Learn more about SAP Fiori, discover its key features and benefits, and find out why SAP Fiori surpasses SAP GUI and how it can help your business.
In today’s world, digital transformation is reshaping businesses, as new technologies emerge to help companies stay competitive and catch up with global trends. Making these technologies easy to understand is a key to success, as user-friendliness helps employees easily understand and use new, sophisticated solutions. This is where SAP Fiori becomes helpful. It allows companies from many different (often brick-and-mortar) industries to successfully digitize operations without spending a fortune on user education and training.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the essence of SAP Fiori, exploring its key advantages over previous generations and helping you determine how your business can benefit from this solution.
What is SAP Fiori?
SAP Fiori is a modern user experience (UX) design system by SAP, specifically developed to simplify people’s interactions with the system on an enterprise level. Introduced in 2013, SAP Fiori 1.0 provides a fresh, intuitive, and consistent user interface that replaces or supplements the traditional SAP GUI (Graphical User Interface), which users historically found complex and difficult to navigate.
Today’s SAP Fiori 3 is a collection of role-based applications tailored to different user tasks, providing simplified, responsive, and personalized interactions. SAP Fiori is focused on clarity, simplicity, and ease-of-use, significantly enhancing productivity and user satisfaction within SAP environments.
As an SAP Strategic Supplier, LeverX has taken a tangible part in the evolution of SAP Fiori, assisting SAP in refining this design system while developing the standard SAP S/4HANA Fiori apps. This expertise allows us to provide our customers with any type of assistance regarding SAP Fiori.
SAP Fiori Key Features and Components
SAP Fiori has a set of features that make it stand out from traditional SAP interfaces. Both design and technical architecture work together to create a modern, user-centric environment that allows SAP users with any level of technical background to utilize the system in the most efficient way. Here’s what makes SAP Fiori accessible and user-friendly:
- Role-based applications: Each SAP Fiori app is designed to meet the specific needs and workflows of individual user roles, ensuring users see only applications relevant to their job and simplifying their daily tasks.
- Intuitive and simple UX: Adhering to clear UX principles, SAP Fiori emphasizes simplicity, clarity, and consistency across all SAP applications, making them intuitive and easier to navigate.
- Responsive design: SAP Fiori is built to be fully responsive, enabling users to seamlessly access SAP applications from any device, be it a desktop or a mobile platform.
- Personalization: Users can personalize their interfaces, rearranging apps, defining preferences, and creating custom views to improve their productivity.
- Consistency across SAP products: Being a part of the SAP ecosystem, Fiori helps establish and maintain a uniform UX standard across SAP’s software landscape.
Technical components
From a technical perspective, SAP Fiori successfully combines three components that serve to create smooth workflows and real-time data exchange for a comprehensive, visualized overview of what’s happening in your business’s SAP environment.
SAP Fiori launchpad
- Serves as the central portal and entry point, consolidating various SAP apps into one unified, personalized interface.
- Provides seamless navigation, authentication, and personalized app access, improving usability and productivity.
SAPUI5 framework
- A robust JavaScript-based framework is used to build responsive, dynamic, and interactive Fiori applications.
- Ensures consistent UI behavior and visual appeal across all platforms and devices.
OData services
- A standardized Open Data Protocol is used by Fiori applications to exchange data efficiently between front-end apps and back-end SAP systems.
- Facilitates real-time data exchange and seamless integration with various SAP modules and services.
How SAP Fiori components work
The SAP Fiori Launchpad acts as the central hub where users access different types of applications, organized according to their specific role. These applications are built with the SAPUI5 framework, leveraging modern web standards and responsive design patterns to ensure a consistent and intuitive interface across devices. Behind the scenes, SAP Fiori apps communicate with SAP’s backend systems using OData services, allowing smooth integration, secure data exchange, and real-time information delivery. Together with user-friendly UX, these elements provide a modern, streamlined, and unified experience for enterprise applications.
Types of SAP Fiori Applications
Most commonly, SAP Fiori applications fall into three categories:
- Transactional apps: These applications help streamline and accelerate everyday business tasks like approvals, data entry, or reading files, updating records, or deleting unnecessary notes.
- Analytical apps: Analytical applications process large volumes of data to provide insightful real-time data analysis and data visualization, streamlining the decision-making process (financial reports, performance dashboards, etc.).
- Fact Sheet apps: These apps provide users with a detailed view of the object’s information, offering detailed information about core business objects, specific items, or processes. For example, these could be customers, products, or partners with detailed insights into purchase or delivery history.
At LeverX, we help businesses develop and implement any type of SAP Fiori application, enhancing their processes with smoother workflows and better productivity, as well as adhering to SAP Clean Core standards.
SAP Fiori vs. Traditional SAP GUI
Compared to the traditional SAP GUI, SAP Fiori is a game-changer; it represents a significant evolution of both interfaces and process facilitation, addressing longstanding usability challenges and transforming the user experience.
SAP GUI has always been criticized for the complexity of its interface navigation, with its hierarchical menus that require extensive training to remember the pattern. This has changed in SAP Fiori, where an intuitive, role-specific interface focused only on relevant functionality and personalized dashboards drastically reduces complexity and user frustration, while improving efficiency. This interfacial simplification led to important shifts in productivity enhancement, making task completion 64% faster than it was in SAP GUI.
SAP Fiori also improved user adoption and satisfaction with its intuitive design and reduced learning curve. This allowed for significantly quicker adoption and higher user satisfaction across the organization. Improved and easy adoption consequently enables companies to cut costs on user training, onboarding, support, and resolution of human-related issues.
Another important improvement is related to mobile availability. While SAP GUI was primarily desktop-focused, SAP Fiori’s responsive design ensures that the system and vital data are available from any type of device, enabling real-time access that supports prompt decision-making.
The table below illustrates why SAP Fiori surpasses SAP GUI in terms of usability and productivity. It has become a strategic investment that modernizes SAP user experience, enhances productivity, and creates a digitally connected workplace across the organization:
| Aspect | SAP Fiori (Modern UX) | SAP GUI (Classic) |
| Navigation | Simple, intuitive, tile-based navigation | Complex menus, multiple clicks, text-heavy |
| User experience | User-centric, clean, streamlined design | Functional but complicated and cluttered |
| Mobile accessibility | Fully responsive, seamless mobile access | Desktop-centric, limited mobile access |
| Training needs | Minimal training, intuitive usability | Extensive training due to complexity |
| Personalization | Easy and extensive role-based personalization | Limited customization options |
SAP Fiori Business Benefits
SAP Fiori is a business accelerator that delivers significant organizational benefits, helping businesses address critical pain points of the traditional SAP GUI:
Improved productivity and efficiency
SAP Fiori streamlines enterprise processes by simplifying user workflows and offering real-time data access. While traditional SAP GUI is complex and difficult to navigate, SAP Fiori offers task-based apps focused on specific needs, real-time analytics and simplified decision-making through embedded SAP HANA capabilities, and an intuitive user interface that streamlines routine tasks.
Increased user adoption and satisfaction
SAP Fiori removes one of the main barriers traditionally associated with SAP adoption – SAP’s steep learning curve. The new, intuitive interface of SAP Fiori offers a user-friendly experience that reduces user frustration, simplifies user training, and speeds up SAP adoption across departments, minimizing employees’ reluctance. The latter is critical if a business undergoes a massive digital transformation and switches to SAP S/4HANA from some legacy system.
Data relevance due to role-based personalization
SAP Fiori apps are designed around user roles and business contexts, so users only see the relevant information they need to work with according to their positions. This improves decision-making and reduces cognitive load, allowing people to focus on their tasks without the risk of being distracted by streams of information or mistakenly using the data they don’t need.
Cross-device access for mobile work enablement
Unlike the desktop-oriented SAP GUI, SAP Fiori offers a responsive design, allowing users to easily access data from desktops, laptops, and mobile devices at any time. This flexibility enables employees to stay connected and productive on the go, which is essential for businesses that need to make time-sensitive decisions.
Reduced risks of human errors
The design of SAP Fiori is clear and simple, offering pre-filled forms, logically placed distinctive action buttons, and visual validation of users’ input. This simplicity not only saves time but also leads to fewer human errors, fewer corrections, and better data quality across the board. As mistakes are detected and fixed at the earliest stage of data entry, businesses can cut costs associated with operational standstills caused by these errors.
Lower TCO due to reduced onboarding costs
SAP Fiori reduces the IT burden from dedicated teams by empowering users through self-service functionality and clearer workflows. As a result, users onboard faster, and the number of helpdesk requests drops significantly. The cumulative effect of this simplified training is a significant reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise applications.
Why Switch to SAP Fiori
In today’s competitive landscape, user experience is a business differentiator, not just a visual upgrade. Adopting SAP Fiori is a strategic business enhancement that empowers organizations to stay ahead of the competition in the digital age. Providing your employees with a modern, intuitive, and mobile-friendly solution rewards you with smooth, streamlined processes, real-time analytics, accurate work, better productivity, lower rates of lags and operational disruptions, and, as a result, higher profits and lower TCO. SAP Fiori allows your business to achieve this with its streamlined, responsive UX that directly translates into greater agility, faster decision-making, and stronger department engagement.
Future-proofing with SAP innovation roadmap
SAP Fiori is the official and default user experience for SAP S/4HANA. So, businesses that adopt SAP Fiori today position themselves for smoother, lower-risk S/4HANA migration in the future, ensuring that your business:
- aligns with SAP’s long-term innovation strategy.
- eliminates technical debt by avoiding outdated interfaces.
- enables continuous UX improvement as SAP evolves its ecosystem.
Increasing ROI via user productivity and satisfaction
SAP Fiori is a value-generating investment, as organizations benefit from it in many ways: employees are more capable, systems are better utilized, and leadership has faster access to the data that drives strategic decision-making. In more detail, SAP Fiori offers tangible business value via the following:
- Productivity gains through task simplification and real-time insights.
- Lower support and training costs.
- Reduced errors from clean, contextual interfaces.
- Stronger user adoption for more consistent process execution.
Conclusion
SAP Fiori is a next-gen UX design system by SAP that offers role-based access, responsiveness, simplicity, and personalization. Being a core design for SAP S/4HANA, SAP Fiori drives digital transformation and improves businesses' efficiency, enhancing productivity and user satisfaction within SAP environments, which positively impacts cost reduction, competitiveness, prompt decision-making, and overall ROI increase.
Even if you're still operating on SAP ECC (EoL coming in 2027), transitioning your custom ABAP programs into SAP Fiori applications is a powerful first step toward the future, even if you’re not planning a full-cycle SAP S/4HANA migration soon. Contact LeverX professionals for a detailed consultation about your Fiori transformation.
SAP Fiori is more than a UI refresh – it’s a strategic asset for businesses aiming to modernize their operations and user experience to stay ahead of the competition in the future.
