. By integrating new deliverables and accelerators into the GROW Adoption Plan and SAP Cloud ALM, companies can achieve a faster and more efficient implementation experience. This release features GROW Adoption Plan tagging, combining new adoption deliverables and related accelerators, including the Multi-Country Deployment and Application Lifecycle Management accelerators with new content. Additionally, our updated quality gates now include the first iteration of adoption elements, which will further integrate into SAP Cloud ALM.

Available for some time, but in between releases and therefore, potentially new to some, we are also offering our customers guidance for transitioning from the two-system-based landscape to the three-system landscape of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Figure 3: We are offering our customers guidance for transitioning from the two-system-based landscape to the three-system landscape of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Also, SAP introduces new sustainability capabilities to support organizations in meeting their sustainability ambitions and goals as well as regulatory requirements. These include automated ESG reporting via the SAP Sustainability Control Tower and AI-enhanced carbon footprint calculations through the SAP Sustainability Footprint Management solution. Additionally, both solutions feature a carbon calculator engine for comprehensive emissions reporting, and the upcoming SAP Green Ledger will integrate greenhouse gas emissions into financial decision-making.

Speaking of artificial intelligence: A lot has happened here in the past months. With SAP’s Business AI strategy, we are defining the future by embedding SAP Business AI along our entire portfolio:

Relevant – Reliable – Responsible

Figure 4: With SAP Business AI, we accelerate your business processes and optimize decision-making.

Enough upfront news–without any further ado, let’s check out what I additionally consider as highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release.

Modern and Intelligent Experience

SAP User Experience

Through artificial intelligence, we help to get your work done faster and change the user experience–starting with our generative AI copilot, Joule. After a successful phased roll-out in the Early Adopter Care program, Joule will grace your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system with a continuous delivery shipment very soon, at current state of planning in quarter 3/2024. Joule works as follows: Formulate your business need in natural language and Joule will provide easy access to applications and data, lowering manual tasks and boosting productivity.

Figure 5: Our natural-language, generative AI copilot Joule provides easy access to applications and data.

SAP Business AI offers you a cutting-edge SAP Fiori experience via smart summarization and easy filter. Smart summarization jump starts your collaboration or follow-up by extracting the essential information of the object pages of the SAP Fiori elements applications you are using in the system. With easy filter, you can select data of “list report-based" SAP Fiori apps instead of defining filter values manually. All of this in natural language. These AI use-cases are available in beta testing. Check out the SAP Customer Influence page to sign up: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#campaign/3698

Figure 6: AI-assisted smart summarization extracts the essential information of the object pages of the SAP Fiori elements apps you’re using in the system.

Figure 7: With easy filter, you can select data of “list report-based" SAP Fiori apps instead of defining filter values manually.

To enhance transparency around significant system changes, we’ve established a scalable communication strategy, allowing the delivery of important messages to specifically chosen customers and users, following the "need-to-know" principle. This in-app communication was highly requested by our customers and partners through advisory groups and our influence portal and permits us to spotlight essential customer activities in the system. Catering messages to such specific requirements facilitates delivering reminder information solely to those customers who haven't yet performed important requisite system activities and those users who possess the necessary authorization to carry out these tasks. A first example of this approach is the targeted communication pertaining to SAP Fiori launchpad settings, i.e., the switch to spaces and pages.

Figure 8: Target users get system pop-ups after login showing critical must-dos and must-knows for their user role including a linked document for details.

Finance

In finance, we introduce new review booklet for cost centers. This app provides a concise display of both actual and planned costs, organizing several predefined reports under 'Actuals' and 'Plan/Actuals' pages. It provides business applications that embed crucial insights into the relevant business context, supporting the answering of critical business queries effectively and efficiently. It seamlessly integrates application logic, guidance, and multidimensional insights and upholds the promise of "insight to action" within embedded analytics, enabling users to analyze actuals and plan data in a single report while providing the flexibility to toggle between guided views and generic slicing, dicing, and pivoting based on specific business requirements.

Figure 9: Display, analyze, and validate cost center data with the new review booklet.

Additionally, we enable you to analyze and summarize data from the cost-center review booklet into actionable financial business insights with the help of generative AI. This use case is available in beta testing. Check out the SAP Customer Influence page to sign up: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#campaign/3698

Figure 10: Gain financial business insights with the help of generative AI.

GRC, Trade, and Tax

This release delivers an innovative experience in managing US-internal tax configuration powered by Joule. The process of maintaining tax jurisdiction codes and rates has been simplified from a dozen steps to only three! Users just can use a natural language prompt to retrieve detailed information from the AI, then verify, simulate, and save the configured tax jurisdiction codes and rates. Once the connection between your SAP system and the LLM is configured, users can chat directly with the AI to retrieve detailed address-based tax jurisdiction information. Furthermore, the LLM delivers links to the respective state tax or revenue authority, providing users with an easily accessible way to verify their tax rate information prior to simulating and saving the changes. This use case is currently available in beta testing. To register, check out the SAP Customer Influence page: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/campaign/3698

Figure 11: Joule helps to simplify the process of maintaining US-internal tax configuration.

Sales

One of the key highlights here is the auto-activation of the intelligent scenario for input recommendations for sales orders. This feature significantly boosts efficiency and cost savings by hastening the activation of the intelligent scenario for sales order recommendations. Implemented when scope item 73P gets activated, the system employs an auto-training mechanism that periodically trains the machine learning model based on the business data from the past year. Users have the flexibility to enable or disable this auto-training in the ‘Intelligent Scenario Management’ app. This functionality guarantees automatic set-up, training and operation of the intelligent scenario, making the sales order completion more efficient and intuitive while reducing costs.

Figure 12: Auto-activation of the intelligent scenario for input recommendations makes the sales-orders process more efficient and intuitive.

Product Compliance

With this release, we enable the generation of product compliance documents with integration into the safety data sheet process. Users can now generate a first selection of sections of an EU safety data sheet (without country/region-specific additions) for product compliance solutions using Adobe Document Services. This not only extends the product compliance solution with integrated document generation capability but also streamlines the generation of documents for product compliance data. This is based on versatile Adobe form templates and form data providers. The generated documents are seamlessly integrated into the safety data sheet process. This also comes with new apps to manage and release data for handling and storage as well as stability and reactivity of products, making it a comprehensive tool for product compliance.

Figure 13: You can now easily generate a first selection of sections of an EU safety data sheet using Adobe Document Services.

ERP Innovations

Manufacturing

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 introduces advancements in the ‘Monitor Material Coverage’ SAP Fiori apps. The ‘Monitor Material Coverage – Net Segments’ and the ‘Monitor Material Coverage – Net and Individual Segments’ apps now offer additional columns displaying the number of rescheduling proposals for a material. This improvement assists businesses in avoiding supply shortages or an excess of supplies. This is achieved by indicating the number of Material Requirements Planning (MRP) supplying elements with rescheduling proposals for each material. Additionally, the system can reschedule in, reschedule out, or cancel a process based upon a calculation for the entire planning horizon. The enhanced features enable better management of supply shortages and excess supply with MRP material coverage apps, providing a more effective and streamlined operation.

Figure 14: Manage supply shortages or excess supply with additional columns in the ‘Monitor Material Coverage’ SAP Fiori apps.

Supply Chain Management

In this release, we ship the warehouse-driven split of the outbound delivery order. This feature empowers organizations to separate packed and unpacked items, quantities, or handling units from an existing outbound delivery order into a new one. This offers increased flexibility in case a complete picking is not possible, added functionality if space in the truck is limited, and the ability to split outbound delivery order items for which no warehouse task has been created yet. It’s also possible to split handling units into a new outbound delivery order. The release therefore provides businesses with improved logistical abilities, offering greater adaptability in managing outbound delivery orders.

Figure 15: The warehouse-driven split of the outbound delivery order empower organizations to separate packed and unpacked items, quantities, or handling units from an existing outbound delivery order into a new one.

Solution and Subscription Business

Here, I want to highlight a feature from the latest CFD release which I believe has huge business value for organizations transitioning to solution-led business models. The introduction of advanced solution bundling enables you to pre-configure complex solution orders which can contain multiple configurable and non-configurable items, and sell them on a single solution order, providing greater flexibility whilst saving effort on manual input. This enables the sale of complex end-to-end solution offerings tailored to specific customer needs.

Figure 16: Pre-configured bundles can be added to a solution order and processed for further fulfilment.

Service

In this release, we enable you to add maintenance plan templates in service contracts. This enhancement simplifies the workflow drastically, particularly for those dealing with service contracts that include maintenance plans. During the creation process of service contract templates, you can already add maintenance plan templates to service contract items. After creating a service contract from a service contract template, the maintenance plan templates are also copied. When you release a service contract item, a new maintenance plan is automatically created using the maintenance plan template. If you don’t use service contract templates, you can add maintenance plan templates directly in a service contract.

Figure 17: Maintenance plan templates facilitate the service contract process significantly.

Enterprise Porfolio and Project Management

To better support the engineer-to-order process, we ship an innovation to reserve materials using project demand. When it comes to project demands, we offer three categories: resources, services, and materials. In the category of materials, we now offer ‘Project Stock Reservation’. A project procurement controller or project manager can select the WBS element, the plant, the material ID, the quantity, and eventually also the storage location, and then reserve material for a project on a certain date. Once the demand is requested, a reservation number gets generated. With the monitoring capabilities, you can view how many quantities have been delivered in case certain quantities in stock are issued against the material. This creates transparency for the project procurement controller.

Figure 18: The ability to reserve material using project demand makes workflows more efficient and project management more effective.

Professional Services

The shared risk-based revenue recognition for professional service projects feature addresses potential customer projects that exceed the initial scope, allowing service providers to bill at regular rates before charging reduced rates for any additional work. A new revenue recognition key (SPTMSR) supports this shared risk model. This enables more precise revenue recognition where additional work is required, increasing flexibility for revenue recognition and reducing manual efforts to adjust accrued revenues. In this model, if the need for additional work is identified, the system considers the reduced rate during revenue recognition. The feature signifies an important step towards enhancing accounting accuracy and transparency in service-oriented sectors, promoting mitigation of financial risk, and improving overall project management.

Figure 19: Shared risk-based revenue recognition for professional service projects enhances accuracy and transparency.

Sourcing and Procurement

A purchase contract is an agreement between a buyer and a supplier with agreed pricing, quantity, terms, and conditions. Since purchase contracts are long-term documents, they are subject to change over time. By enabling versioning of purchase contracts, businesses can meticulously track various versions of contracts each time a modification is made to an active purchase contract. Following alterations to fields set for versioning, the system automatically creates a new version. The new version can then become an active document, subject to the approval process. The versioning feature enhances transparency and efficiency by enabling comparisons between two document versions, including changes notable in pricing. This function ultimately aids in fostering improved collaboration between buyers and suppliers.

Figure 20: Versioning in purchase contracts fosters improved collaboration between buyers and suppliers.

Asset Management

In this release, we introduce an enhanced feature of recording the "As-Found" condition in the 'Perform Maintenance Jobs' app. The app offers maintenance technicians an improved way to record the initial condition of an asset during proactive and routine maintenance jobs, even when the maintenance order does not have a maintenance notification assigned. If the specific technical object differs from the overall order header, a new notification will be created automatically while the technician records the "As-Found" condition. Previously, the malfunction data tab was enabled only if the order has an associated notification. Now, these tabs are accessible by default in orders with notifications. Additionally, configurations can allow users to maintain malfunction data, thereby providing users with better recording of asset reliability data which in turn enhances the overall user experience.

Figure 21: We enhance the recording of the “As-Found” condition in the ‘Perform Maintenance Jobs’ app.

Environment, Health, and Safety

A new application for managing the investigation process significantly improves the tracking and oversight of investigation projects, allowing for more effective and efficient processes. The ‘Manage Investigations’ app offers a comprehensive platform where pertinent details such as investigation phase, persons involved, and timelines can be meticulously documented and managed. Administrators can determine the course and progression of investigations, and delegate necessary tasks for seamless operation. This new tool pursues both procedural integrity and simplicity, with a user-friendly interface coupled with robust functionality. Ultimately, it enhances user experience, strengthens accountability, and fosters greater efficiency in managing the investigation process.

Figure 22: The new ‘Manage Investigations’ app fosters great efficiency in managing the investigation process.

Two-Tier ERP

In two-tier ERP, Tier 1 acts as an original equipment manufacturer on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and Tier 2 acts as a service subsidiary on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. With this set up, organizations can perform claims processing and subsequent reimbursements between their service organization and original equipment manufacturer. In this release, we introduce a refined warranty claim process, aiding you in effectively managing and navigating through the complexities of warranty claims. The process offers improved visibility into various aspects such as claim creation, processing, submission, and tracking. In addition, the solution accelerates assessment and administration of warranty claims with built-in automation that streamlines the end-to-end warranty management. As a part of service management, this efficient mechanism ensures quicker resolution time, reducing both manual effort and the overall operating cost for the business. Essentially, the enhancement in the warranty claim process signifies an evolution towards improved customer satisfaction and a more strategic approach to service operations.

Figure 23: The new warranty claim process offers improved customer satisfaction and a more strategic approach to service operations.

SaaS Foundation

Extensibility

The cloud extensibility model with a three-system landscape in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition enables customers to seamlessly leverage SAP innovations, resulting in future-proof extensions that are compliant throughout their lifecycle and do not require adjustments during cloud innovation cycles. With this model, we can develop cloud-ready business apps, services, or custom extensions that are both upgrade-stable and cloud-ready. With developer extensibility, as a customer or partner, you can use one-off delivery for ABAP development intended to remain within your SAP S/4HANA Cloud landscape which enables you to import the developed custom ABAP code in a three-system landscape into the test and production system of the current landscape.

With multi-off delivery, we take it a step further. Custom development can be performed by a partner on behalf of a customer, in a separate development system which is not connected to the customer landscape, and then deployed on the customer's three-system landscape using the ‘Git-Enabled Change and Transport System’ (gCTS). The source code of ABAP extensions is stored in remote Git repositories, with gCTS being used to transfer (push and pull) the ABAP custom code between SAP S/4HANA Cloud landscapes and Git repositories. This is especially useful for scenarios where source and target landscapes can't be connected via transport routes. The SAP Fiori app ‘Git-Enabled CTS (gCTS)’ helps to manage tasks such as connecting to remote Git repositories, pushing and pulling commits, and managing branches. Commits are created in the development environment using ABAP development tools for Eclipse (ADT) when a task of a transport request is released. Find more information here.

Figures 24 & 25: Multi-off delivery brings a multitude of possibilities for custom development.

Public Sector Management

Public sector functionality within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is broadening in terms of geographical availability. In addition to the US, Canada, and Germany, services such as grants management, budget management, and fund accounting is now also available in the UK, the Netherlands, and Australia. The global deployment of our service has started and is gaining great momentum. Be prepared for the availability in additional countries by the year 2025.

Additionally, we bring new, comprehensive budget management functionalities:

Addition of a Substitution Tool for Budget Maintenance.
Enhancement allowing the consumption of budget for expected expenses rather than the posting date.
Feature to check Public Sector budget availability using project hierarchies.
Updates to facilitate the generation of budget documents.
Improved reporting on budgets versus payments and open invoices.

Figure 26: This release includes significant updates to the early release enablement cycle for public sector.

R&D Engineering

In this release, we ship the integration of CAD design for data and file management. With this SAP Product Lifecycle Management solution, seamless interaction between engineering designs and SAP business processes is now feasible, i.e., you can easily transfer engineering bills of material (EBOMs) from the SAP Product Lifecycle Management solution and continue to work on them as manufacturing bills of material (MBOMs) in the relevant ‘Maintain Bill of Material (Version 2)’ app. The CAD tools extend their capabilities by being able to store files in the SAP PLM Product Data Integration (PDI), leading to the development of an Enterprise Product Structure within SAP’s Product Lifecycle Management. This integration simplifies the transfer of product data via product handover to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, reducing the number of interfaces and facilitating a smoother operation. The end result is higher efficiency in engineering processes, holistic product description for increased transparency, and reduced operating costs. Overall, it signifies a major stride towards optimizing product data management in industry-specific CAD applications.

Figure 27: The integration of CAD design for data and file management enhances your engineering processes.

Business Partner Data

This release presents an enhancement in data privacy management, allowing users to concurrently assign data controllers along with specific purposes to business partners. This upgrade significantly bolsters the concept of “privacy by design and default” by permitting users the flexibility to manually or automatically attach data controllers to business partners. With options to leverage this feature via the ‘Maintain Business Partner’ and ‘Manage Business Partner’ SAP Fiori apps or through API channels, businesses can effectively manage their partner master data. This advancement not only ensures timely compliance with stringent data protection regulations but also molds business processes to instill trust among partners and customers. By enhancing the data privacy landscape, this feature equips businesses with the edge to meet legal requirements and foster a venerable relationship with their customers.

Figure 28: You can now assign data controllers along with specific purposes to business partners.

Information Lifecycle Management

SAP Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM) allows users to manage the lifecycle of live and archived data. Users can set rules for managing data throughout its lifecycle, specifying how long it should stay in the database, how long it should be archived, and when it should be deleted. This can be done consistently across development, test, and production systems. With the 2408 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, one key feature is the self-service configuration user interface (SSCUI). This tool allows users to centrally maintain SAP ILM settings and transport them across the system landscape i.e., development, test and production systems, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. Another key feature with this release is the storage of archive files to SAP HANA Cloud data lake files, ensuring fast and efficient access to archived data. Previously, these files were stored in the Neo platform. This change helps to store the SAP ILM archive files on a future-proof, fast, and cost-efficient technology stack, supporting both SAP ILM use cases: data volume management and data privacy. This change exclusively affects the underlying technology stack, with no impact on usability.

You can find more information here.

Figures 29 & 30: SAP Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM) allows users to manage the lifecycle of live and archived data.

Identity and Access Management

Unlock the full potential of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with the unified access to documentation about Identity and Access Management (IAM) on SAP Help Portal! With this, we provide a simplified, one-stop shop for all IAM-related documentation, making it easier for users to access everything you need to know about user and identity management, roles, authorization, and authentication. The documentation covers all IAM-related tasks in the different phases of implementation (prepare, realize, run, and upgrade) making the process more streamlined and efficient. This unified access to IAM documentation provides a holistic view on IAM for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and integrated products from initial system access to tasks which need to be completed before, during, and after upgrading SAP S/4HANA Cloud and allows you to familiarize yourself with its key concepts.

Figure 31: Check out the documentation about Identity and Access Management on SAP Help Portal.

Summary

You see, the world is turning fast, and we keep you at the forefront of progress–but these are by far not all innovations we have in store with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408. Stay tuned for the individual blog posts diving deeper into selected lines of business and industries.

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and check out our community page to ask your questions and engage with the experts. Follow the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with our latest blog posts.

📽️ Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Early Release Series!

From July 8 to July 12, we hosted a series of 20 compelling live sessions to highlight the exciting innovations shipped with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 release. Missed the live sessions? We've got you covered! Take advantage of the entire series or pick and choose the sessions most relevant to you. Don't miss this chance and watch them on demand–anywhere, anytime.

🔎Find All of Our Assets

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408: Final What's New & Product Assistance available

2024-07-24T15:01:24.404000+02:00

With immediate effect, the final What's New information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 is now available. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is based on the technical product SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

To access the Final What’s New information, please use the What’s New Viewer.

For further formats and languages of the What's New information, as well as pre-filtered views, please use the following SAP S/4HANA Cloud Help Portal page.

In addition, the final Product Assistance (aka Application Help) for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 is available. Please use the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Help Portal page to access the Product Assistance in multiple languages.

For you as a customers, we recommend to also use the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool.

The Release Assessment and Scope Dependency (RASD) tool provides you with a personalized and tailored view on What’s New information based on the activated and used scope within your system. The information for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 will be available in RASD within the next few days. A valid Customer S-user ID is required for login. We recommend to use RASD to prepare for upgrades and updates of your system and to focus on the new and changed features that are relevant for you as a customer.

There is a new commenting feature available for the What’s New in the release SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2408. The feature is now available for this release as part of a pilot that will end on August 21, 2024. During the pilot, authors will evaluate your feedback and incorporate it into the documentation, if needed. We hope that by opening this channel of communication, we can learn how to further improve our What’s New content for you.

SAP UX Latest 2024 Innovations in Public Cloud: Joule, GenAI and More

2024-07-25T12:12:59.234000+02:00

We are taking SAP’s user experience to the next level by incorporating new AI design patterns into our products. These last six months our public cloud products have been leading the way, so let us have a look at concrete examples of how users can get their jobs done more easily thanks to these patterns for Joule and Generative AI (GenAI) in SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Ariba, SAP Customer Experience and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408. In addition to AI patterns, our product teams have also invested in specific user experience improvements. Finally, our technology teams have made it easier to build UIs, leveraging GenAI built into SAP Business AI.

We are accelerating our use of AI in our user experience, to make work easier for users – so much so that you might even feel overwhelmed by all the new announcements and features across our portfolio! However, there are some fundamental patterns which we have identified and which our designers have baked into our SAP Design System. Understanding these patterns will help you understand how we are incorporating AI into our user experience. It will make it easier for you to put the many announcements of new AI-enabled features into context.

In this post, we’ll look at:

The AI design patterns, with concrete examples in our products.
User experience improvements in selected products.
UI technology innovations.

These are the AI design patterns we’ll be looking at, each with their own section:

Joule UX innovations, with a focus on the new informational pattern for customer documents provided by SAP SuccessFactors.
Triggering GenAI actions, such as
- Providing a summary of a given business object or context.
- Creating proposals, such as performance goals in SuccessFactors, or for a category segmentation in SAP Ariba.
- GenAI prompts within application UIs – for using natural language directly within the application.
- Guided AI Prompts – for example for writing assistants, so that users don’t have to worry about what prompt text to enter to get the desired result.

We expect these patterns to be used broadly across the SAP portfolio in the future; the examples below are from products which have adopted them first.

Transformational as AI is for the user experience, it is only a part of the overall interaction a user has with an application. Hence, in addition to introducing AI into our UI, we are continuing to work on ensuring that we provide a good overall user experience, by improving existing applications and by building new ones. In this post, I’ll give you a brief overview of some of the major innovations of the last six months, and provide pointers where you can find out more, in the sections:

User Experience Improvements in Selected Products
- SAP SuccessFactors
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

The same goes for our UI technology, where we are embedding AI to make it easier to build applications with great UX – I’ll give you a brief overview along with pointers to more details, in the sections:

UI Technology Innovations
- AI-enabled UI Development
- Further UI Technology Highlights

Joule User Experience Innovations

Joule is your AI-enabled copilot for working with SAP, allowing you to use natural language to gain insights and achieve results. Today, it is generally available for SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Customer Experience, SAP Customer Data Platform, SAP Build Code, and SAP Integration Suite. It is also available to early adopters of SAP Start and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The navigational pattern (see below) is already available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.

First, let me recap the main interaction patterns provided by Joule, before introducing a new capability available today with SAP SuccessFactors.

Joule Interaction Patterns

Joule has these three interaction patterns, examples of which you can see in Figure 1.

Informational Pattern: allows you to query documentation with natural language, typically with a “How do I…” question. Joule provides concise summaries of content from documents, such as SAP documentation in the Help Portal, along with three links to the most relevant sections of the documents.

Navigational Pattern: Joule recommends relevant applications and facilitates seamless navigation to these applications – typically in response to a “Where can I…” question.

Transactional Pattern: Joule offers insightful information about business objects. It also allows you to make updates to business data directly within Joule, eliminating the necessity of opening the corresponding application.

Figure 1: Examples of each of the three interaction patterns for Joule: informational, navigational, and transactional, from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (for early adopters). ALT Text: Three images of Joule are shown. On the left, the informational pattern shows that the user has typed “Can I configure a workflow for my purchase requisitions”. Below that, the eight-line written answer is shown, followed by a “Search results” selector and three top search results. In the middle, the navigational pattern, the user has typed “Where can I execute mass changes on my purchase requisition?”, below that, the reply from Joule “Here’s what I’ve found” is followed by a card containing three lines, each with an application name and an “Open” button. On the right the transactional pattern, the user has typed “Show Purchase Requisitions”, Joule responded with “Sure, here is what I found” and a card containing three lines, each with a PR number followed by an “Open” button.

New: Informational Pattern for Customer Documents

We have now extended the informational pattern to allow customers of SAP SuccessFactors to upload company policy documents which can be queried via Joule. This means that users can use natural language to ask a question, such as “What’s the expense limit for business meals in Germany?”, and Joule will provide a concise summary from the customer policy document(s). Not only that: Joule will also provide links to the relevant documents. Think about how much time you can save that way! Figure 2 shows an example, and Video 1 shows an example from 0:57 to 1:30.

Figure 2: Example of a user using Joule to query a customer expense policy document. ALT Text: The image shows the top part of the SuccessFactors home page with Joule as an overlay on the right. The user has typed in to the Joule chat “Can I use my private car for my business trip?”. Below that, Joule’s nine-line response is shown, followed by a link to the source document.

Technically, the customer documents that have been uploaded are grounded into the underlying AI large language model, which means that we can use the power of generative AI to extract information from these documents without the risk of hallucinations.

You can find out more about this new Joule use case supported by SAP SuccessFactors, along with a large number of new transactional use cases in the What’s New Viewer for 1H2024:

SAP SuccessFactors Documentation: New Use Cases Supported in Joule.

Have a Look at How Joule Energizes You at Work

Joule, your copilot for working with SAP, is intended to give users a natural language based single entry point (in the web or on mobile) for all their applications and business data – complementing the UI-based single entry point in the web provided by SAP Start, and the UI-based mobile entry point provided by SAP Mobile Start.

As such, Joule will also support many of the AI interaction patterns I listed in the introduction above. Indeed, already today you can see these patterns in action in Video 1 below:

Summary of a business object (in this case a customer account summary, combining data from SAP Sales Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Cloud).
Summary of customer requirements from an email message.
Transactional pattern: interacting with SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation, to get a best-fit product for the customer request.

Informational pattern for customer documents: a query to the company expense policy about how much employees can spend on dinner for entertaining a customer

Video 1: Joule in action for SAP Start, SAP Customer Experience and SAP SuccessFactors informational pattern for customer documents.

Joule also supports developers building new applications and their UIs, you can see an example of this towards the end of the blog post.

Watch these videos to see more examples of Joule in action for SAP Customer Experience (CX) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud:

Outlook

Here are some forward-looking statements about what we plan to deliver in the near future. As always, these are subject to change, but of course we hope to deliver as planned.

Towards the end of Q3/2024, we plan to make Joule generally available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, with the informational pattern available everywhere, and the other two patterns available for selected business areas.

Later this year, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain and SAP Ariba Category Management plan to provide Joule integration.

Just as we have extended the informational pattern to support customer documents for SAP SuccessFactors, so we plan to provide this capability also for customer documents relevant to other products.

A major step forward planned for later this year is support for analytics in the transactional pattern, so that users can query analytics and get responses as charts. We also plan to incorporate GenAI into the major workflows of SAP Analytics Cloud – read more about this in:

Generative AI for planning and analytics – statement of direction.

So far Joule is only available in English. Later this year we plan to support further languages, including French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

For more details, have a look at the road map for Joule in the SAP Road Map Explorer:

Joule Road Map

Triggering Generative AI Actions in the Application UI

A simple yet powerful way of helping users achieve better outcomes is to embed a generative AI action within an application UI, so that the system can for example generate a proposal based on initial data entered into the UI or already in the system. We can distinguish between the following kinds of actions:

Creating a written summary of existing business data, be it from an incoming email or data in the system, such as a customer account, a sales order or financial data.
Creating a proposal for new or updated business data or business objects, such as a performance goal for an employee, or a procurement category segmentation.

Creating a Summary of Business Data

I’d like to show you an example from SAP Customer Experience (CX) for creating an account summary, and two examples available now for Beta testing with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: summarization of object pages, and financial business insights.

SAP Customer Experience Example

SAP Customer Experience offers users various AI capabilities for working more effectively, one of these being summarizing business data, for example summarizing an incoming email for SAP Service Cloud. This capability is also embedded in Joule. You can see examples of this, and more, in this video (the summaries are from 0:25 to 0:50):

Video: Generative AI for Intelligent CX Overview (2:37 minutes).

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Examples

The following two examples are currently available as a Beta release.

Summarizing Object Pages

For all object pages which have been built with SAP Fiori elements, users can ask the system to summarize the business object. For example, if a manager sends an email asking for a summary of a sales order, the internal sales representative can use this feature to create a written summary, edit it as needed, and send it to their manager, saving a lot of time. Figure 3 shows what this looks like; you can also see it in action with this video:

Video: AI-assisted Smart Summarization of a Sales Order (1:10 minutes).

Figure 3: Smart summarization of a sales order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, available as a Beta release. ALT Text: the image shows a popover above a sales order UI. The popover contains text with a title “Order Summary” and sections “Introduction”, “Date and Location” and “Key Highlights”. The bottom right of the screen has a “Copy All” button.

AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights

Interpreting financial data can be challenging, and explaining them in an easy-to-understand way even more so. Hence, we provide AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights, which make this task much easier. Figure 4 shows an example of how the system will provide a summary report of the financial data. You can see it in action here:

Video: SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition AI-Assisted Financial Business Insights (1:20 minutes).

Figure 4: Summarizing financial reporting data in easy-to-understand language as provided by SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, available as a Beta release. ALT Text: the image shows a table on the left with 27 lines and 5 columns of cost center information, and on the right a comprehensive summary with a heading and five paragraphs. The screenshot is overlaid top left by an explanation box with the text “Increase financial reporting efficiency with quick actions supported by generative AI”, and at the bottom with an explanation box with the text “the company seems to have increased costs in 2024 compared to 2023”.

Generating proposals for business data

Let me show two examples for this pattern available today, from SAP Success Factors and from SAP Ariba. Note that SAP Customer Experience also offers GenAI support for creating business data, as already mentioned in the previous section.

SAP SuccessFactors Example

SAP SuccessFactors now supports managers who need to formulate performance goals, by providing a “Generate” with AI action. Managers can provide a brief description of the goal, and SAP SuccessFactors not only generates a longer description, it also makes proposals for milestones, with a suitable task description along with start and end dates. Of course, goals need to be well thought out by managers; nevertheless, having an initial starting point, especially with a break-down of potential goals on a timeline, can be very helpful, especially for less experienced managers. Figure 5 shows an example which showcases our AI button with the AI icon (to the left of the “Generate” text in the button).

Figure 5: Example from SAP SuccessFactors of an AI action for triggering generative AI to help managers formulate performance goals, along with suitable milestones. ALT Text: an animation showing how a user can enter the text “AI strategy for our production plant by Q4” and then click on the “Generate” button, which features the AI icon on the left. The result is a form with a goal description and metrics, followed by a table with proposed milestones and their start and end dates.

SAP Ariba Example

SAP Ariba Category Management also provides an additional AI action for creating a procurement category segmentation from scratch. As in the previous example, a Generate button with the AI icon is used, see Figure 6.

Figure 6: Example from SAP Ariba Category Management of an AI action for triggering generative AI to help create a category segmentation. ALT Text: an animation which starts with a screen with an illustration and text “No Segmentation to Display”. The user clicks on a button which features the AI icon before the text “Generate”, and the result is a proposed category segmentation chart on the left with a text summary on the right.

Generative AI Prompt within Application UI

We can go a step further than the simple AI action by letting users use natural language to interact directly with the application UI. We do this by enabling them to enter a prompt directly in the UI.

Since most users will not be familiar with formulating powerful GenAI prompts (prompt engineering), we use this simple input field in cases where it is obvious to the user what kind of input is expected.

The first example I’d like to share is the powerful “Just ask” feature now generally available with SAP Analytics Cloud. You can use natural language to create a query, and SAP Analytics Cloud uses AI to interpret the text as well as to decide on the most appropriate chart to use to visualize the result. Figure 7 shows an example.

Figure 7: “Just ask” in SAP Analytics Cloud. ALT Text: the user has entered “gross margin product”, and the appropriate chart representation (a horizontal bar chart) has been used to display the gross margin per product on the left. On the right you see that the system gives suggestions for suitable texts in buttons, which when clicked enter the text displayed in the button. The first such proposal shown is “Gross Margin per Category”. There is also a “Save question” section with a button with the text “gross margin product”.

The next example is now available as a Beta in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, allowing users to use natural language to filter lists, as an alternative to using the individual filter fields in the filter bar. The AI icon in the “Go” button indicates to users that AI is behind this functionality. Figure 8 shows an example for sales orders.

Figure 8: Using natural language to filter a list of sales orders in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (available as a Beta). The user has entered the text “Show me all open sales orders for December 2023”, the list only shows entries matching this query. ALT Text: the image shows a list report. At the top there is a toggle for the filter mode, with the options “Classic” and “SAP Business AI”. Below that, a disclaimer text, that generated content may not always be accurate. Below that, the text field for the query, to its right a button which features the AI icon before the text “Go”. Below that, the result list with 11 lines and 8 columns.

Technically, this feature is provided by applications built with SAP Fiori elements using OData V4. You can watch an example here:

Video: SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, AI-Assisted Easy Filter (0:51 minutes).

Guided AI Prompts

Creating good text proposals with Generative AI requires good prompts – something which most users of business systems have no or little expertise in. Hence, we have come up with guided AI prompts, which give users a UI element that allows them to tweak the kind of outcome they want, so that users don’t have to worry about what prompt text to enter to get the desired result.

SAP Customer Experience Example

Figure 9 shows how SAP Customer Experience enables service and support users to easily create response emails, in this case with sliders to influence the style, tone and length. As you can see, users don’t need to know exactly what kind of generative AI prompt text is needed, they can simply adjust the sliders to get the desired outcome – which they can of course further edit if needed.

Figure 9: Guided AI Prompt from SAP Customer Experience, showing the sliders for choosing the style, tone and length of the email on the left and a possible generated draft email text on the right. ALT Text: the slider and draft mail are visualized as a popover. Below the sliders there is a button which features the AI icon before the text “Generate Draft”. The popover has a language selector top right, with English now chosen, and “Apply” and “Cancel” buttons bottom right.

SAP SuccessFactors Writing Assistant

Managers often need to write text, be it formulating goals or giving feedback – but not everyone is a gifted writer! SAP SuccessFactors has found a novel way for generative AI to assist users in their writing. Figure 10 shows the approach, with an example where a manager is giving feedback to an employee. The “Give feedback” UI already provides good usability, by helping the manager formulate the main aspects (what went well?, what could I improve on?, any additional comments).

The new Writing Assistant takes this to the next level: by marking the text, a context menu appears, as you can see on the left in Figure 10; clicking on the AI icon brings the drop-down menu shown in the middle, where the manager can choose from various options to adapt the text with generative AI. On the right you see how the Writing Assistant shows you the original text and the suggested new text – in this case improving the original text, in particular by replacing “…they can be difficult” with “…even though they can sometimes be challenging”.

User Experience Improvements in Selected Products

This section gives updates on our Web Entry Point, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. I'll keep this section fairly short, and mainly point you to sources where you can find the details.

Web Entry Point: SAP Start, SAP Build Work Zone, SAP Task Center

SAP Start is now integrated with SAP Fieldglass, which provides two insight cards. Also, SAP SuccessFactors has provided three additional insight cards for SAP Start – read more here:

What’s New for SAP Start – May 2024

The SAP Task Center now provides APIs for integrating tasks from 3rd-party products. Read more about it here:

SAP Task Center’s New 3rd Party Integration

SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition also has a number of enhancements:

What’s New in SAP Build – Q2 2024 Edition

SAP SuccessFactors

The 1H2024 release comes with a large number of UX innovations across the whole portfolio. To get the complete picture, have a look at these two blog posts:

Here, I would like to highlight the new design for the organizational chart, along with the new user experience for the people profile, with a brand new public view of your profile (public within your company) consisting of Profile Preview and Spotlight, along with more intuitive user interactions.

Figure 11: The new org chart in SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: The image shows an org chart, with each employee summarized in a box with their image on the left and their name and job role on the right. The image has a manager “Christine Dolan” at the top, below which another manager “Charles Braun” is shown, with his direct and indirect reports shown underneath: direct reports linked with and surrounded by a solid line, dotted-line ones linked with and surrounded by a dotted line.

Employees can build and represent their personal brand by showcasing skills and competencies, mentoring and target roles, and other relevant information sourced from SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Colleagues who look at the org chart can get a quick preview of a user’s profile with the Profile Preview, shown in Figure 12, and get more information using the Spotlight, shown in Figure 13.

Figure 12: SAP SuccessFactors "Profile Preview", shown on the right. ALT Text: The image shows the preview as a popover on the right of the screen, with a photo of Aanya Singh and a “Show Spotlight” button next to it along with a button for opening the Org Chart. Below that, her role and organization are shown, along with some text she provided about herself, a photo, name and organization of her direct manager, and a link to “All Actions”.

Figure 13: SAP SuccessFactors "Spotlight". ALT Text: the image shows the Profile Preview of Aanya Singh on the left, but with the button “Hide Spotlight” instead of “Show Spotlight”. On the right, the rest of the screen shows her skills, competencies, who she is mentoring, her organization, an about me video, upcoming absence, work experience, reporting line, target roles and badges for good performance.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408

The latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition comes with a large number of new AI-enabled user experience enhancements, such as the smart summarization and easy filter, which I explained earlier. To get an overview of all of these, read this summary, or watch Arpan Shah, Head of Product Management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, introduce them all at this year’s SAP Sapphire conference:

Summary: Unlock Tomorrow’s Potential with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
SAP Sapphire Video: ERP127 – SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: Find out what’s next.
Blog post (look at the “Modern and Intelligent Experience” section): Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 Release.

As I mentioned in the introduction, AI is only a part of the overall interaction a user has with an application. I’d like to highlight these new innovations in the user experience for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition:

Spaces and Pages replace the classical SAP Fiori launchpad group-based visualization, so all customers are automatically enabled to use My Home.
My Home: To-Dos task cards show details, and AI makes suggestions for a users’ favorites (see Figure 14 below).
Collaborative ERP: further Microsoft integration with Adaptive card-based Loop components and integration with Microsoft Copilot as a Beta release – see below for more information.
Change Management: we are introducing a toggle to allow users to switch from the existing version of an app to a new version, starting with selected apps.

My Home

The To-Dos task cards offer action buttons, for example to approve or reject items. Often, this requires some key information about the item, for example the name of the product and the value for a purchase requisition. These details are now visualized directly in the task cards, as you can see in Figure 14.

Another useful new feature is AI recommendations for applications: as you can see in Figure 14 in the Apps section of My Home, a new tab has been introduced which uses AI to create a list of applications which are recommended to the user to add to their Favorites.

Figure 14: New features of My Home in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: the To-Dos task cards show details, and AI makes recommendations for applications which are likely to be relevant to the user. ALT Text: the image shows three To-Do cards at the top, each with header text “Approve Purchase Requisition” followed by the number, below that the name of the requestor, item description, net value, requisition date and requestor. Each card has an “Approve” and “Reject” button. Below that, the Apps section has a new tab “Recommended” with an information banner below it explaining that “Here you can see applications that are recommended to you by SAP Business AI. You can choose to disable this tab using the settings”. Below that, two rows of five apps with their icons are shown. The bottom of the image shows parts of the News (on the left) and Pages (on the right) sections.

As well as the above, My Home now provides:

To-Dos now also shows custom Situations, created using the extended Situation Handling framework, in addition to the standard situations delivered by SAP.
Intelligent generation of pre-delivered cards for new cloud customers.
Drag & drop is now enabled in the insights section, so you can directly rearrange your tiles and cards.
Information about deprecated apps.

Collaboration with Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Loop Components

We already enable users to collaborate via Microsoft Teams, embedding applications in chats or as tabs in Teams channels. We are taking this to the next level, available for Beta testing with the 2408 release, by:

Informing users about to-dos via notifications in Microsoft Teams;
Enabling embedding of interactive cards with information and actions from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition directly into Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Copilot. The data and actions are only shown to users with the necessary authorizations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Technically this is done via adaptive card-based Loop component; Figures 16 and 17 show examples.
Even more powerful: we have started integrating Microsoft Copilot with Joule, combining enterprise data residing in SAP with contextual knowledge from Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, and more, helping to deliver richer insights for better decision-making.

Figures 15 and 16 show an example of integration with Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Outlook. Figure 15 shows the response to Alice’s request to Copilot for details of a sales order, where you can see the written summary along with the adaptive card containing details, links and action buttons. Users can easily copy these adaptive cards into an Outlook e-mail or a Teams chat, using the copy button shown in Figure 15.

Figure 16 shows what it looks like if you receive an email containing an adaptive card – the example shows Frank’s inbox, with the e-mail that Alice sent him by copying the adaptive card shown in Figure 15. Frank can see the card with the details, links and action buttons.

To see it in action, watch this:

Video: Microsoft Copilot Integration for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (2:25 minutes).

Figure 15: An example of how a user (Alice) can use Microsoft Copilot to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The image shows a summary of a sales order, with a card containing information about the sales order, including the action button “Remove Billing Block”.

Figure 16: An example of an adaptive card embedded in an Outlook email. The user Frank received an email from Alice requesting that he remove the billing block. ALT Text: the email contains text “Hey Frank, can you please help to get this sales order processed asap. Please remove the block!”, followed by a long URL to access the sales order, and the adaptive card with the heading “SAP S/4HANA Cloud”, the sales order number as a hyperlink, sales order details and two action buttons at the bottom “Set Billing Block” and “Remove Billing Block”.

If you are interested in trying this out via the Beta testing program, you can register here.

UI Technology Innovations

Before showing you the latest innovations, I would like to introduce the new SAP Application Extension Methodology, and in particular the Extension Architecture Guide, which is for enterprise architects and solution architects that are already familiar with SAP's extensibility concepts and are seeking comprehensive decision-making guidance with an emphasis on the SAP Business Technology Platform. The section Presentation Tier Guidance summarizes SAP’s guidance for the extension task "create custom user interface (UI)", which addresses the need to develop a new custom UI, tailored to meet specific business requirements.

This year, we have invested heavily in supporting developer extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Learn more about it here:

Blog post: Extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition using SAPUI5 adaptation projects.
Documentation: Extending an SAP Fiori Application for S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP BTP, ABAP Environment.
Documentation: SAPUI5 Flexibility (covering end-user personalization, key-user personalization and developer adaptation).

AI-enabled UI Development

SAP Build Code brings AI-enablement for application developers on SAP Business Technology Platform, giving you:

Guided development to quickly build SAP Fiori apps: web, mobile and full-stack.
Built-in guidance and SAP best practices for developers to create enterprise-grade applications.
Visual tools and a programming language of your choice: JavaScript, TypeScript, Java and more.

With generative AI in SAP Build Code, you get the following:

Joule auto-generates app logic and data models.
Automated unit test coverage.
Contextual application logic code generation based on prompts.
Automatic sample data generation.

SAP Fiori tools go even further, allowing you to describe the list report and object page application you would like to create, and then automatically generating the data model , CDS views, OData services as well as the SAP Fiori elements UI. Figure 17 shows how you can use natural language to describe the application you want to build, in this case taking the example available in the documentation and copying it into Joule. Figure 18 shows the outcome: the data and code assets visualized in SAP Build Code as well as the resulting application UI list report and object page. Read more about this, and see it in action, in this blog post:

SAP Fiori tools 2403 introduces Gen AI capability and more.

Figure 17: Using Joule with SAP Fiori tools to describe the SAP Fiori elements application you want to create, in this case taking the example text from the documentation. ALT Text: the image contains three screenshots. On the left the documentation, in the middle Joule with the initial lines of the documentation text entered, on the right Joule with the final lines of the documentation entered, where the field names are listed in the order they should appear in the list report.

Figure 18: The resulting data and code assets visualized in SAP Build Code as well as the resulting SAP Fiori elements application UI consisting of a list report and an object page. ALT Text: the image contains three screenshots. On the left SAP Build Code showing the generated entities; in the middle the generated list report UI with five lines of data; on the right the generated object page with the header and a “Contract Details” section containing nine fields.

In case you need more flexibility than provided by the SAP Fiori elements patterns, we also provide AI-enablement for freestyle SAPUI5. Read about it in this blog post:

Joule for freestyle SAPUI5 development in SAP Build Code.

Further UI Technology Innovations

Here are some further new capabilities I’d like to bring to your attention.

New features of SAP Fiori elements based on OData V4, explained in this blog post:

Unlocking Efficiency and Simplicity: A Look into the New Features of SAP Fiori Elements for OData V4 – the new features are:
- Support for recently entered values dropdown.
- Open object page in edit mode.
- Merging section and subsection title to reduce unnecessary white space.

If you program the UI of your new application using SAPUI5 and the flexible programming model, you’ll want to ensure good code quality. To help you with that, we bring you UI5 linter, a powerful static code analysis tool:

Introducing UI5 linter.

These blog posts introduce further interesting new features or offerings:

Final words

For more information about our AI innovations, have a look at this article from Philipp Herzig, our Chief AI Officer:

SAP’s New AI Innovations and Partnerships Deliver Real-World Results.

We’re looking for your feedback on the SAP Fiori design guidelines, how we communicate updates / news - in other words, on our communication strategy for the SAP Design System. Please take a few minutes to fill out this little survey:

SAP Design System: Communications Strategy Survey.

Do keep posting your experiences and recommendations yourself in the SAP Community, with the SAP Fiori and/or the User Experience tag! In case you are wondering how to get a list of the most recent blog posts on SAP Fiori and User Experience in our new SAP Community, use these links:

For general information on design at SAP and SAP Fiori, check out:

SAP Screen Personas and Adapt UI for classic apps are growing in popularity. July 2024 update

2024-07-26T01:42:16.467000+02:00

It seems like generative AI is on everyone’s mind. This was certainly the case at SAP Sapphire last month. SAP continues to innovate in this area with new AI design patterns appearing across the product portfolio. In my opinion, one factor that’s driving the interest in AI for UX use cases is that people are looking for a fast and easy way to improve the user experience. The good news is that this does not require generative or even “classic” AI. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition includes a simple and powerful feature to adapt the UI for classic apps. This is also available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and on-prem customers as SAP Screen Personas.

In this post, I’ll provide a short background on SAP Screen Personas, discuss its implementation as a standard feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, and share some interesting usage patterns we are observing. I’ll conclude with some concrete next steps so you can improve the user experience of your SAP ERP system.

SAP Screen Personas / Adapt UI for classic apps lets you simplify screens and streamline business processes

We introduced the first version of SAP Screen Personas in 2012. Fast forward to today and we are on SAP Screen Personas 3.0 SP18. During that time, thousands of customers have simplified their transaction screens. My colleagues and I, along with the customers that attend our monthly practitioner forum calls, have seen a wide variety of UX transformations, ranging from merging content from different tabs or transactions onto a single screen to automating bulk updates that reduce the process time from hours to 30 seconds.

SAP Screen Personas is built into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

SAP Screen Personas was so popular and loved by our customers that we decided to make it a standard feature of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Although there are over 3000 SAP Fiori apps available in SAP S/4HANA, there are still some scenarios that lack SAP Fiori coverage. Several thousand classic apps are available to accomplish these less-common tasks. There was already the ability to adapt SAP Fiori apps using SAPUI5 flexibility so we added the new functionality to adapt classic apps using the same menu.

Explosive growth in Adapt UI for classic apps in the past year

Running our software in the cloud gives us better visibility into how customers are using our solutions, which provides insights into adoption patterns. The team and I were pleasantly surprised to see that roughly 20% of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers are using the Adapt UI functionality. In fact, we have a 300% increase in the number of flavors running in productive systems within the past year. What are all these customers doing?

What we observed is that public cloud customers are simplifying many of the same apps that their on-prem counterparts do. These tend to be some of the more complex SAP GUI transactions in procurement, sales and distribution, and material handling. Looking deeper, we see that there is also the “long tail” of screen simplifications, with around 175 classic apps having 10 or fewer flavors.

From my perspective, the implications for SAP are clear. For the heavily used flavors, we should probably provide an SAP Fiori app. In some cases, this already exists, and we need to explore why customers are choosing to simplify the classic app rather than using the corresponding SAP Fiori app. (If this is you, please reach out; I would love to hear your explanation.)

Another conclusion I reached from this data is that it was a great idea to include Adapt UI for Classic Apps as a standard feature in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, since so many customers are using it to personalize screens to meet their unique business requirements. It also shows that public cloud customers have lots of flexibility to adapt or extend the user interface and they are using it. SAP Screen Personas is one of several powerful options. Private cloud or on-prem customers have even more extensibility options.

How to improve the user experience of your SAP ERP system

Customers

If you are an SAP S/4HANA customer, I recommend you use SAP Fiori apps, whenever possible. You can find the comprehensive list in the SAP Fiori app reference library.
For the classic apps, if there is something you don’t like, change it.
While SAP Screen Personas is built into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, it’s a free add-on that takes less than an hour* to install into your private cloud or on-prem system. Then, you can simplify your SAP GUI transactions or classic apps, if you prefer that terminology.
* if you know what you are doing.

Partners

Learn how Adapt UI for Classic Apps fits into SAP’s UX portfolio and how to use it strategically as part of an SAP S/4HANA transformation or greenfield implementation. The most comprehensive training course on SAP Screen Personas is now on the SAP Learning platform. This training is still free.

Learn more about SAP Screen Personas

Online training. The best way to learn the basics about SAP Screen Personas (Adapt UI for classic applications) is to take our course on the SAP Learning platform. https://learning.sap.com/courses/adapting-the-ui-in-sap-s-4hana-cloud-using-sap-screen-personas
Connect with your peers. Every other month, we have a group of customers that gather online to share best practices, demo their flavors, and answer each other’s questions. Experts from the product team also join to explain how to use the latest functionality. If you are interested in joining, you can sign up online to join the SAP Screen Personas practitioner forum. This will add you to the mailing list for the monthly meeting summaries. Please contact me directly if you want to join the monthly calls.

I hope you start using Adapt UI for Classic Apps or SAP Screen Personas to make your business users happier and more productive.

For the SAP UX Engineering team, Peter Spielvogel.