Overview of Fiori - SAP ERP Tutorial

- [Instructor] Okay, so let's talk about Fiori in general terms. What is it? Fiori is SAP's new browser-based user interface, so the idea is that you don't log in to your old, regular ERP system with the SAP GUI anymore. Instead, you use Fiori through a web browser. SAP announced Fiori in late 2013, and then it was actually released in 2014, and fairly recently, at the end of 2016, they came out with Fiori 2.0, the newest version of it. And a couple of years back, SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced that Fiori is actually free for all SAP customers, so SAP provides this license for free. So, there's really no reason not to look into using it. There's a lot of good upsides for it. Fiori is also available for the old ECC 6 system. I don't think that Fiori 2.0 is available for it, but at least the very first, initial version was available for it, but really mainly if you want to use Fiori today, you should be on the S/4HANA system. Fiori also supports HTML5. That's a new coding standard, which means that it is completely responsive, meaning that it responds to the device that it's being displayed on. That means you can run Fiori with the launchpad on your regular computer, your laptop, your tablet, and even your mobile phone. It supports all of those devices. Also, it supports multiple operating systems, so it runs on Windows. It runs on iOS, so if you have a Mac computer, an iPhone, it runs on that. Or it also runs on Android, so if you have a Google phone, same thing. You can launch the Fiori launchpad from there. Also, it's available in multiple languages. I don't know how many. They keep adding to it, but now, just like the SAP system, in general, is available in just about any language which you can think of, same thing for Fiori, also available in multiple languages. And last, but certainly not least, Fiori comes with a set of apps, and when they first released it, they had like maybe a hundred apps or so available, and then suddenly, it was 300 apps, and I think now they're up to over 1200 apps. That list is always growing. They keep adding more and more apps to Fiori, and that covers really all the areas of the enterprise, so there's finance apps, there's apps for procurement and sales and logistics, HR. So, anything you can think of in the system, there typically is an app for it, and if there's not an app for it, there's probably one being developed, or you can always custom develop your own apps, too. That's absolutely possible. Now, let me show you why Fiori exists. So, here's a... Here are a few sample screens from the SAP ECC 6 system from the user interface displayed through the regular SAP GUI. So, here's one. Here's another one. So, just by looking at this, if you're familiar with working with SAP through the SAP GUI, you could kind of tell already that these are... I don't know what the word is. Very challenging screens, all right. So, there's a lot of fields and a lot of buttons, a lot of icons on there. Each one of these things does something, so it's not very user-friendly if you think about this. This screen alone has over a hundred items on there that you could click on or that do something. So, this has been a point of contention over the last few years in the user community. People always wanted something that's a little easier to work with, a little cleaner, a little more modern. And that was really SAP's main motivation when they worked with Fiori. They wanted to make things easier for the user. Just to compare these screenshots, here are a couple of screenshots from the Fiori interface. So, you've probably seen this one a lot. All right, this is a screenshot off of the Fiori launchpad displayed in different devices, either a laptop or tablet or even a mobile phone, and you can already tell that it's very, very different from the regular SAP GUI screens. And once you work with the launchpad, and you click on one of these tiles, you might see a screen that looks like this displayed through your browser. You can tell it's a very clean and modern look. It's, again, it's browser-based so you just use your regular web browser to display this, and it's much easier to navigate, much cleaner looking, all right. So, that's a very big change or departure from the old screens that we had to work with to the new Fiori screens. Fiori includes apps or these tiles, and there are three different types of these apps. The first one is a transactional tile or transactional app, and they do things like transaction codes in the SAP system. They can create, change, display, or post things. So, for example, create a customer would be a transaction, or post an invoice, all right. Those would be transactional apps, and that's one of the categories or one of the types of apps that exists in Fiori. The second type is analytical apps. Those are apps that visually display analytics information, reporting information or key performance indicators or any kind of metrics that you want to track, and they do this in real time, so the numbers that you see are updated in real time automatically. You don't have to manually run a report for this anymore. And then, the third type of an app is called a factual app, and that's more of an informational kind of app where you can display documentation or you can display fact sheets or kind of contextual information that's related to the business object you're looking at. Okay, so keep that in mind, these three types of apps. Most of the apps that you'd be working with are the transactions, of course, and then, the analytical apps to evaluate and report on key performance indicators or metrics.