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sharon_agam
Explorer

Continuing our tradition of running BYOFA (Build Your Own Fiori App) workshops we are just about to complete another successful one here in Germany.

This workshop is exceptionally colorful as SAP is hosting 7 partners, each from a different European country. Each of the partners is working with its own customer on a unique use case, as customers are here with us as well.

As before, the workshop objective is to go through the entire development lifecycle of a Fiori app within just 4 days. The first two days are dedicated to defining the user experience, or in other words, the app wireframes. The following two days are to give life to these wireframes, meaning coding the app and integrating it into the Fiori Launchpad.

We held the design track in the SAP AppHaus in Heidelberg. The innovation came from the combination of diverse PEOPLE, a creative SPACE like the AppHaus and the iterative design thinking APPROACH. We got to hear the following sentence from one of the participants “I really feel I’m in Google now”.

On day one, all teams followed the same agenda - understanding the context, scoping, building a persona, its current journey map, pain points, ideation, storyboarding and validation with additional end users, on top of the ones attending the workshop.

We opened the second day with group presentations. The use cases varied a lot; different industries and Line of Businesses.

Team 1 is improving the experience of a property admin who needs to cover more than 10 properties in one day, measuring standard and non-standard properties matrix while solving ad-hoc issues. Current pain-points are lack of priorities, lack of deep knowledge about each individual property and more.

Team 2 is focusing on simplifying the experience of the person who manages the pick-ups of items shipped to a pick-up location of items ordered online. Current process suffers from long search time for the right order, finding more information about it, finalizing the process with the buyer and getting the item from the attached warehouse.

Team 3 is simplifying the process of a publishing company operations controller who needs to schedule the flow of the printing job in a smart way, taking into account the current stock level of each book, needed paper type, forecast, lead time, paper supplier history and more.

Team 4 is designing a solution for sales people of soft drinks distributor as currently they are not using the cumbersome PDA app they have hence attending these sales meeting without preparing them in advance and without real KPIs.

Team 5 is improving the experience of a buyer who needs to know immediate online information about specific products she/he identified as irregular. Current process is based upon multiple views and reports needed to be executed in a variety of systems.

Team 6 is simplifying the sales order process executed in a fashion designer’s showroom, where the purchase includes multiple products with multiple variations and has to take place really fast as the buyers have limited time and attention span.

Team 7 is focusing on making things easier for the IT manager of their customer, who gets hundreds of Change Requests a day and needs to decide whether to approve or reject, assign to a specialist, forward to further consultants’ attention and more.

Following the groups presentation, we started working on paper proto-types, switching to the creation of high-fidelity wireframes of the apps at the end of the day. Some teams were using our Fiori Prototyping Kit while others used the new Axure stencils.


On day three the goal was to kick-off the development of the Fiori app. Following the overall architecture and SAPUI5 we kicked-off the development. Each team had at least one developer focusing on the OData service development and one focusing on the UI.

The teams were assisted and guided by an ABAP/backend expert and a UI5 Fiori developer. The appetite of the teams was so high that at 18:30 we finally had to gently tell them to go home.


On day four the teams developed the actual data binding to the existing UI elements and discussed the various work streams which needed to be further developed. Using the WebIDE it was remarkable to see how fast the developers can create something substantial. Our objective of enabling the teams to develop new Fiori apps was definitely achieved.

It is amazing to see how much of the design has been realized as a Fiori app. One particular example is of a back-end developer who had never heard about SAP UI5 before, and was able to create almost the entire UI of the desired app, following the master data template, including the implementation of a dynamic icon tab bar, using SAP WebIDE. And of course we didn’t forget to pamper the developer a bit so to keep the good spirit and high level of energy.

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