How to choose the right SAP User Experience (UX) Transformation Platform – SAP Personas or SAP Fiori?

User Experience: The Case for Change

SAP User Experience (UX) Solutions

For enterprises looking at making SAP attractive, aiming profits by creating easy user adoption of SAP, the news about SAP Fiori and Personas at Sapphire Now 2014 is a great news. The exciting news is that, the two user experience (UX) products,are now included free for SAP customers. Each of these complementary solutions helps today’s business users by making SAP more intuitive.

SAP Fiori applies modern responsive design principles for a completely re-imagined user experience. SAP Fiori UX represents a personalized, responsive and simple user experience across devices and deployment options. The ready-to-use 300+ role-based apps of SAP Fiori provide a wide range of choice for SAP users. The apps are categorized into three app types that include transactional apps that allow users to perform transaction tasks, analytical apps that provide users role-based insight into key performance indicators, and fact sheets that display contextual information and key facts about central objects used in business operations.

While, SAP Screen Personas is for customization of most classic screens in SAP ERP to increase personal Productivity. The simple, drag and drop approach to modify most SAP GUI screens. Using SAP Screen Personas makes simplifying business application screens quickly and easily for IT and business users without any programming knowledge. SAP Screen Personas improves the end-user productivity, visual appeal, and performance of SAP.

Comparison Matrix to choose between the SAP Personas and SAP Fiori

How to choose  SAP Personas or SAP Fiori?

For majority of SAP casual users in an enterprise, Fiori will be a right-fit to run routine and most common transactions. Fiori apps are ready to run apps with responsive designs that work in an intuitive way across smart phones, tablets and desktops, allowing users to update routine tasks from anywhere from any device. It helps in enhancing speed of business in every line of business. Updated information of inventory, leaves approval, sales and purchase order approvals, creating a dynamic supply chain management which can efficiently deal with challenging supply and demand situations allowing minimal changes for enhancement of look and feel, not allowing changes to the underlying transactions.

SAP Personas has do-it-yourself approach, primarily designed for desktops, helping in modifying specialized and complex screens, tabs or tables of any SAP GUI transaction quickly and easily. Requiring no programming, the most functional group of the organizations can simplify the processes by selecting the information they choose to appear in their own required context.

Based on your priorities, and addressing the below queries will help your enterprise choose the right SAP UI technology to assist your SAP UX transformation initiatives.

For more information regarding our services around SAP User Experience (UX), or to schedule a demo of SAP Fiori or SAP Personas, please email us at sales@innovapptive.com or click here to complete our contact form.

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Deconstructing the user types and full benefits of SAP Enterprise Mobility

Mobility as a revolution is playing an ever-increasing role in the business world. Unlocking new capabilities for consuming and processing information is radically changing the way enterprises conduct business. According to leading industry analysts 50% of business applications will be accessed through mobile within two years. As your enterprise embarks into the mobile revolution, it is important to deconstruct your user base right at inception to reap the full benefits of Enterprise Mobiliy.

Businesses using SAP and opting for SAP Enterprise Mobility, need to understand the diversified users of business mobile community to achieve the benefits of SAP Enterprise Mobility.  Mobile solutions vary depending on the specific business and functional needs of a particular community.  Business mobile community can be broken into three distinct groups:

• Casual users:

  These users very rarely have the need to use an SAP system and rarely tend to adopt SAP on their desktop/laptop. Casual users in your enterprise are constantly looking for easier, consumer grade solutions to complete their casual functions with minimal training. Administrate tasks such as entering a travel & expense report, submitting their time sheets or approving purchase requisitions, purchase orders or invoices don’t necessarily require a casual user to be trained in SAP. Instead, if an enterprise can mobilize these functions with consumer grade and intuitive solutions likeSAP Fiori or Innovapptive’s mPower™ Apps Suite, the overall administrative cost per employee is significantly reduced.

• Professional users:

  These users are typically field workers where mobility plays a vital role to perform their routine day to day functions.Field engineers, technicians and service representatives have minimal access to a desktop and laptop but require access and process critical information at the point of service delivery. Usage of mobility by these professional users provides a superior and high level of service to customers with the ability to centrally update and look up information anywhere and anytime. Deploying mobile solutions to these critical users, lowers administrative costs, enhances integrity, improves customer satisfaction and helps faster decision making.

• Transactional users:

  These users use business applications on a daily basis and need the ability to query and enter new data.  As full access to the entire suite is necessary and a simple business app may not full fill the requirement of a transactional users. Enterprise mobile solutions have to be designed to handle a quick-to-complete task, which thereby increases more professional level of customer related services by introducing new business practices and making full use of the ERP capabilities.

The road to mobilizing the above users should consider the below 3 critical aspects:

Step 1: Innovate and create a strong and foundational value road map

Innovate by understanding and prioritizing use cases by business value, type of apps, devices, simplicity, and ease of adoption. Ensure security and platform requirements are not compromised through this journey.

Step 2: Transform by introducing new levels of automation and productivity

True transformation can be achieved when the mobile solution has the ability to re-engineer core processes by automating routines to bring new levels of flexibility to the workforce, The use cases that are about to be deployed shall have the ability to move beyond industry norms and ‘business as usual’ engagement with customers and suppliers. It enables to transform partner, staff, and customer/supplier relationships.

Step 3: Empower your workforce to do more with less.

The results of mobilization should empower your enterprise with concrete returns on investments. Enterprises must find effective tools like the SAP Mobile Platform to monitor adoption, usage and other KPI’s that improve employee productivity at lower cost, improve data quality, and remain ahead of competition.

SAP Mobile Transformation: RFID and Bar Code Peripheral Solutions for Smart Phones and Tablets are revolutionizing automatic data capture and processing in SAP

Implementing a mobile handheld device to automate and process your SAP transactions can be an expensive and complex affair. Automating critical SAP transactions such as work orders, inventory management or a point of sale solution require the ability to scan bar code through a mobile handheld device. However, these mobile handheld devices can be an extremely expensive proposition with devices ranging anywhere between $2000 – $6500, depending on your configuration and requirement with associated complex infrastructure to support offline requirements. A cost-complexity-benefit case analysis has traditionally limited the use of handheld devices to automate critical business locations, users and SAP transactions. However with the advent of smart phones, tablets and secured bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, your employee’s smart phones or corporate owned devices can be converted into handheld devices using disruptive RFID peripherals. These RFID peripherals now provide the ability to further automate SAP transactions that fell through the cracks in your cost-complexity-benefit case analysis of a handheld device.

What is an RFID/Bar Code Scanning Peripheral?

Companies such as Infinite Peripherals are redefining the mobile handheld devices by simply converting your smart phone or tablets into bar code scanning devices to assist processing automation of your SAP data.  Handheld vs. RFID/Barcode Peripheral Comparison Matrix 

 Compatible Mobile RFID and Bar Code Peripheral Solutions

Innovapptive’s offers several pre-built, SAP certified mobile solutions that run with these RFID and Bar Code Peripheral Solutions. Several of our Fortune 500 customers are using these devices to transform and automate a variety of their use cases. I have listed few examples below:

MOBILE QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Innovapptive’s mQuality mobile solution allows quality managers to create SAP quality notifications in real-time in plants, warehouses and inventories. Capturing product defect details and images using their mobile device integrated with RFID peripherals is much easier in asset intensive industries. The recorded information is then assigned to a coordinator for faster processing of the defect resolution, thereby improving product quality and customer satisfaction.

MOBILE ASSET TAGGING

Innovapptive’s mAssetTag solution allows automation of your fixed asset physical inventory reconciliation by simply scanning fixed assets using these peripherals and using the smart phones GPS functionality to record it’s most current location to meet regulatory requirement of completing a 20% reconciliation of your fixed assets.

MOBILE INVENTORY AND WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT

Innovapptive’s mInventory solution uses RFID peripheral to automate critical inventory transactions such as inventory cycle counting, goods receipts, goods issue and stock look ups, resulting is accurate and up to date inventory information in SAP. With mPower™ mInventory mobile app, precise tracking and paperless management of inventory helps you increase productivity, lower costs, optimize your supply chain, and improve customer service.

MOBILE SALES EXECUTION

Innovapptive’s mSalesExec solution allows Sales reps need access to SAP CRM to have up to date information on the in-store placement which may be remotely located. The app is integrated with RFID/Bar Code peripherals to automate sales order creation by simply scanning SKU’s within an order guide to quickly create a sales order.

MOBILE WORK ORDER

Innovapptive’s mWorkOrder mobile solution is integrated with RFID devices allowing companies to share work order information with service and maintenance technicians in real time to help them get organized, record start and end time, review detailed work order information, analyze service routes, record notes, add components and upload relevant pictures and documents.

Security Challenges in Enabling SAP Enterprise Mobility. How does your Enterprise Prevent Data Breach and Data Leakage?

The usage of mobile devices and their adoption into business is ever-increasing. Improved hardware performance, a robust platform feature set and increased communication bandwidth, contribute towards expanding mobile capabilities beyond voice and email. Usage of smart phones in companies have created new strategies in business processes as never before because of their capability to access back-end information from anywhere anytime.  As a result enterprises want to seize every opportunity using mobile to speedup business processes, increase productivity and create a best ROI. The overwhelming enthusiasm of industries towards mobilizing their enterprises involves security risks. Overlooking these security vulnerabilities may lead to serious data threat to an enterprise.

According to enterprise security expert Jack Gold, organizations will lose three to four times as many smartphones as notebooks each year. Gold (rhetorically) asks us “with 32 or 64 GB of memory, how many records does a lost smartphone or tablet contain?” At an estimated cost of more than $250 per lost record, a data breach can be expensive. In fact, some research estimates the cost of a mobile breach at more than $400,000 for an enterprise and more than $100,000 for a small business, and in some cases these costs can range into the millions.

This concern resonates as an increasing number of smartphones and tablets not only connect to the corporate network but also access an increasing number of business applications and content repositories. Beyond data, enterprise IT and security departments are concerned about the risk of opening up the internal network to a diverse array of mobile devices. In many cases, smartphones and tablets are neither governed nor monitored, meaning that they can introduce network threats and negatively impact an organization’s compliance status.

What layers of an enterprise mobile solution should an enterprise secure?

To answer this very important question, you need to peel the different layers of the enterprise mobility onion. SAP is a back-end for large number of enterprises across the globe, here are few Security Challenges in Enabling SAP Enterprise Mobility. Enterprises must secure their corporate data and prevent any security vulnerabilities/threats around three different layers:

1. Components Security

Enterprises much secure the different components of an enterprise mobile solution:

Data - Protecting corporate data from breach and leakage is of paramount importance. Securing, controlling and protecting integrity of the enterprise data, data at rest and data during transmission need to be monitored. The mobile security solution your enterprise implements must ensure that the data is protected at an application, cache and messaging database level.

Device - A robust mobile device management (MDM) solution is critical in securing corporate owned devices and data. Managing, monitoring, controlling and protecting the data/configuration settings reduces costs and business risks. In situations where a device is lost or stolen, it is important your enterprise has the capability to remotely wipe data and lock devices.

Servers - Hardening of servers, platforms and infrastructure of enterprise servers such as SAP Mobile Platform, MDM, MAM and Licensing Servers is critical in avoiding security vulnerabilities on the server layer.

2. Application Security

Enterprises must look into mobile application security to enable bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. Comprehensive mobile application management (MAM) solutions encrypt app data at rest, creates per-App VPN, app data wipe, app expiration, jail breaking, and geo fencing etc.

3. Authentication & Authorization

SSO (Single Sign On) - With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.

SSO2 - The purpose of SAP NWBC is to having all the required applications, traditional SAP transaction at a single platform. To allow access for the client to the backend, activating SSO2 cookies is requied as the NetWeaver Business Client(NWBC) uses SSO2 cookies for authentication.

HTTPS - The main motivation for HTTPS is to prevent wiretapping and man-in-the-middle attacks.

SAML - It is an open standard data format which is XML-based for exchanging authentication and authorization data between an identity provider and a service provider.

X509 - To secure data which is intended restricted visuality X.509 certificates can also be used so that others will not be able to see it. It is done by using a mathematical concept known as asymmetric key cryptography.

DATA vault -  The data vault provides encrypted storage of occasionally used, small pieces of data.  Data in data vault are encrypted with an AES-256 bit key. Content can include user and application login credentials, encryption keys, synchronization profile settings, and certificates. It requires a password to unlock the data from the application.

App Passcode - Setting a passcode for the device can go long way towards improving the security of the device.

How to customize SAP Mobile Apps without Even Changing Code?

As your enterprise is constantly searching for new ways to outshine your competition, the demand for enterprise mobility apps is exponentially rising. The quest to find solutions to improve overall employee productivity, increase sales revenues, and optimize your business processes, lead each one of your lines of businesses to think different and run better.

Thus they are constantly reaching out to your IT teams to achieve “instant mobilization”. Corporate IT teams are inundated with these requests and are faced with a daunting challenge to accelerate their enterprises’time to market and value. However, enterprises IT teams are crippled with lack of budget, man power, and cutting edge skills to meet this demand.

How is it humanely possible to meet this kind of demand?

Innovapptive has found a way to Customize SAP mobile apps, it is as simple as a SIMPLE SAP Configuration, no code change required.

Via the SAP store, Innovapptive offers a wide portfolio of configurable pre-packaged SAP certified mobile apps that can quickly meet your demand, accelerate your time to market and reduce support and deployment costs by over 70%.

How is this achieved?

Innovapptive offers a proprietary “customization and extensions” cockpit to achieve an infinite number of customizations through SIMPLE SAP Configurations. Yes, simple SAP Configurations and no code change required. This simplicity in customizing SAP mobile solutions to provide a strong value proposition to our customers will dramatically improve their overall ROI:

Which configuration features does the Customization and Extensions Cockpit offer?

• Add, remove, prioritize order of the fields
• Activate and deactivate modules specific to your company or industry.
• Add additional custom business logic during data retrieval or data posting with out-of-the-box Business Add-In’s (BADI’s)
• Apply security authorizations at the field level to meet security & Segregation of Duties (SOD) requirements
• Apply custom validations logic

Customization and Extensions Cockpit Features

How can those features be applied in practice?

• Add, Remove, Hide or Display Fields: By using simple SAP configurations for customizations, SAP functional consultants can make required fields available on-demand, and remove unwanted fields as per evolving business requirements, all without changing a single line of code.
• Field Mappings to SAP: Map newly added fields on the mobile app user interface to SAP table fields (including custom fields) with simple SAP configurations,
• New Business Logic Addition: Add new business logic either during posting or during data retrieval from the mobile app to meet current and evolving business requirements using Innovapptive provided SAP Business Add-In’s (BADI’s)
• New Screens Addition: Ability to design your own screens within Innovapptive’s framework and then placing them in a convenient sequence and decision tree, based upon your priority.
• New Transactions Addition: Ability to add new SAP transactions to existing functionality by creating a new module on the app.
• Security Configuration: Newly added fields can be made authorization relevant and the mobile app automatically checks against your existing SAP roles authorization data.
• Standard Security Validation: Depending on your SAP roles, the mobile app automatically updates its view and also validated data based on your existing SAP roles.
• Standard and Custom Business Validations: All standard and custom validations applied in SAP are automatically transpired into Innovapptive’s mobile app through the customization and extensions cockpit framework.

What value does it hold for IT and business?

Globally, 2,000 companies are already leveraging our extensive portfolio of SAP certified mobile solutions and our customization extensions cockpit to:

• Dramatically decrease implementation timelines and cost: Go mobile in less than four weeks
• Dramatically reduce on-going support and maintenance cost
• Avoid hiring any additional skill sets (Mobile UI/UX designer, iOS, Android, Appcelerator developer, project managers, security consultants, functional consultants)
• Receive OS upgraded versions for iOS, Android, Windows, etc. at no additional cost

If you would like to request a demo for the “customization and extensions cockpit”, please click on the link below.

Alternatively, if you would like to discuss with an Innovapptive associate, you can reach out to us by emailing us atsales@innovapptive.com or you can reach a customer service representative at (713)-275-1804.