Learn how SAP BTP accelerates the SAP Fiori app development process, find helpful tools, and explore real-world use cases.
SAP Fiori is a new-generation user experience (UX) design system developed by SAP, aimed at simplifying interactions and improving user adoption. Initially launched in 2013 as SAP Fiori 1.0, it introduced a simplified and intuitive interface to replace the conventional SAP GUI, which users frequently found complex and challenging to navigate.
SAP Fiori applications are typically categorized into three types:
- Transactional apps that simplify and speed up common business tasks, such as approvals, data entry, reviewing documents, updating records, or removing unnecessary notes.
- Analytical apps that help analyze large amounts of data in real-time and offer insightful visualizations and reports (e.g., financial dashboards, performance analyses) to support informed decision-making.
- Fact Sheet apps that provide details about specific business objects or processes, including detailed views of customers, products, or partners, along with their historical data, such as purchase or delivery records.
Developing SAP Fiori applications requires adherence to SAP Fiori guidelines, SAP expertise, and professional tools. This is where SAP BTP comes in handy. In this article, we will:
- Explore how SAP BTP helps streamline SAP Fiori apps development
- Cover BTP’s advantages and opportunities in application development
- Showcase some real-life application scenarios
- Highlight key considerations to keep in mind while building your Fiori apps on SAP BTP
Brief Summary
SAP BTP enhances SAP Fiori application development by streamlining the process with advanced tools, seamless integration capabilities, scalable cloud infrastructure, built-in AI services, and flexible customization options. Additionally, SAP BTP maintains the apps’ health and supports innovation adoption for further upgrades by accelerating Fiori app deployment, improving user experience, and reducing operational costs.
Moreover, BTP plays a crucial role in supporting a clean core approach by enabling the development of loosely coupled extensions, including Fiori apps, that remain independent of the ERP core. All of this makes SAP BTP not just a development platform, but a strategic enabler of enterprise-wide digital transformation through high-quality user experiences.
What is SAP BTP, and How Does It Relate to SAP Fiori?
SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) is a unified, open, and business-centric platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering from SAP. It combines capabilities for data management, analytics, application development, automation, and new technologies like AI and machine learning in one platform. Designed to help businesses innovate faster and more efficiently, SAP BTP empowers developers and enterprises to build, extend, and integrate applications within SAP and non-SAP environments. SAP BTP supports various programming models, offers cloud-native scalability, and enables rapid deployment while ensuring enterprise-grade security and compliance.
In the context of SAP Fiori, SAP BTP acts as a robust foundation for modern application development. SAP BTP provides advanced development tools like SAP Business Application Studio and SAP Fiori tools, integration platforms like the SAP Integration Suite, and extensibility options like low-code/no-code tools to streamline Fiori application development. With its help, developers can easily build responsive and user-friendly Fiori applications while also leveraging real-time data analytics and business intelligence features.
How SAP BTP Accelerates SAP Fiori App Development
SAP BTP supports and enhances SAP Fiori development in several important ways, allowing for quicker, stable, and compliant delivery of sophisticated applications for your business's various needs.
Development tools and frameworks
SAP BTP grants access to robust development tools and frameworks, ensuring better productivity and smoother development:
- SAP BAS (Business Application Studio): A web-based IDE tailored for SAP Fiori development that provides built-in templates, code validation, debugging, and deployment tools.
- SAP Fiori tools: Extensions for Visual Studio Code and SAP Business Application Studio that streamline Fiori app creation through guided development, automatic code generation, and intuitive previews.
- Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model: A modern framework that helps developers rapidly build Fiori applications by providing standardized backend services that simplify complex development tasks.
Integration capabilities
SAP BTP enhances Fiori development by providing integration solutions that improve connectivity of applications and the target system:
- SAP Integration Suite: Offers comprehensive connectivity that enables seamless integration of Fiori apps with both SAP and external systems via APIs and OData services.
- API management: Allows secure, controlled exposure and consumption of backend services that facilitate smooth interaction with backend systems and data sources.
Extensibility and customization
SAP BTP helps enrich SAP Fiori apps with necessary extensions, tailoring them according to individual business needs:
- Extension suite: SAP BTP provides capabilities to easily extend and customize existing SAP applications (including standard Fiori apps) without altering the core backend systems, which ensures stability, maintainability, and adherence to clean core principles.
- Low-code/no-code development: Simplifies app development and extension tasks, allowing developers to create tailored applications or enhance standard Fiori apps rapidly.
Scalability and performance
SAP BTP assists in making Fiori applications more scalable, allowing them to evolve gradually according to changing business processes:
- Cloud-native architecture: SAP BTP’s cloud-based infrastructure ensures scalable deployment, automatic scaling to handle varying user loads, and high availability, resulting in robust SAP Fiori app performance.
Advanced analytics and intelligent capabilities
SAP BTP provides AI and machine learning capabilities to streamline Fiori application development, integrating these smart capabilities right into Fiori apps.
- Embedded analytics and AI: SAP BTP includes powerful analytics services that enable developers to integrate real-time reporting, dashboards, and predictive analytics directly into Fiori applications.
- SAP AI Business Services: Enhances Fiori apps with intelligent capabilities like chatbots, recommendation engines, and automated decision-making to boost productivity.
- SAP Build Code: Allows for AI-powered coding, testing, and application lifecycle management that is optimized for Fiori development.
Security and compliance
SAP BTP helps businesses create their SAP Fiori apps securely, carefully protecting vital corporate data:
- Built-in security: Robust authentication, authorization (Identity Authentication Service, SAP Cloud Identity Access Governance), and compliance tools embedded within SAP BTP provide secure access to sensitive enterprise data within Fiori apps, ensuring compliance across applications by meeting all the necessary policies and regulations.
Advantages of Developing SAP Fiori Apps on SAP BTP
SAP BTP positively affects SAP Fiori application development, allowing developers, businesses, and end-users to benefit from this integration, which includes a simplified development process, lower costs, and streamlined data connectivity.
Accelerated development and productivity
SAP BTP offers rapid app development by leveraging built-in templates and preconfigured tools, like SAP Business Application Studio and SAP Fiori tools, that save time on manual development. The low-code/no-code features offered by built-in tools and generative AI capabilities also add to applications' efficient, automated creation and extension.
Simplified maintenance
SAP BTP supports a clean core approach, which helps keep the central ERP system free from custom code. This becomes a critical advantage, as a clean core strategy dramatically simplifies future upgrades and maintenance of SAP Fiori apps, avoiding the need to tweak the ERP core.
Enhanced integration and connectivity
With the help of SAP Integration Suite and API Management, SAP BTP provides seamless integration with SAP and non-SAP systems. This allows real-time access to backend data and improves decision-making and productivity, regardless of your business's operational environment.
Scalability and future-readiness
The cloud-native architecture of SAP BTP allows applications to scale dynamically with user demand, ensuring consistent performance and responsiveness. Regular updates and enhancements to SAP BTP ensure that SAP Fiori applications remain technologically current and aligned with industry best practices. This benefits ongoing innovation and digitalization adoption, allowing businesses to grow and stay competitive.
Besides, BTP ensures the deployment flexibility of Fiori apps due to SAP Build Work Zone, which allows for content federation from multiple systems. This provides users with a unified entry point to access apps and content across different environments, ensuring operational flexibility and a consistent user experience.
Extensibility and customization
SAP BTP allows developers to safely extend standard SAP Fiori applications or build custom apps without altering core SAP systems. It offers flexible customization capabilities to tailor apps precisely to specific business requirements.
Advanced analytics and intelligent technologies
With its embedded analytics capacities, SAP BTP integrates powerful real-time analytics directly into SAP Fiori apps, enabling actionable insights and informed decisions. In addition, SAP AI Business Services (also available in BTP) incorporates intelligent features such as predictive analytics, chatbots, and automation, driving competitiveness and innovation with AI and machine learning.
Reduced operational costs
SAP BTP is a cloud-native platform, so building Fiori apps on BTP eliminates the need for heavy infrastructure investment and lowers ongoing operational and maintenance costs. This frees resources and helps decrease TCO (total cost of ownership).
SAP Fiori on SAP BTP Application Scenarios
Fiori applications built on SAP BTP help streamline operations and enhance productivity in many areas and aspects of business.
For example, organizations can streamline financial workflows, such as invoice approvals and expense reporting, because SAP Fiori apps are designed with a mobile-first user experience. This improves availability by offering access on the go, empowering decision-makers to act quickly, enhancing process efficiency, reducing manual intervention, and minimizing errors.
SAP BTP and SAP Fiori can also help with supply chain automation. Fiori applications allow for integrating IoT data and analytics into a single system so companies can monitor and optimize their supply chain operations in real time. This leads to improved decision-making, fewer business standstills, and reduced operational and maintenance costs.
SAP BTP enables the development of custom SAP Fiori applications for streamlined onboarding processes. Considering the previous SAP GUI interface's complexity, this is especially valuable for new SAP users. With BTP, SAP Fiori apps leverage event-driven integrations and ensure that new employees receive timely access to resources, tools, and information, making the process of adopting a new system seamless and efficient.
SAP Fiori applications built on SAP BTP also improve customer engagement. Businesses can easily develop customer-facing Fiori apps to provide personalized experiences by leveraging data analytics and AI to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Key Considerations for SAP Fiori Developers
Creating SAP Fiori applications on SAP BTP streamlines the development process and promises faster results without sacrificing quality. Yet, to help your business benefit from this integration in the best possible way, ensure your SAP developers understand the following basic rules.
Understand SAP BTP services
In order to successfully build Fiori apps on SAP BTP, developers should be well-versed in the services offered by SAP BTP and stay updated with the latest developments in SAP technologies.
The SAP environment is continuously evolving, and SAP experts from LeverX are always here to help your teams learn more. Additionally, LeverX offers training on how to utilize SAP BTP in the most efficient way. Alternatively, you can contact us for a whole range of professional services in SAP Fiori development enhanced by SAP BTP.
Adherence to best practices
Following established best practices in SAP Fiori, application design and development ensure maintainability, scalability, and performance of your business apps. This also helps to provide smoother integration and data availability with your ecosystem and a smoother transition to SAP S/4HANA if you decide to take this opportunity.
Security implementation
To protect sensitive business data and comply with regulatory requirements, robust security measures, such as authentication and authorization protocols, must be incorporated. Make sure your developers are aware of the security guidelines and safety requirements for SAP Fiori applications so they can tailor solutions that will keep your business’s sensitive data protected.
Performance optimization
Requirements for SAP Fiori applications may change with your business's evolution and growth. Thus, regular monitoring and optimizing application performance are essential to providing a seamless user experience, meeting business expectations, and keeping the system functioning without disruptions.
Conclusion
SAP BTP significantly accelerates and simplifies SAP Fiori application development by offering comprehensive development tools, seamless integration capabilities, advanced analytics, built-in security, and scalability, which allows businesses to enhance user experience and overall productivity.
Contact LeverX for an expert consultation on any questions regarding SAP BTP, SAP Fiori, and other SAP solutions that can benefit your organization’s success and competitiveness.
